Abstract

Since the 1980s, villagers in China, as elsewhere in developing Asia, have responded to the advances of capitalism by splitting the family, with some members migrating out in search of waged employment, while others maintain a small landholding and care for dependants. Scholars sometimes note that these translocal strategies have advantages for the reproduction of both rural families and capital. Beyond these brief mentions, however, there has been strikingly little attention to social reproduction in the literature on agrarian change in China, or indeed elsewhere in Asia. This paper seeks to address this lacuna, advancing an analytical framework for understanding agrarian change in rural communities characterised by large-scale outmigration, which centres on social reproduction, specifically translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights, in particular, the connections between rural families’ changing aspirations for reproduction and the fluid, translocal strategies they adopt to meet those aspirations; changing patterns of reproductive work, especially care-work among rural families; and shifting social relations and forms of class and intra-family differentiation in the rural population. In developing this new framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China, and draws on a critique of the existing ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, and approaches focusing on ‘global householding’ and the cultural reproduction of class and gender. 

About the Speaker

Tamara Jacka is professor in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU. Her research interests are in socio-political change in contemporary China, especially as it relates to gender and rural-urban inequalities, and rural-urban migration. Her recent publications include Contemporary China: Society and Social Change (co-authored with Andrew Kipnis and Sally Sargeson, 2013), Women, Gender and Rural Development in China (co-edited with Sally Sargeson, 2011) and Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (2006).