Abstract
Julia Chuang delivers a rich study of urbanization from the perspective of the individuals whose land and labor are the foundations of urban production in her book Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market. Chuang contextualizes her ethnographic fieldwork in China from 2007 to 2011 with the preceding three decades of post-socialist reforms to analyze how the maintenance of a market for labor is disrupted by the creation of a market for land.
Chuang highlights a paradox in China’s urbanization boom: the extraordinary growth of China’s economy is dependent on suppressed wages. Low wages are subsidized by the institution of collective land, which guarantees that rural residents have a right to a small plot of land they can use to subsistence farm. This security is necessary to weather years when pay from migratory labor is low or completely absent, a common side effect of the debt-driven construction industry many laborers work in. Facing large fiscal deficits after a period of rural economic decline, local governments took advantage of changes in state policy designed for urbanization and began expropriating land from villagers to sell to developers or use to back bank loans. Residents traded their right to land for supposedly better status as urban citizens, but the welfare provided for these new urbanites is often insufficient. One result of land expropriation is a new class of laborers dependent on suppressed wages without the security of land to fall back on.
Chuang centers the lives of individuals in two villages in Sichuan Province, providing a bottom-up view of largely state-driven development. This detailed perspective brings into focus how the political and economic characteristics of villages produce different outcomes in migration and land expropriation, the importance and delicate nature of kinship networks, the gendered, spatial division of labor in the maintenance of the low-wage, migratory labor market, and the role of place in economic development.
Chuang bridges sociology and geography, as well as rural and urban sociology, while also making a specific contribution to economic sociology by applying a Polanyian view of development that recognizes markets as embedded in society and documents the “transformation of labor and land from sources of human subsistence into commodities for market exchange” (p. 27). Beneath the China Boom will be of interest to many, including but hardly limited to scholars of development, labor markets, inequality, and rural-urban dynamics.