Managing Liberalization and Globalization in Rural China: Trends in Rural Labour Allocation, Income and Inequality

China’s rural economy has undergone radical change since the onset of economic reforms in 1978. In the thirty years since then, rural China has experienced successive waves of liberalization. The dismantling of the commune system in 1978 was the opening, and dramatic, salvo in a continued and protracted extension of the market into the organization and coordination of the rural economy. The household responsibility system, which replaced the commune system, was followed by the expansion of off-farm rural industrial employment in township and village enterprises (TVEs) in the mid-1980s. These enterprises were rapidly privatized themselves in the mid to late 1990s. At the same time, rural-urban migration became a major feature of the Chinese economy as tens of millions of peasants moved around the country in search of work. Then, in 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in a move which further opened the agricultural and rural economies to the forces and logic of global capitalism.