Agricultural Modernisation and Diabolic Landscapes of Dispossession in Rural China

Abstract

AbstractIn response to the Chinese state’s 2006 call to expand industrial grain farming, government officials in the township of Ruilin pressured and coerced small‐scale farmers to lease their land to new large‐scale farmers on five‐year contracts. Though coerced villagers initially vowed to retake their land, they ultimately renewed their leases four years later, despite their apparent ability to resume farming. Explaining their change of mind, many villagers referenced the remade landscape as evidence that they no longer belonged on the land. Based on a multi‐year ethnography, I show that in forcibly sidelining villagers and remaking the landscape for mechanised agriculture, officials made villagers spectators of a modernised scene that, over time, helped to naturalise the modernist ideology that shaped it. Drawing on landscape studies literature, this paper contributes to recent work on relational and situated dispossession by foregrounding the link between sensory experiences of the land and subjectivity formation.