Report from a Chinese Village 2019: Rural Homestead Transfer and Rural Vitalization

Yongchao Zhang,Johan Klaesson,Hans Westlund

doi:10.3390/su12208635

Abstract

With the economic transition and changes in the urban–rural relationships, rural revitalization has become a great political concern in China. Reforming the rural land system is considered an important prerequisite for the revitalization of the countryside as the homestead transfer can provide new land utilization space for industries. This case study of the “hollow village” (villages with abandoned houses) reconstruction of Wantang in Yiwu city, which is a homestead system reforming pilot, aims at making a detailed analysis of the specific practice of homestead transfer. It analyzes the roles and functions of the local village collective organization in the reform of homestead transfer. From the capitalization on homestead value, the effect of densification of housing, and the effect of labor resource diversification of homestead transfer, this paper analyzes how the village collective uses the policy of the “hollow village reconstruction” to realize rural revitalization and farmers’ welfare. A conclusion is that the village collective’s leadership and mobilization played an indispensable role in the process of homestead system reform. Building up industry is the key factor for the village’s revitalization. It is significant not only for the use of the homestead resource but also for creating off-farm employment. Our findings also emphasize the need for bottom-up village collective initiatives to align with top-down government policy, regional resource endowments and enterprises, to achieve rural revitalization.

Highlights

In 1962, the Swedish author Jan Myrdal lived for one month in the village Liulin in China’s Shaanxi province and interviewed peasants about their experiences of land collectivization and village life
We explore this research gap by answering two research questions: In which ways does the rural homestead transfer promote rural revitalization? What is the role of the village leadership and the village collective in the process of rural vitalization?
After the “hollow village reconstruction”, the cultivated land area increased by 16.2% to 13.33 ha, and the plant varieties became more abundant

Summary

Introduction

In 1962, the Swedish author Jan Myrdal lived for one month in the village Liulin in China’s Shaanxi province and interviewed peasants about their experiences of land collectivization and village life. Three years later the book “Report from a Chinese Village” was published in English [1] and became a unique account from the transformation of a, at that time, very closed country. With a case study of one single village, Myrdal was able to show the transformation of rural China after the communist takeover of 1949. Almost sixty years later, the conditions in rural China are very different. This paper uses the same method as Myrdal, a single case study, to report about the transformation of a Chinese village in a new time. This study focuses on China, the country with probably the strongest government in the world, making the experiences hard to transfer to other countries. How the most populous country in the world transforms its countryside is a process of global interest

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