Transforming peasantries in India and China: comparative investigations of institutional dimensions

Abstract

My lecture is about the study of transforming peasantries, in two senses: both as the subjects, as well as the agents of societal transformation. The differential development performance of rural India and China is explained through stylised micro-comparisons drawn from longitudinal village, and synthetic field studies conducted by the author in both countries since the 1970s, highlighting the salience of contrasting rural institutional factors, using a string of binary contrasting features displayed by the Indian village vis-a-vis the collectives of rural China. The micro-cosmic comparison poses a puzzling paradox: Chinese rural development performance easily outstripped Indian achievements in the first three decades of its collectivist path, from 1949–1978, despite the upheavals associated with the Great Leap Forward and the large-scale famines of the time. But, if the initial conditions of the two countries were remarkably equivalent, and if the external factors, state macro and inter-sectoral policies were no more, and in some respects, considerably less favourable in China than in India, how can one explain the superior Chinese performance in the countryside virtually across the board for this early high-collectvism period that laid the foundations for the subsequent high-growth trajectory at the national level? Why did rural China pull ahead, why did India lag behind? The micro-cosmic comparisons of rural institutions are used to resolve this paradox. The answer lies in the crucial differentiated role of the institutional dimension in the two countries. Chinese advantage originates not in the market reforms era, but in the socialist period when the countryside was organised in rural collectives. In India, rural institutions were generally obstructive, sticky, and posed a constraint to policies of rapid transformation; in China, the institutional profile, far from setting a constraint, was itself converted into a policy instrumental variable, where institutional features were designed and periodically redesigned primarily using the criteria of their functional appropriateness for generating rural accumulation and growth.