ABSTRACT
The role and status of Chinese peasants have changed significantly over time in the CCP’s meta-discourse of the Chinese Revolution as the latter has been re-articulated again and again. The class became the principal subject of the Chinese Revolution between 1927 and 1949, and its members were further elevated in the PRC’s status order and represented as ‘masters of the country’, together with the industrial workers, in official Party-state discourses from 1949 to 1978. Yet they were at the same time subjected to the imperatives of the PRC’s socialist industrial development and treated as a reserve labour force which could be conveniently drawn into urban areas when necessary or sent back to the villages as the need for cheap labour decreased. Chapter 4 charts that background and how it continues to determine the role of the peasantry since 1978, but unlike in the past, they have been turned into an object of capitalist urbanization. Moreover, their socio-political status has declined now that they are no longer a major part of the subject of the Revolution, which the CCP has abandoned except in rhetoric, re-orientating the PRC from socialism and communism towards economic development, combining socialist and capitalist modes of production. The most important direct source of impact on the peasantry in the past seven decades has been household registration (hukou), which, together with political and occupational criteria, has played a decisive role in making and unmaking classes by maintaining and removing the boundaries between rural and urban categories. Over the last seven decades, it is hukou which defines the peasants’ official class identity, while occupation and residence are of no more than secondary importance, as the class membership of the peasants who do not obtain urban hukou remains unchanged even if they move into other occupations or live in the cities for extended periods of time.
