ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the land-use and land-arrangement strategies that Chinese migrant and left-behind rice farmers use to manage their farmland and off-farm migration. These include both social and technical strategies – only some of which accord with state expectations – such as leaving behind family members, building houses on farmland, using labour-saving technologies, switching from rice to cash crops, or even abandoning fields. Using specific household cases, the chapter demonstrates how peasants draw on a wide repertoire of available resources to handle their situation. Shedding light on the logics behind these decisions, it argues that, in taking seemingly technical agricultural decisions, farmers are in fact pursuing various long-term and short-term projects that best match their fluctuating current and anticipated future household situation.
