Kan Liu
| After receiving Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Chinese Literature at Berkeley, Kan is now a PhD student studying Geography at UCLA. She was born and raised in a small hamlet in rural China, the fifth daughter of a peasant family. She also worked several years on a assembly line in South China. As a peasant veteran, she is committed to peasants’ rights globally. Email: liukan@ucla.eu |
Research on Land-grabbing:
Large-Scale Land Transfer in Contemporary Rural China: A Case Study of the Consolidation of Peasant Land for Large-Scale Commercial Farming
As countless factories in China’s industrial cities have lured away millions of rural laborers, the result has been an increase in agricultural labor shortages and in fallow land. A new government campaign—called “Constructing a New Countryside”—that seeks to modernize China’s “backward” rural society has pushed local governments to embark on a program of rural land consolidation in order to create large-scale commercial farms. In exchange for giving up their land, peasants receive monthly rents from agribusiness firms. Often, peasants from the same region are then hired as day laborers. This very recent phenomenon has thus far attracted very little scholarly attention, despite its potential to affect hundreds of millions of people over the course of the next decade. The ultimate goal of my research is to understand the impact of agrarian capitalism and land dispossession on peasants and the rural poor, and to examine to what extent there is resistance to this transformation.
