Searching for Sustainability: Industrial Agriculture of Small Farmers in China and Its Structural Strains

Abstract

The ‘sustainability turn’ in China's development paradigm is in part a response to the sustainability challenges—both ecologically and socially—that China's agrarian transition has generated. This article characterizes China's agrarian system as an ‘industrial agriculture of small farmers’ (IASF): industrial in method and social metabolism, yet predominantly smallholder in scale and social organization. Over four decades, this configuration delivered national food security, inclusive livelihood improvement and accumulation without the mass dispossession characteristic of agrarian transitions elsewhere. Yet the processes driving these achievements also generated three interconnected structural strains: an ecological strain from IASF's industrial methods and the scale-biased state interventions they provoked; an infrastructure strain produced by the capitalist restructuring of conditions on which smallholder viability depends; and a demographic strain resulting from the dissolution of IASF's social reproduction foundations. Analysing seven cases of state interventions in Chinese agriculture, articles in this collection show that these efforts—despite genuine ambitions in ecological and social restoration—consistently reproduce the scale biases and class dynamics that accelerate smallholder marginalization rather than arresting it.