Peasants’ Informal Employment: A Microsocietal Study of Two Villages of Dingxian, Hebei (华北农民非正规就业的微观形态: 基于河北定县两个村庄的考察)

Abstract

Research on informal employment in China has mainly adopted an urban perspective, ignoring its rural social and economic dimensions. This article, adopting a rural perspective, not only takes into considerations a greater number of informal forms of employment, such as part-time businesses and self-employment, but also explores the mechanisms that differentiate the various types of informal employment by comparing the level of development of township and village enterprises and changes in the mode of agricultural management. The article discusses the forms and evolution of informal employment in two villages in Dingxian (Ting Hsien) 定县, a county that has been studied in depth since the 1920s. Our study finds that the distance between township enterprises and the village is an important factor influencing peasants’ informal employment since it largely determines the choice of peasants to “leave both the land and the village” or to “leave the land but not the village,” which in turn further affects the level of peasants’ incomes. Compared with employees in the formal sector, these informal employees are obviously in a weak position in terms of wage levels, working conditions, welfare, security, and so on. As for the internal environment, changes of the mode of rural production also affect the forms of informal employment. The large-scale operation of the land will liberate the agricultural labor force, so as to expand the potential scale of farmers’ employment, and the shift from growing food crops to growing cash crops will lead to more diversified forms of farmers’ concurrent businesses. Finally, the article tries to establish a framework composed of the internal and external environment of the village to explain the mechanism of peasants’ informal employment.国内关于非正规就业的研究，大多是以城市为观察视角，忽视了非正规就业人员身后的农村社会经济状况。把农村作为研究的起点，不仅可以纳入更多的非正规就业形式，如农民兼业和个体经营等,更为重要的是，它还能够通过对比“传统部门”内不同程度的乡镇企业发展与农业经营方式变化，从而发现非正规就业的差异化形成机制。作为上世纪20年代就已备受学界关注的农村社会，河北定县有着深厚的学术研究传统。本研究选取了当地两个具有不同特征的村庄，发现附近是否存在乡镇企业很大程度上决定了农民打工的距离远近，即离乡还是不离乡，这也进一步影响农民收入水平的高低。无论是以建筑业为主的离乡务工，还是以作坊式乡镇企业为主的在乡务工，其员工的工资水平、工作条件和福利保障等方面均处于不利位置。与此同时，农村内部经营方式变化也会影响、甚至促成新的非正规就业。土地规模经营更大程度上解放了农业劳动力，客观上扩大了农民外出的潜在规模；从种植粮食作物到经济作物的转变，使得农民兼业形式变得更加多样化。最后，我们尝试建立一个由村庄内外部环境共同作用形成的经验框架来解释农村非正规就业的变化机制。 (This article is in English.)