From De-collectivization to Re-collectivization: New Transformation Trend in Agriculture Production in Taicang City of the Eastern China from the Perspective of ‘Governmentality’

Since the Reform and Opening-up launched in the end of 1970s, the agriculture sector in China has witnessed a tremendous change, attracting widely academic debates in the past decades (Long et al., 2010; Song and Liu, 2014). A substantial body of academic work showed that institutional change in agriculture and rural fields stimulated the significant increase in agriculture productivity, helped end the hunger issue, and contributed to the state industrialization and urbanization (Long et al., 2012). Meanwhile, the research on the agriculture transition in the context of urbanization and agricultural tax abolishing suggested that the returnees and left-behind farmers were more likely to engage in scale grain growing, intensified horticulture production, and the other non-agriculture economic activities, such as rural tourism and E-commerce (Qian et al., 2016; Qin and Liao, 2016; He and Zhang, 2022; Yang and Xu, 2022; Li and Qin, 2022; Wu et al., 2022; Yang and Xu, 2022). However, the size expansion of agriculture production resulted from the centralized oligopoly of farmland has revealed a reversal tendency closely linked to the ‘household responsibility system’ identified and implemented in 1978 (Long et al., 2010), indicating the ongoing reduction of smallholders in rural China.

More important, recent research recorded that there was a new tendency to move to agriculture re-collectivization in some rural localities, alongside with the emerging of a number of collective economic organizations (Kan, 2016). As the sharp agrarian re-composition featured by the increasing dominance of corporate agribusiness and large farms (Marsden et al., 1993; Cheshire and Woods, 2013), which occurred in Australia and New Zealand in the context of radical agriculture deregulation and market liberalization in late 20th century, the combination of distinctive collective regime and latest rural reforms has been influential in framing the agriculture production transformation towards re-collectivization (Kan, 2016; Chen et al., 2019).

Albeit, there is limited understanding of the transformation trajectory of re-collectivization in agriculture production in rural locality, and the dynamic mechanism and sustainability of this transition process also need a deeper academic discussion. Given the governments’ strong impact on directing agriculture transition activities and nurturing new agriculture operators in rural China (Chen et al., 2022), this study aims to examine the practice of the emerging re-collectivization in agriculture production in the eastern China based on the theoretical lens of governmentality. The governmentality approach focuses on explaining the exercise of state power and how it mobilizes the individuals and groups to meet state strategic goals (Foucault, 1991; McDonald et al., 2013). Through analyzing the local implementation of public projects related to re-collectivization practices in agriculture production in study areas, this paper intends to explore the governance structure framing the shift from de-collectivization to re-collectivization, examine the motivation of agriculture production re-collectivization, analyze the crucial factors challenging the sustainability of agriculture re-collectivization process, and discuss the differences and similarities in the mechanisms advancing agriculture production reorganization across major producing countries in agriculture in the world.

In order to inquire the above issues, we begin with a brief literature review on the concepts of agriculture production reorganization, governmentality approach and governance structure reforms in China, and develop a theoretical framework for scrutinizing agriculture production reorganization practices in rural China later. The following two sections are devoted to the case study, involving research methodological issues, study areas and the analysis of the process of agriculture production reorganization in rural locality. In the end, the discussion and conclusion are presented.

The discourse of organizing agriculture production refers to the configuration of farming workforce, social structure, natural resources and the other production means supporting the agriculture production process, which is usually demonstrated by the central unit of agriculture production, such as family farms, modern capitalistic farms and collective farms linked to variable socio-economic, political and geographical structures (Kan, 2016). As some research suggested, agriculture production organization changes were not only influenced by the technique innovation, but also shaped by the wider socio-economic and political factors affecting food-supply regime (Goodman and Redclift, 1989). Furthermore, by analyzing the development of capitalist agriculture, some scholars stressed the state’s role in shaping agricultural production changes through delivering targeted institutions in farming subsidy, market regulation, import or export regulation, and so on (Cheshire and Woods, 2013). According to the previous discussion conducted in the European Union countries, the most notable policy is the Common Agriculture Policy of the European Community, which has experienced several rounds of important reforms, dominating the evolution trajectory of agriculture production organization in the past decades (Evans, 2009; Koopmans et al., 2018).

China finished the collectivization campaign in agriculture sector in the early 1950s through reforming rural land ownership, confiscating individual farmers’ land ownership, amalgamating farmers’ land into collective farms and organizing farming households into village cooperatives. The members of the village cooperative jointly owned agriculture production means, took part in farming activities, and commonly appropriated the agriculture harvest, which were the typical features of agricultural collectivization within the political and economic regime of state socialism (Kan, 2016). Unfortunately, this campaign had not succeeded in eliminating the problem of extreme poverty and realizing agriculture modernization in rural China due to weak incentive for working in the collective farms (Long et al., 2012).

In the context of ongoing rural reform agenda aiming at rural poverty alleviation, the agriculture production organization in rural China had undergone successive changes. The early reform, named ‘household responsibility system’, was deployed by the central government based on local exploring and pilot projects in late 1970s, greatly boosting the agriculture production and relaxing the impoverishment in short term (Chen et al., 2019). According to the principles of household responsibility system, while the farmland was still owned by village collective, farmland usage rights and the other agriculture production means were equally distributed to individual households based on population per household, and that the redistribution mechanism in agriculture surplus did not work again, which practically demonstrated the disintegration of collective farms and the arrival of de-collectivization era in the mid-1980s (Long et al., 2012; Ren et al., 2022).

To cope with the problem of rural labor surplus caused by the improvement in agriculture productivity, the later economic reforms led to the prosperity of township and village enterprises (TVE), boosted the broader national industrialization, and triggered the huge migration from rural to urban areas (Unger and Chan, 1999). But the continuous out-migration of farming workforces and rural talents seriously threatened the vitality of rural community and national demand of food security (Chow, 2002; Christiansen, 2009). In this context, the reform agenda in rural China began to point to agriculture modernization featured by mechanization and scale operation. Since the 2000s, the farmland usage right was permitted to transfer among individual households, opening the institutional window for expanding individual farms’ size (Long and Qu, 2018). As some research suggested that the farmland managed by family farms for moderate scale operation had accounted for 13.4% of China’s total cultivated land, and the average size had reached 200 mu (13.33 ha) in China by the end of 2012 (Long et al., 2016). Recently, Communist Party of China (CPC) committee and the State Council in China has decided to furtherly institutionalize the farmland management right transferring, cultivate new agriculture operators involving new type of family farms and farmer cooperatives, foster collective agriculture organizations, and deepen the rural property institutional reform for invigorating agriculture modernization (Long and Tu, 2018). In this sense, the flourishing of collective organizations concentrating on agriculture management would not only crucially facilitate the reorganization in agriculture production stage, but also increasingly bring the agricultural operating activities under the ‘control’ of village collectives. Together with the widespread shareholding reform of rural collective assets and the delivering of profits redistribution mechanism (Kan, 2016), the current reform agenda appears to translate the previous de-collectivization process into a new phase of re-collectivization.

Yet, the measure and capacity that state governs the society strongly influences the local practice of national reform agenda in agriculture sector, framing the pathway of agriculture production reorganization in locality. In this way, the theoretical lens of governmentality could shed light on the dynamics driving this agriculture transformation process. Thus, in the next section, we focus on the changing modes of ‘governmentality’ and its application in rural governance practice.

The concept of governmentality, referring to the ways governing society, originates from a set of Foucault’s research work, which is not only used to interrogate the ‘problematics of government’, but also employed to develop the new means for operationalizing the social control (Foucault, 1991; Woods, 2010). The later mainly concerns the operation of governmental power in society, focusing on the invention of new governing techniques involving calculation, audit, targeting, financial management, and so on, to permeate the social life by authorities (Dean, 1999; MacKinnon, 2002).

‘Governmentality’ was further developed by scholars such as Dean (Dean, 1999) and Rose (Rose, 1996) as a framework for understanding how to govern a ‘free’ society, concentrating on the rationalities of governance and routines of problematizing its governance objects. Furthermore, later work suggested that under the same purpose of government the mode of governmentality is not static, but to continually evolve in correspondence with the altering social and economic environment and political ideologies. Managed liberalism, the ‘early mode of governmentality’ characterized by direct state intervention into population’s lives, prevailed in the post-Second World War time in the western countries, emphasizing the rationality of ‘governing through social’ (Rose, 1996). However, due to the growing criticism on the managed liberalism for its unacceptable governing cost and heavy bureaucracy from the political right in some western countries and the wide spread of governing technologies such as auditing and targeting, the advanced liberalism became prominent in the 1980s (Woods, 2010). Compared with managed liberalism, advanced liberalism studies sought to reduce direct state intervention and highlighted the principle of ‘limited government’ and ‘governing through communities’, concentrating on acting only when it is necessary to do and devolving responsibilities to communities, private sectors and the other stakeholders (Woods and Goodwin, 2003). As Murdoch analyzed, advanced liberalism does not mean the complete withdrawal of state intervention, but encourages the state to act as a monitor or facilitator beyond locality to ensure the normal running of social and economic activities (Murdoch, 1997).

Therefore, applying the new mode of governmentality, advanced liberalism, to guide governance practice requires to develop and harness new techniques of partnership to enroll a large range of differentiated actors and make them work together to realize the state wills (Fig. 1). Meanwhile, there is growing research on local governance to argue that the development of ‘partnerships’ over public sectors, voluntary groups, and individuals could facilitate the effective cooperation between state and non-state actors in establishment and implementation of public policies (Woods and Goodwin, 2003). Nevertheless, state actors still play a crucial role of controller in partnerships through devising engaging rules for participants and providing funding for public projects or initiatives based on a quasi-market of competitive bidding, emerging a ‘unequal partnership’ among various participants (Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; Woods, 2010).

Figure 1.  The new mode of governmentality shaped by advanced liberalism discourse

Moreover, the rural studies employing governmentality revealed various rural governance forms associated with advanced liberalism rationality of ‘governing through communities’, such as inter-sectoral partnership in Netherland, community self-help in Australia, inter-institutional interplay in England and the community involvement and empowerment mediated by the local state agencies in Scotland (Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; MacKinnon, 2002; Woods, 2010). However, the existing literature on governmentality (advanced liberalism)’s adopting in rural governance predominately appeared in the countries of Global North, and the discourse of governmentality has seldom been employed to analyze the rural governance in the global south, especially in the largest developing country, China. In the following section, through employing the governmentality approach, we examine the changing state governance structure in the context of state modernization paradigm and analyze its contribution to agriculture and rural transformation process in rural locality within China.

Under the discourse of modernization, the reforms started four decades ago have not only accelerated China’s great industrialization and urbanization (Long et al., 2016), but also fundamentally transformed the holistic governance structure in China. As Qian and Weingast analyzed, the tax-sharing system and other relative reforms launched in 1990s redistributed the revenue channel between central and local governments through decreasing local governments’ revenue sharing, and devolved more responsibilities, such as public service provision, infrastructure improvement and economic growth, to local governments (Qian and Weingast, 1997; Loo and Chow, 2006). It is similar to the shift towards neo-liberalism (advanced liberalism) featured by the discourse of ‘governance through community’ in western countries, which is related to the rhetoric of decentralization (Rose, 1996; MacKinnon, 2002). Yet, a reverse discourse of recentralization also emerged during the governance structure transformation phase. For example, the expansion of central government’s fiscal revenue could help to reinforce the capacity for central directing and ‘controlling’ over local governments and other actors. The development and deployment of a strand set of new governing ‘techniques’, such as audit and local government performance evaluation system, ensures that local governments and other local agencies’ actions are accountable to central government’s goals (Zhou, 2007; Zhou and Tan, 2014).

In practice, relying on the expertise collected from the localities the central government or relevant departments identifies the governance problems affecting national development, formulates some national projects according to the idea of top-level design, provides the support funds for projects, and encourages local government departments and other actors to take part in the national initiatives through quasi-market of competitive bidding, which is usually viewed as ‘project regime of state governance’ in the post-reform era (Murdoch, 1997; Zhou and Tan, 2014). Meanwhile, for the local responsibilities devolved by central government, local governments usually deliver local initiatives and additionally offer the matching fiscal funds to help implement national projects and ensure the realization of state aims in locality (Fang et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2019).

In terms of governance practices in agriculture and rural development, for guaranteeing the full realization of new development targets, the central government not only supplied a certain amount of fiscal funds for the public projects and provided direct subsidies to farming households, but also incorporated the ‘achievements’ in carrying out national projects into the broader parameters of local government performance evaluation system (Long et al., 2016; Chen et al., 2022). Meanwhile, the auditing towards the public investment in projects has been implemented to ensure the value of fiscal funds, and to enable the activities of local participators, such as rural collectives, farming households and other private actors or organizations within those projects, to be consistent with central and local governments’ priorities (Fig. 2). In this sense, the partnerships among multi-level governments, social organizations and other individuals and the social network established in those projects could play a key role in agriculture and rural modernization practice in China.

Figure 2.  Interlinkages between state governance restructuring and the ‘governmentality’ in governing agriculture modernization in China

However, study on the geographies of governance emphasized that the activities and behaviors of local government agencies are crucially tailored by the local economic, social, and political conditions (Herbert-Cheshire, 2000; MacKinnon, 2002). Thus, the local interplay and collaboration between state and non-state actors suiting to specific social-economic circumstances could help precisely identify the reorganization process in agriculture production towards re-collectivization in our case area.

Taicang, neighboring the Yangzi River (Fig. 3), is not only one of the six counties which have firstly met the criteria of moderately prosperous society in Jiangsu Province in the eastern part of China, but also one of the second batch of National Modern Agriculture Demonstration Zones (NMADZ) approved by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural affairs in China. According to the statistical data of 2020, the GDP per capita surpassed 160 000 yuan (RMB) (about 25 000 dollar) and the proportion of population living in towns and city areas were more than 70%, hitting the last stage of urbanization (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fRWSqD8s7rLTcWt89fUL8g). As an official from the local authority estimated that although there were still nearly 70 000 households (about 245 000 family members) living in 90 villages within Taicang City, the full-time and part-time farming workers were less than 20 000 and the aged above 60 yr and non-local farmers accounted for about 85% and 30%, respectively, similar to the other developed areas in China.

Figure 3.  Location of study area in China

However, this demographic vulnerability brought high risk to the local public procurement for grain stocks, and placed heavy pressure on the local agriculture and rural modernization agenda. To tackle the urgent challenge of local agriculture depression and implement the national initiatives concerning ‘Agriculture Modernization and Rural Vitalization’, the city government released a series of preferential policies and programs aiming at accelerating agricultural mechanization and propelling the construction of NMADZ through merging the farmland use rights from smallholders within villages and developing cooperative farms since 2010.

Donglin and Yalu, two ordinary administrative villages with about 2200 smallholders in Taicang City (Fig. 3), once experienced the booming of township and village enterprises (TVE) in the past decades, which not only saw the continuous rise of rural residents’ income, but also accumulated a lot of high-quality collective assets, enabling village collectives to respond to external challenges. Like the other villages in Taicang City, most of the residents in Yalu and Donglin are no longer depending on agriculture and few local registered residents chose to work in agriculture sector, with the farmland abandoned or separately operated by elderly or in-migrant farmers. To completely transform this ‘chaotic’ situation, the two villages actively reacted to governments’ initiatives and proactively took part in the public projects of consolidating rural settlements, amalgamating smallholders’ contracted farmland, and developing cooperative farms featured by mechanization and scale operation, emerging as the ‘Star’ members of the first patch village cooperative farms in Taicang City. Thus, choosing the two villages as case study area could help us capture complete development trajectory of cooperative farm and provide an ideal window for observing the partnership and social network among the multi-level public and private actors.

To clearly investigate the new agriculture re-organization process of replacing the previous smallholders with cooperative farms and reveal the social network among various actors engaging in this practice, the data and information were gathered from several sources, involving documents and newspapers, semi-structured interview, statistical and land use data.

More than 30 documents concerning agriculture and rural development in Taicang City since 2009 (the start of significant agriculture transition in Taicang) were collected, including formal policy documents ¹ from agriculture and rural affairs and natural resources management departments, local leaders’ presentations, agri-business plan and project assessment reports. A large number of news reports from the Taicang Daily and the WeChat public account of ‘Taicang San Nong’ were reviewed and aggregated as the evidence of the study. With the help of snowball sampling technology, more than 30 interviewees were invited to join in the conversations that occurred in diverse sites, such as meeting rooms, offices, farming sites, processing factories, canteens, and so on, and the interviewees covered farming labors and managers working for the cooperative farms, staffs working for agriculture and rural affairs or natural resource management departments in city or township governments, leaders in village committee or cooperative organizations in Donglin and Yalu villages. Particularly, all these interviews were conducted between the September in 2021 and the January in 2022, and each interview lasted at least an hour. For protecting individual privacy, less detailed information on interviewees was presented in this paper. Statistical data on cooperative farms, rural economy development, rural population and employment and other social-economic indicators were gathered from the Taicang Statistical Yearbook in 2020 (https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/fRWSqD8s7rLTcWt89fUL8g). Data on land use in Donglin and Yalu villages for the year 2010 and 2020 were gained from Taicang City Natural Resources and Planning Bureau.

These different data sources have been conducted to compare and triangulate with each other for the maximum accuracy. For completely presenting the motives behind agriculture production transformation towards re-collectivization in locality, the interviews, data processing and analysis focused on several crucial points, including how the interviewees understood the cooperative farm campaign, what factors supported the everyday operation of cooperative farms, how the interviewees saw the different actors’ role in developing cooperative farms, how the interviewees assessed cooperative farms’ contribution to local agriculture modernization and constructing the NMADZ in Taicang, how the interviewees viewed the future of the cooperative farms and how to maintain the prosperous development momentum.

…the departments of agriculture and rural affairs within both central and local governments need to take specific actions to implement the national strategies associated with ‘Building New Countryside’ and ‘Agriculture and Rural Modernization’ … (Respondent A)

To fulfill the department’s duty for implementing the former national strategy of ‘Building New Countryside’ (Liu et al., 2010), since 2010 the former Ministry of Agriculture (the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs now) in China successively issued the ‘Modern Agriculture Development Plan (2011–2015)’, ‘National Agriculture Modernization Plan (2016–2020)’ and the ‘Instructions for the National Modern Agriculture Demonstration Zone Construction (INMADZC)’ in an effort to promote agriculture modernization in localities with advanced conditions firstly. These programs not only emphasized the appropriate adjustments of agriculture structure, mechanization of agriculture production, the adoption of advanced agriculture techniques, the expansion of agri-business and the management of agriculture resources and ecosystem, but also encouraged the cultivation of new agriculture operators, such as new family farms, specialized farming households and farmers cooperatives, so as to promote agriculture moderate scale operation (Long and Qu, 2018). The implementation of those strategies is closely connected to the recent reforms in terms of the agriculture basic operation institution, rural land institution and the rural collective property institution in China.

For actively reacting to national agenda of agriculture transformation, assembling multi-sources resources for propelling local agriculture development, the Taicang City government submitted the application for constructing NMADZ in 2012 and successfully entered the list of the second batch of NMADZ in the same year. Alongside with the ratification moving from the MARA to Taicang City government, considerable state fiscal funding was simultaneously channeled to Taicang City to support this project. An interviewee from the Agriculture and Rural Affairs authority in Taicang revealed that the public investment coming from the central and provincial government reached 100 million yuan (RMB) per year between 2012 and 2015, and that the public budget could cover over 60% of the total cost in high-quality farmland construction and 30% of the total budget for purchasing advanced agriculture machinery respectively, which significantly alleviated the Taicang City government’s financial burden.

However, accompanying the transfer payments to Taicang City, a set of performance assessment and management measures for NMADZ were also issued, which meant that Taicang City government had to accept the targeted audits and performance evaluation conducted by the MARA in scheduled to ensure absolute compliance with NMADZ requirements. The Document of Measures for Monitoring and Assessing the NMADZ issued in 2013 clearly suggested the calculating and ranking methods, which included 19 indicators related to material equipment, agricultural techniques application, agriculture operation and organizing, financial support, agriculture output capacity and agriculture sustainable development.

Till this step, under the ‘Carrots (Transfer Payments) and Sticks (Audit and Performance Evaluation Measures)’, the responsibility for transforming Taicang City into a new member of the list of ‘NMADZ’ has been formally devolved to the city government. Besides, some local experts revealed that if Taicang City could not pass the annual performance evaluation and projects audit, MARA was likely to withdraw the title of NMADZ and the granted funds, which would be an unacceptable failure for Taicang City as it would pose seriously negative effect on the results of chief officials’ personal performance evaluation. Fortunately, Taicang City successfully went through all the assessment program required by the MANA in the end.

Pushing forward agriculture modernization and constructing NMADZ in Taicang City not only needs to follow the policies from the MANA, but also has to take into the consideration of the local situation that few rural households, especially few rural youths, are willing to go on working in agriculture sector. As an interviewee explained, the serious lack of farming labors (the proportion of farmers in total rural residents less than 15 percentage in 2010) had almost led to the collapse of local agriculture system, and that the most feasible measure was to adopt labor-saving technologies in agriculture production, which required both the farmland scale management and mechanization in agriculture sector. Additionally, few farming households are going to largely increase their input in agriculture production because of their off-farm livelihoods. A former head of farming household expressed his viewpoints as follows:

…I am not full dependent on farming for livelihood due to the low gains from it, and I grow grain and vegetables in my plot just for hobby. To be honest, I am not capable of investing so much money in buying modern agricultural machinery… (Respondent B)

For this urgent challenge, the Agriculture and Rural Authority in Taicang has its own understanding, and some officials from the Bureau gave their answers to those crucial questions:

…Although the single farming household does not own the capacity to invest in scale farms, relying on the collective non-agriculture economy and the government fiscal support, our village collectives could afford the initial investment in the scale farming… (Respondent C)

…Through farmland consolidation and transferring individual households’ contracted farmland usage rights to village collective economic organization, we could unify the farmland management, which is similar to the collective farm before the reform and opening-up. If the former farming households will, they could go on working in our ‘collective farms’ as permanent or seasonal farming labors, even the managers… (Respondent D)

In this context, the government of Taicang City formally initiated a campaign of ‘developing cooperative farm’ through releasing a document named ‘The Opinions on Developing Cooperative Farms in Taicang City (ODCFTC) (2010)’, defining the ‘cooperative farm’ as both a new type of agriculture operation system originating from ‘household responsibility system’ and a key node to tie rural households, facilitate farmland scale management and develop modern agriculture. It clearly stated that cooperative farms could be set up by village collective organizations, a group of individual households or private enterprises, and that farming households or other participators could join in the cooperative farms through pooling workforce, finance, farmland and other production factors based on the shareholding system (Kan, 2016), which closely connected the cooperative farm to the re-collectivization of agriculture production. Another document entitled ‘The Opinions on Management of the Contracted Farmland Usage Rights Transferring in Taicang County (2010)’ directly called on individual households to take part in the cooperative farm through converting their contracted farmland usage rights into distributable shares. According to the instruction for building cooperative farms, members of the farm own the identity of shareholders, holding a share in the cooperative farm’s profits and having the legitimate right to elect members of the managing team and supervise the team’s investment and operation decisions. Theoretically, the income of cooperative farms’ staffs mentioned above include both salary and redistributed dividend, and that the other ordinary smallholders who have transferred contracted farmland to the cooperative farms not only could enjoy the farmland’s rent, but also gain the dividend in consistent with their distributable shares.

A local agriculture expert told us that cooperative farms were not only the local translation outcome of state agriculture modernization agenda, but also the predominant actors undertaking the constructing tasks of NMADZ, such as amalgamating farmland parcels, constructing irrigation system, improving soil quality, applying new producing technologies and equipment, and so on. As the statistical data showed Taicang City had seen a boom in cooperative farms since 2010. So far, 90 cooperative farms (each village owing one cooperative farm) have been established, operating farmland over 225 000 mu (15 000 ha) and accounting for nearly 70 percent of the total farmland in Taicang.

Taking the Donglin and Yafeng cooperative farms as an example, which were the first batch cooperative farms established in 2010, they have achieved remarkable stride in agriculture production mechanization (permanent farming workers declining from 40 and 26 to 20 and 9 respectively and farmland management size hitting 250 mu (16.66 ha) per capita, about 80 times of the smallholders) in the past decade. Depending on the prosperous development momentum, the Donglin cooperative farm had fulfilled the promise of redistributing dividend to its shareholders, and the dividend from the cooperative farm in 2020 exceeded 1000 yuan per share. However, not all the cooperative farms had so pretty performance.

In sum, considering weak attractiveness in agriculture sector, strong local economy and few rural residents relying on agriculture, Taicang chose a local routine of fostering cooperative farms to reorganize agriculture production system to curb the local agriculture recession and meet the state demands for promoting agriculture modernization, but it might be not fitting the underdeveloped areas in the central or western parts of China.

As presented in the above section, the cooperative farm, both an important piece of local innovation in agriculture production system and a powerful agent of village collective, has become the frontline actor practicing agriculture modernization in Taicang City. To meet the MARA’s demands the Taicang City government decomposed the concrete indicators of constructing the NMADZC and devolved them to township governments based on specific local conditions, which looked like the responsibility shift from MARA to Taicang City government.

Yet, due to the low returns in agriculture sector and much investment needed in scale farming, mobilizing multi-actors and integrating resources became the most important pre-conditions for developing cooperative farms and promoting agriculture transformation in short-term, an interviewee from Taicang City government said. For overcoming the disadvantages of agriculture and motivating the village collectives, the Taicang City government promised to support the grassroots villages in developing cooperative farms through tax exemption and fiscal grants, and the later governmental document further claimed that the subsidies should be precisely calculated based on the size of farmland operated by each cooperative farm, and that the township governments should strictly monitor the practical operation status of cooperative farms.

Nonetheless, some interviewees confirmed that although numerus actors were allowed to launch and operate cooperative farms, the existing cooperative farms were all established and operated by village collectives, and few other actors were interested in operating them due to low profits and high risk in agribusiness. The carders from Yalu Village pointed out that they had invested millions of yuan in purchasing farming equipment, such as tractors, combine harvesters, rice processing machines, and so on. Similarly, the branch secretary of Communist Party of China (CPC) in Donglin Village highlighted that the village collective had channeled five million yuan (RMB) to the construction of cooperative farm five years in a row, and that the other poor villages were not capable of affording the huge economic cost as the limited public funds could not cover all the aspects in building and operating the cooperative farms.

While asked why they accepted this ‘low cost-effective task’ of re-collectivizing agriculture production, some interviewees had the following understandings and answers:

…though the profits from agriculture sector are few and not stable because of both recent extreme weather conditions and fluctuated agricultural products prices, we fully understand the importance of agri-food produced in locality when the long-distance supply chain is disrupted due to the emergent events such as COVID-19. So, we believe that to rebuild and upgrade our local farming system is a great mission could not be rejected… (Respondent E)

…I absolutely agree with previous speakers’ points, but I wish to complement that indicators related to the cooperative farms are important parts of our personal performance evaluation which severely affect our salaries… (Respondent F)

Under these institutional arrangements and common missions, both city and township governments, cooperative farms made joint efforts to propel the various projects to meet the criteria of NMADZ. Fortunately, Taicang City performed greatly in the overall assessment organized by the provincial government and MARA, and realized the complete mechanization in all stages of grain production in 2017. Importantly, through practicing the cooperative farming system, Taicang City has cultivated a batch of farming talents specializing in modern agriculture production and operation activities.

As such, the nexus of quasi-contract among city and township governments, village collectives, and cooperative farms in Taicang City, which is comprised of responsibility shift, public funding transferring payment and shared goals, helped set up the partnerships over various actors and shape collective actions of exercising NMADZ. Besides, it also forged a group of cooperative farms and deeply transformed the former smallholders. However, this movement in Taicang only finished the transformation in organization style of agriculture production and had not touched the solution to the problem of cooperative farms’ autonomous operation. So, we will examine the detailed factors driving the normal operation of cooperative farms in the next section.

As mentioned in the previous sections, few local young people choose to work in agriculture sector again, leading to the generational and reproductive vulnerability on the social and economic fabric of both the residual smallholders and the latest cooperative farms in Taicang City. It is crucially important to keep in mind that farming work is closely linked to low-pay, exhausting working conditions and low social position, not only in China, but also in the developed countries (Kneafsey et al., 2021b), on the other hand, more attractive non-agriculture job opportunities are available for local labors in Taicang. Consequently, only some elderly left-behind are taking part in farming activities, but not complete for subsistence. We once met a tractor operator working in the cooperative farm of Yafeng, who had been 76 years old, but he was one of the core members in production group. Thus, the first obstacle challenging the cooperative farm’s sustainable development is serious lack of labors, especially young labors.

To ease this problem, on the one hand, the Taicang government injected amounts of public funds into cooperative farms for reducing the cooperative farms’ operating cost and raising farmers’ incomes. For instance, the ‘Notice on the Adjustment of Ecological Compensation’ released in 2013 declared that the cooperative farms would receive fiscal grants of 300 yuan (RMB) per mu (0.07 ha) annually for the paddy that they managed, and that the village carders could gain a cash reward of 50 000 yuan (RMB) if the size of village cooperative farm surpassed 3000 mu (200 ha). Crucially, the grants were able to be used not only for activities protecting paddy (a kind of artificial wetland), but also for constructing farmland infrastructure, paying the farmland rent and dividends to shareholders. In addition, there were other types of subsidies to the village collectives or cooperative farms, such as subsidy for arable land conservation project (118 yuan (RMB) per mu (0.07 ha) annually), funds for agriculture equipment repair and maintenances (700 yuan (RMB) per piece annually) and grants for purchasing expensive agricultural machinery (fiscal funds accounting for 60 % of the total price). An interviewee from Donglin Village presented that the cooperative farm workers could earn average wage of more than 60 000 yuan (RMB) per year, which was close to the per captia disposable income of residents in Taicang in 2020. Additionally, since 2015 the grant for paddy conservation has increased from 300 yuan (RMB) per mu (0.07 ha) to 420 yuan per mu, and it could cover wider range of issues, such as ecological protection and pollution control, paddy infrastructure construction, technique service for rice production, agriculture insurance payment and other rural public services.

On the other hand, through the large-scale agriculture mechanization campaign, cooperative farms have owned a large number of advanced farming devices, including tractors, rice transplanters, combine harvesters, agricultural drones and other smart agriculture equipment (Fig. 4), which not only contributed to the increase in production efficiency, but also improved the working conditions and mitigated farming labors’ workload. Especially, a carder from the Yalu Village proudly told us that the era of agriculture production fully relying on manpower had become the history forever. In addition, some farming workers from the Donglin farm also showed their confidence in agriculture due to the successive improvement in incomes.

Figure 4.  Advanced farming devices show in 2018. (Photos taken by the first author in Donglin Village, Taicang City, China)

Moreover, to tackle the urgent challenge of farmers’ generational replacement, the local authority launched a ‘Program for Cultivating New Type Farmers’ since 2013 to encourage local high school graduates to study in agricultural colleges through providing college fees and promising jobs in the cooperative farms with attractive annul income and social insurance. So far, there have been more than 270 young customized graduates working in the cooperative farms or villages committees in Taicang. About the plan for cultivating the new agricultural talents, some local officials from the Taicang Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs told us:

…We signed contracts with Jiangsu Vocational College Agriculture and Forestry and Suzhou Polytechnic Institute of Agriculture and required them to help us cultivate a certain number of agricultural talents each year firstly. Then we visited the high schools within our city to broadcast our program of fostering the next generation farmers, enrolled the local students who were interested in local agriculture and rural development as the candidates, and signed contracts with them, promising that city government would pick up all their college tuitions (about 20 000 yuan (RMB) for 3 yr), and they needed to go back to work in the cooperative farms or villages after finished their training courses in the colleges…(Respondent G)

…All the graduates returning to hometown will be chosen as the candidates of village cadres or heads of the collective economic organizations, and we will design a complete plan for their career development. But they have to take part in the regular training courses organized by the bureau of agricultural and rural affairs and the other occupation exercises so that they not only do well in agricultural production and operation, but also can develop the capabilities of rural governance. Some outstanding village carders’ annual income could reach 100 000 yuan (RMB) per year as well as own the opportunities of entering governmental staff groups… (Respondent H)

…So far, these agricultural colleges have trained about 270 graduates for us, and 95 graduates have become the village carders responsible for the collective economy management. The rest have worked well in our cooperative farms and become the core farming talents, making great contribution to the development of NMADZ in Taicang City… (Respondent I)

Meantime, the Taicang workstation for diffusing modern agriculture technologies, a kind of public institution like the extension agency in the western countries, regularly invites agricultural experts inside or outside Taicang City to provide the local farming workers with training courses on agricultural production and operation activities to expand the group of certificated farmers. A staff working for the Taicang Burea of Agriculture and Rural Affairs told us that the number of certificated farming professionals had hit 1100, comprising the core part of current farming labors in in Taicang. In addition, the workstation also extended the contents of extension services in terms of agricultural diversification and commercialization, encouraging the local cooperative farms to produce high value agri-food, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, and to use the digital platform for e-commerce to expand channel for moving agricultural products ‘out of the village into the city’ and capture more added value in local communities.

Like the groups farm formed in the decollectivized era in some former Soviet-Union countries (Agarwal et al., 2021), the cooperative farm is a type of innovation in agriculture production towards re-collectivization, which is tailored to the local conditions in Taicang of the eastern China. Depending on gathering individual households’ contracted farmland and farming labors and assembling governmental and collective assets, the cooperative farms in Taicang City have run for one decade, which not only accelerated the local agriculture transition, but also deeply integrated the current cooperative farms into the ‘modern procurement system’, dramatically promoting agriculture commercialization in line with the modernization agenda facilitated in western countries (Varga, 2017). This also means that the cooperative farms have become significantly sensitive to market signals such as ‘price volatility’ of products or inputs and the public policies pointing to agriculture modernization discourse (Piras et al., 2021). In other words, the cooperative farms were not as autonomous as the former smallholders.

As keeping the stabilization of agri-food production and supplies is closely related to national food security issues emphasized by states all around the world, how to realize the various farms’ self-sustaining and long-term active is of interest to both policymakers and scholars. Recently, the soaring price of farmland and other inputs associated with COVID-19 has imposed negative impact on the cooperative farms’ survival, which requires the reasonable adjustments in directing policies for the cooperative farms to remain their long-term vitality. As the observation in Romania and other western countries suggested that a variety of supports from the EU (European Union) and state governments, which favored the young farmers, significantly contributed to both the mechanization of group farms and the responsibility transferring from the retiring farmers to the young and educated generation, and that the active group farms inclined to have larger operation size and declined members and exercised mixed farming involving crops produce, animals rearing and other non-farming activities, which clearly implied that their members would share higher output per capita and be more resilient to complex market changes (Varga, 2019).

Applying to the situation of the cooperative farms in Taicang City, further facilitating the process of replacing the manpower with machinery in agriculture production, building entire industrial chain, diversifying agribusiness and enabling farmers to capture more added value might be a promising way for keeping cooperative farms persistent and resilient. Besides, it could also help protect the enthusiasm of farming members for participating in agriculture production, prevent talented farmers from exiting agriculture sector, and maintain the local capacity for staples production that is vital to grain self-sufficiency issue repeatedly stressed by China’s central government (Long et al., 2012). In reality, the Donglin cooperative farm in Taicang City, firstly began the exploration of mixed farming and entire industrial chain through articulating a number of agri-food activities, such as crops plantation, animals feeding, grain processing and products sales. The manager told us that although the recent prices surge in the inputs led to the profit loss in grain production, the extraordinary revenue from the sheep rearing and rice processing and sales helped compensate the crops production stages and maintain the farm’s normal operation. Meanwhile, in the past decade the cooperative farm size expanded from 1100 mu (73.3 ha) to 2600 mu (173.3 ha) while the farming labors declined from 16 to 9, demonstrating the further mechanization in grain production in accordance with the experience of the group farms in former Soviet Union countries (Lerman et al., 2008; Piras et al., 2021).

Beyond the financial supports, the extension services covering a wide range of fields, which are provided through the public institutions such as the chamber of agriculture, played an important role in boosting agriculture sustainable development in western countries (Agarwal et al., 2021). Relying on the workstation for diffusing modern agriculture technologies, the Agriculture and Rural affairs authority in Taicang has made great efforts in delivering agriculture extension services to the cooperative farms, ranging from agriculture equipment manipulation and maintenance and the field management to farmland irrigation and water conservancy. The practice has profoundly revealed the ‘essential importance’ of extension services in fostering qualified local farmers and strengthening the cooperative farms’ capacity in agriculture production.

Yet, the recent pain of surging price of agricultural inputs and farmland forced the farm managers and policymakers to reconsider cooperative farms’ capacity building for countering the complicated challenges, underlining the urgency to expand the existing rural extension service contents (Leeuwis and Aarts, 2011; Wauters and Mathijs, 2013). Fortunately, the academic debate on rural innovation argued that the extension services should be updated toward diversification, not only including the diffusion of pure technological knowledge, but also referring to the agribusiness and social action knowledge and the development of competences to reflect on practices (Sulaiman, 2012). In this context, the extension training paradigm for China’s agriculture transition needs to be reframed to emphasize the new farms’ capacity to face the increasing economic uncertainties (Rogers, 1996; Landini et al., 2017a). Specifically, it requires the extension practitioners to rethink the conventional intervention approach of hierarchical transferring of defined technologies and knowledge from experts to farmers, and to turn to establishing public platforms or hosting events for gathering different actors, such as farmers, experts, businessmen, extensionists and others, promoting the horizontal exchanges among them (Moschitz et al., 2015; Landini et al., 2017a), and guiding the reflection on practices and experiences to form the comprehensive understanding of the challenges and to seek the solution to the problems (Morgan, 2011).

Interestingly, the extension practice of Donglin cooperative farm in Taicang has presented some important features stressed in the international academic work. The interviewees noted that because of the beautiful title of ‘pioneer and star cooperative farm’, a large number of outsiders with different knowledge, experiences and abilities frequently visited their farm so that they could contact experts in various fields, and that the freedom exchanges between them and visitors facilitated their collaboration in integrating the rice-related activities, including rice breeding, processing, packaging and the marketing of branded rice, which contributed to the great success in building rice industrial chain, capturing more added value and non-agriculture employment opportunities. It is clear that these distinctive ‘advantages’ of star cooperative farm enable them to cooperate with the actors that they need and take concrete actions to tackle the crisis caused by the soaring production cost. In this sense, this ‘new’ rural extension paradigm covering ‘social learning and reflection on practices’ (Leeuwis and Aarts, 2011; Landini et al., 2017b), has clearly unveiled its effectiveness in raising cooperative farms’ capacity for addressing the external challenges.

The decades since the end of the Second World War have seen the tremendous transformation in agriculture sector across the world, but the pathways for reorganizing agriculture production activities varied across different countries and regions.

In general terms, the Green Revolution, which is commonly said to origin in the 1940s, not only ever greatly contributed to the self-sufficiency in grain in many countries in American, Asian and other regions, but also resulted in the differentiation of farmers because it favored large scale farmers affording large investments (Kneafsey et al., 2021a). Through the 1980s and 1990s, following the agricultural trade liberalization, many small-scale farmers in most poor countries were viewed as inefficient and left out of international trade, and the large-scale farms in developed countries gradually dominated the agriculture production and global agriculture trade (Wise, 2009). It seems that the individual smallholders’ survival room is sharply narrowed and displacing the smallholders from the farmland just depends on the time.

In contrasts, since the Soviet Union’s collapse in the early 1990s, most of the socialist countries experienced a drastic shift towards agriculture de-collectivization (Piras et al., 2021). The former state and collective farms had been transformed into large-scale corporate farms and individual family farms (Varga, 2019; Agarwal et al., 2021). To overcome the restrictions such as lack of credit and machinery, aging population, fragmented plots, and so on, many small farmers automatically pooled their farms and labors to create group farms to get better performance (Sabates-Wheeler, 2002; Ruben and Lerman, 2005). The financial support from the EU projects and state governments and EU market enabled the active group farms to gradually solve the problems of generational replacement and labor constraints, grow larger, and become mechanized (Agarwal, 2010; Agarwal et al., 2021). Totally, market-oriented corporate farms and active group farms dominated the agriculture production in most of the former Soviet Union countries, although some smallholders still persisted through active innovations in terms of off-farm livelihoods or intensification in the past two decades (Agarwal et al., 2021; Piras et al., 2021). In fact, the agriculture production reorganization in both developed and the most of the former Soviet Union countries evolved towards the same orientation of large-scale, privatization, and commercialization, and fewer and fewer small farmers remained in the agriculture sector.

Similar to the major former Soviet Union countries, the ‘household responsibility system’ deployed in the late 1970s in China dismantled the previous collective farms established in the 1950s, and gave birth to a large number of smallholders, not only solving the hunger issue, but also allowing the surplus rural population to strive for the national industrialization and urbanization (Long et al., 2010). Nonetheless, the huge exodus of young farmers and deteriorated agricultural resource and environment caused by the tremendous industrialization in the 2000s as well as the ageing of persisting farmers seriously challenged the national grain self-sufficiency, triggering deeper reforms to propel the reorganization in agriculture sector in late 2000s (Long et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2019). Although the cooperative farm was adopted according to the local conditions in our case area, recently a lot of new family farms and farmer cooperatives for scale operation emerged and a certain number of small family farms operated by ageing farmers still persisted in the past decade, presenting another type of diversification in agriculture production system compared to the former Soviet Union countries.

Comparing the agriculture production reorganization process mentioned above, there were a lot of similarities and differences. Both China and the former Soviet Union countries had the same reorganization trajectory towards collectivization in the 1940s and 1950s respectively, and experienced similar transformation from collectivization to diversified de-collectivization in the late 1970s and early 1990s (Kan, 2016; Agarwal et al., 2021). Like the developed countries, after the thorough privatization of collective and state farms, most of the former Soviet Union countries witnessed increasing polarization between large-scale farms aimed at agribusiness and smallholders focusing on self-provision (Varga, 2019; Piras et al., 2021). Unlike the complete privatization of land in other countries, only the land use rights could be transferred among various operators (Long and Qu, 2018), determining the feasibility of re-collectivization in agriculture sector. Second, the small farmers in developed and poor countries were completely driven out of farming due to their weak competitiveness in global market (Wise, 2009), but the surplus farming labors in China autonomously moved to the urban areas to look for more attractive jobs and simultaneously kept the right of getting the returns from the contracted farmland (Chen et al., 2019). Third, in the de-collectivization era, rural China did not experienced the radical polarization among smallholders (He, 2016), which once took place in the developed and the former Soviet Union countries. Forth, the transformation from smallholders to new family farms and cooperative farms in China focused on promoting agriculture modernization and improving domestic grain self-sufficiency, while the developed and some former Soviet Union countries followed ‘export-led’ development model and placed greater emphasis on enhancing large-scale farms’ international competitiveness in order to capture more share in global agriculture products trade (Wise, 2009; Kneafsey et al., 2021a). Finally, in essence, the reorganization in agriculture production in developed countries occurred in liberalized market environment favored by neo-liberalizing governance framework; this early process in China was predominately driven by the state power and village collectives played significant roles in mobilizing resources, taking actions and reshaping the picture of agriculture production.

‘Governmentality’ appears to be powerful in understanding the top-down control and partnerships among multi-level governmental actors, social organizations and other stakeholders for implementing the state wills in certain fields. Drawing on this theoretical lens, we analyzed the changing governance logics in agriculture sector in rural China, examined the local reorganization process of agriculture production from de-collectivization to re-collectivization, and discussed the differences and similarities of agriculture production reorganization between China and the other developed and developing countries. In summary, we have the following conclusions.

Firstly, the progressive rural reforms in terms of farmland managing right transferring and agriculture moderate scale operation in China have not broken the ‘bottom-line’ that rural land must be owned by village collectives, avoiding the radical polarization of farmers that took place in the developed and most of the former Soviet Union countries, and allowing governments at all levels and village collectives to pose strong influence on the new reorganization process in agriculture production for national agriculture modernization.

Second, the tax reform focusing on tax-sharing between central and local governments and the related institutional arrangements launched in the 1990s, such as responsibilities shift from central to local governments, fiscal transfer payments and the local government performance evaluation system, helped reframe the macro governance structure in China. It ensured that the central government was able to devolve the responsibility of restructuring agriculture sector to local governments through quasi-market of competitive bidding for national projects, and to dominate the partnership relationships among various public and individual actors to achieve the national goals of guaranteeing grain sufficiency.

Third, unlike the ‘export-led’ reorganization in agriculture production in other countries, the recent agriculture reorganization in China aims to facilitate the agriculture modernization agenda, but inefficient small-scale farms with weak competitiveness will face the risks of being excluded from farming because of the liberalized agriculture products market environment advocated by the central government.

Forth, the cooperative farm is a kind of new collective agent for relaxing the urgent problem of farmer generational replacement and ensuring the local supply of key agriculture products, fitting the actual conditions in developed areas characterized by high level of urbanization and few rural residents living on agriculture. But it does not mean that the cooperative farm is suitable to all rural localities, and that perhaps the moderate-scale family farms could show better performance in other areas.

Plus, the cooperative farms in Taicang City have been entirely incorporated into the ‘modern procurement system’, implying that they are sensitive to market signals, and requiring them to develop their capacity for coping with complex changes through focusing on innovation activities, not only keeping close eyes on raising agriculture productivity.

Finally, we have to acknowledge that the agriculture reorganization towards re-collectivization in our case heavily depended on the strong support from governments and village collectives and the evidences from agriculture production reorganizing process in Taicang City in less than 10 yr were relative weak in underpinning some long-term deductions, and we will trace this case in the future in order to gain new findings.