One way to understand the remarkable political and economic transformations of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to the present is to take Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class as the starting point. Thompson’s classic study captures vividly the emergence of a working-class consciousness in England during the crucial years between 1780 and 1832, even as he places his narrative in a much longer history. As the paradigmatic proletariat in the initial stages of industrial capitalism in the West, the English working class offers an ideal lens for examining the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass, one that is in many respects emblematic of capitalism’s latest stage: the Chinese working class.footnote¹

While Thompson’s focus is the evolving class consciousness of the English worker, he frames his analysis in terms of the Enclosure Movement, dating to the late fifteenth century, which dispossessed peasants of their land and left them with no option but to sell their labour. In China, too, a dispossession of peasantry is occurring that is often referred to as a New Enclosure Movement (xin quandi yundong). However, the two differ notably in their temporal and spatial scope. Processes that took place over a period of several centuries in England are being telescoped into just three decades in China. What is more, they are taking place in the opposite order: the initial commodification of industrial labour in the 1990s that gave rise to China’s gleaming skylines was accompanied by a seemingly inexhaustible stream of migrant labourers into cities even without the large-scale commodification of rural land. Why, then, dispossess a peasantry that has already submitted to capital voluntarily—that is, under economic duress, obviating the need to resort to forcible dislocation?

When China embarked on its ongoing economic reforms in 1978, it was one of the most equal countries in the world. Today it is one of the most unequal as measured by the Gini Index.footnote² The changing fortunes of the Chinese working class are a crucial part of this revolution—or, more properly, counter-revolution—as the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) has chosen economic development over equality as its overriding goal. Importantly, both the making and unmaking of the Chinese working class have unfolded in tandem with the making and unmaking of the Chinese peasantry. Marx believed that communism would lead to the abolition of the distinction between city and country.footnote³ However, both the socialist industrial base constructed under Mao and China’s booming megalopolises today have been built on the foundation of an impoverished hinterland. It is the peasant’s and the urban worker’s differentiated relationship to land and labour that has allowed the state to direct a continuous flow of rural resources to cities, first to support industrial labour under state socialism and then to subsidize global capital after China’s turn to state capitalism in the 1990s. The changing nature of that relationship is vital for understanding China’s astonishing, and astonishingly speedy, transformation.

While there are numerous studies investigating different aspects of China’s transformation, most focus on either urban or rural China; or worse, treat urban institutions as if they represented China as a whole. In order to understand the changing fortunes of the Chinese working class, it is imperative to consider city and country in dynamic relation to one another. Similarly, and especially in China’s socialist context, the reorganization of capital and the restructuring of labour cannot be grasped unless they are considered as part of a single transformation, with implications not only for the economy but also for the organization of society and family more generally. Furthermore, conventional disciplinary definitions of what counts as an economic, political or social phenomenon are often inadequate for apprehending the Chinese context. It is also necessary to situate China’s post-1949 development within a global framework. Chinese nationalism and socialism have been responses to the worldwide expansion of imperialism and capitalism from their very inception.

Finally, a truly encompassing synthesis requires a comparative lens. This essay pays special attention to the English experience and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Soviet one. Insofar as the Marxian view of history is a stadial one—capitalism succeeding feudalism, to be followed by socialism—the Enclosure Movement in England represents the classic example of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. While the Bolshevik Revolution evidently failed to conform to this schema, leapfrogging from feudalism to socialism, the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the 1990s has come to be seen as the paradigmatic instance of a socialist transition to capitalism. Much of what we encounter in China will seem similar to both England’s passage from feudalism to capitalism and the Soviet Union’s post-socialist transition, yet China’s experience also diverges from both in significant ways, as we will see.

The value of elaborating comparative counterpoints is not to exceptionalize China, nor to provide yet another account of ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’; if anything, what is occurring in China is best described as capitalism with global characteristics. Rather, the import of historical comparisons is heuristic, helping us reconsider some of the key categories by which we have come to narrate the story of China’s development. Indeed, the People’s Republic of China displays characteristics that can be classified as socialist, capitalist and feudal all at once. Unlike England, China did not need agrarian capitalism nor a concomitant dispossession of the peasantry as a springboard for its initial industrial development under Mao. Paradoxically, capitalism has thrived in China in large part because it has been built on a socialist foundation. To this day, it continues to be subsidized by a set of surviving socialist legacies, many of which are in turn embedded in kinship institutions dating from China’s imperial past. What is more, because of China’s position in the global manufacturing economy, the socialist subsidy accrues to market actors around the world.

As we shall see, the English comparison helps to illuminate the critical role played by the distinctive forms of ownership of rural and urban land in the prc—a legal distinction that has no precedent in Chinese history, Marxian thought or Soviet praxis. It is a key premise of this essay that there has never been a single People’s Republic of China. There have always been (at least) two peoples, if not quite two republics. Ever since agriculture was collectivized following the Land Reform in the early 1950s, every piece of land and every human being in China has been categorized legally and administratively as either urban or rural. Unlike its socialist peers, China never expropriated its peasantry by nationalizing the ownership of all land. Even today it distinguishes between two different forms of public ownership: urban land, owned by the state, and rural land, owned by the collectives that cultivate it.footnote⁴ Here, I will first consider why an examination of land and labour is an especially useful way to understand China’s transformation, as well as probing some of the limits of a Marxian analysis of their relationship to one another. I shall then go on to trace the first stages of the epic making—and eventual unmaking—of the Chinese working class and its rural other, the peasantry.