Email: zhou.yuqin.b1@tohoku.ac.jp

Affiliation: Tohoku University, Japan

Nationality: Chinese

Guanxi and the Politics of Land Transfer: Everyday Negotiations in Rural China's Agricultural Transformation

Abstract

This article examines the everyday politics of land transfer in rural China through the lens of guanxi—a culturally specific and historically situated form of social embeddedness that mediates access to land, capital, and power. Rather than treating guanxi as a generic form of informal relations or social capital, the paper foregrounds it as a distinctive mode of political and moral reasoning that actively shapes the commodification and circulation of land in contemporary agrarian China. Guanxi is not a residual tradition displaced by market rationality, but a dynamic and evolving logic of negotiation, trust, and power that underpins rural transformations.

Based on four years of in-depth ethnographic fieldwork in Dawan Village, Anhui Province (2019–2022), this study explores how land circulation under China's rural reform—especially since the introduction of the "three rights separation" policy (ownership, contract, and management)—is mediated through guanxi networks rather than purely legal or market mechanisms. In official narratives, land transfer is imagined as a transparent, contractual, and efficiency-enhancing process. Yet in practice, villagers often rely on guanxi ties—grounded in kinship, historical obligation, and relational trust—to determine land access, resolve disputes, and interpret the legitimacy of transactions. Returnees, in particular, are able to mobilize guanxi connections with village cadres to accumulate land, while vulnerable smallholders often find themselves excluded or marginalized within this informal hierarchy.

Three core arguments are advanced. First, guanxi operates as a form of informal yet institutionally embedded governance that shapes rural authority and resource allocation in ways that often circumvent or override formal legal procedures. Second, land commodification in China is not simply about price-setting or rights allocation—it is a contested political field where social embeddedness determines who benefits and who loses. Third, the coexistence of formal reforms and informal guanxi practices produces layered and sometimes contradictory forms of legitimacy, generating both opportunity and tension.

Theoretically, this article contributes to critical agrarian studies by reframing land transfer as a relational and contested process shaped by culturally specific logics. It draws on the agrarian question of capital and class (Bernstein), the moral economy of the peasantry and everyday resistance (Scott), and the powers of exclusion (Li), while offering an original perspective grounded in the Chinese concept of guanxi. Rather than treating guanxi as a symptom of institutional weakness, the paper positions it as a generative force that governs access to land, consolidates new agrarian elites, and reconfigures village power relations.

Empirically, the study provides a thick, grounded account of how villagers navigate overlapping legal and relational regimes, often privileging trust and reputation over written contracts. By centering guanxi as both an analytical tool and ethnographic reality, this paper offers a fresh framework for understanding informal governance, land politics, and agrarian transformation in post-reform China—and contributes more broadly to global debates on how social ties structure inequality and rural change under contemporary capitalism.

Bio

ZHOU Yuqin is an assistant professor in sociology at the Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Japan. Her research bridges rural sociology, informal institutions, and community governance, with a strong empirical grounding in both China and Japan. She received her PhD in Information Science from Tohoku University in 2023 under the supervision of Professor Naoto Tokugawa and was trained in the Japanese tradition of monographic village studies, especially those focused on agrarian change and social structure.

Her doctoral dissertation, based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in rural Anhui, China, examines how guanxi mediates farmland capitalization process in contemporary Eastern China. Beyond her China-focused research, Dr. Zhou also leads and participates in multiple research projects on post-disaster rural recovery in northeastern Japan. Her fieldwork in Sendai's coastal areas after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake explores how civic engagement, small-scale agriculture, and environmental activism intersect in rebuilding rural communities. She has collaborated with volunteer organizations, museums, and local NPOs to integrate research with practice.

Zhou is fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and English, and actively participates in transnational academic networks in agrarian studies and rural development. She is an active member of Japanese and international sociological associations and contributes to transnational research on land governance, civic society, and gendered labor in rural contexts. Her work contributes to critical agrarian studies by foregrounding localized forms of informal governance and relational power within broader political-economic transformations.