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China is undergoing a rapid agrarian transition from dispersed household farming to large-scale, mechanized, and commercialized agricultural production, while retaining collective rural land ownership. Reforms have encouraged transfers of rural land to new subjects of agriculture including agribusinesses, family farmers, and cooperatives, leading to capitalist dynamics in agriculture both from above and from below. Central-state pressure to scale up and modernize agriculture has led local governments to engage in creative experimentation with new institutional forms. This article investigates one such innovation, which has been widely lauded as an important model: the creation of an “agricultural co-management system” in Chongzhou City, Sichuan province, which combines land shareholding cooperatives (LSCs), the hiring of new professional farm managers for the LSCs, and state-provided agricultural services aimed at modernization. We demonstrate that the Chongzhou government’s experimentation arose from political economic incentives to capitalize and modernize agriculture as well as the locally specific circumstances of the failure of a dragonhead enterprise. Examining the three components of the agricultural co-management system in depth, we argue that it has deepened rural differentiation through a process of state-led accumulation, and that the continued scaling up of LSCs in the context of a new modern agricultural functional zone threatens to further erode shareholder control. These LSCs, set within the agricultural co-management system, are a new subject of agriculture that combine elements of capitalization from above and below.

The locally managed agrarian transition in China: Land shareholding cooperatives and the agricultural co-management system in Chongzhou, Sichuan