Huang Zhihui on Absentee Farmers

Huang Zhihui, “From Absentee Landlords to Absentee Farmers:  The Transformation of Farmers’ Living Patterns and Rural Revitalization in the Context of Reciprocal Relations between Towns and Villages”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Huang Zhihui (b. 1984) is a professor at the School of Ethnology and Sociology at the Minzu University of China who specializes in rural issues and rural-urban relations. He has written what look to be very interesting books on “substitute farmers 代耕农,” which refers to new forms of “tenancy” that have emerged as China’s farmers have migrated to the cities (Faceless Domination/无相支配, 2013; Substitute Farmers/代耕农, 2019), as well as a book on Fei Xiaotong’s thoughts on China’s political economy (Revisiting the Herald/重温先声, 2018).
 
The text translated here deals with the subject of China’s “absentee farmers,” i.e., the millions of villages who, over the course of reform and opening, have moved to China’s cities, and the challenges this mass migration poses in the context of the “rural revitalization” China’s ruling authorities frequently promise to deliver.  The term “absentee farmers” immediately calls to mind the concept of “absentee landlords,” and Huang begins his essay with a discussion of this latter phenomenon in the first half of the twentieth century, when large numbers of landowners moved to China’s cities and used the rents paid by their tenants to speculate in urban real estate.  Absentee landlordism went a long way toward destroying traditional village life, first by removing large amounts of capital from the village setting, and second, by weakening whatever moral order the now absent gentry had helped to sustain.
 
Most of Huang’s focus, however, is on the reform and opening period and the absentee farmers produced by China’s urbanization.  His findings are rich, and to me, quite surprising.  He illustrates that over the past twenty years or so, the earlier pattern of rural migration to the big cities, annual returns to the village to celebrate the new year, and eventual return to live in the village has given away to a new pattern in which farmers leave their villages and purchase homes in their township or county town.  To pay their urban mortgages, many of these farmers continue to work in the big cities, but their ties to the village are attenuated by their urban residence (or residences—many “farmer families” own more than one urban dwelling), even if this residence is often not physically distant from the village.  In other words, the factory wages of migrant workers are invested in the much greater convenience of urban life; even a rural township offers better schools, health care, and public services than most of China’s villages.
 
Huang further notes that the effect of absentee farmers on the villages is similar in many ways to that of the absentee landlords:  keeping up with mortgage payments means that farmers need steady wage labor, i.e., urban employment, and these payments of course go to urban banks.  Huang argues that these mortgage payments drain capital—as well as labor—from China’s villages, meaning that there is no money for rural reconstruction and few people present in the villages to keep up with daily maintenance, to say nothing of engaging in the kind of projects that would produce a “rural revitalization.”
 
Huang seems ideologically or emotionally committed to village life, and offers various suggestions which he hopes might be translated into policy, but I wonder how realistic this is.  Urbanization, especially at the level of townships and county towns, makes a lot of sense both to the government and to China’s farmers, and whatever rural industrialization eventually takes place will surely focus on county towns and townships as well.  There are surely exceptions, as well as villages that succeed in exploiting niche economies such as ecotourism, but it is hard to imagine what would force capital to invest in the villages, and it is surely easier to decide that development of the townships and county towns constitutes the “rural revitalization” China needs—and simply declare victory.      
 
Translation
 
Even as we promote rural revitalization, farmers are abandoning their villages in droves, leaving large numbers of empty and hollowed out[2] villages.  This has led some researchers to worry about who will revitalize the countryside, how we will revitalize the countryside without people, and what kind of villages are we revitalizing. They have conceived a series of proposals calling on farmers to return to the countryside on their own volition.

However, villages do not exist in a vacuum, the social system has changed, and the reasons for rural population mobility as well as the distribution patterns of residential systems are extremely diverse. If we merely focus on the villages without taking into account the new context produced by the transformation of urban-rural relations, we can easily wind up treating the symptoms but not the disease.  The two national plans for rural revitalization and coordinated regional development put forward in the report of the 19th Party Congress in October 2017 both emphasize an overall vision of "urban-rural integration," which means that the "urban-rural relationship" is the key element in the joint promotion of these two strategies.

Only by examining the specific nature of farmers’ lives, living situations, and employment from the perspective of urban-rural integration can we conceive concrete ideas for rural revitalization in the broader context of urban-rural integrated development. In my opinion, the financial relationship between urban and rural areas as well as the farmers’ dwelling patterns are the key points to consider.
 
The various relationships between urban and rural areas formed through the mediums of land, commodities, real estate, labor, and payment systems constitute the specific socio-economic dimensions of the urban-rural financial relationship. What we call the urban-rural financial relationship refers to the flow of financial capital between cities and the villages, shaped by factors such as capital investments, transfers of capital, labor power, and the flow of commodities. 

Cities have always occupied the dominant position in the urban-rural financial relationship, and have taken the two opposing positions of either investing in or taking from the villages. In terms of rural revitalization, urban financial input into rural areas is a positive initiative, embodied in financial and fiscal tools such as bank loans, employment assistance, and microfinance, while financial extraction occurs when farmers' incomes are siphoned away toward the cities through modern financial management tools such as property mortgages, electronic payments, and e-commerce consumption.

Economists generally examine the scale of capital lending to see whether the financial relationship between urban and rural areas is balanced, and more rarely look at the specifics of population distribution, the daily transformations in terms of clothing, food, housing and transportation, and the nature of urban-rural finance. The experience of recent urban-rural development shows that when marketable factors such as land and real estate enter into financial markets and take on financial attributes, the way urban finance extracts resources from the countryside can change dramatically.
 
Whether it is the rural construction movement in the 1930s or the current rural revitalization plan, it is necessary to pay attention to the urban-rural financial domination hidden behind various revitalization schemes. Starting from specific finance-related market elements such as housing and land, this paper discusses how pre-liberation landlords and today’s mobile farmers became “present in” or “absent from” the villages, following changes in the urban-rural financial relationship.  In particular, I will focus on the settlement pattern of "absentee farmers" in the perspective of contemporary rural-urban financial relations, which is a practical problem that must be solved in order to carry out rural revitalization.
 
During the rural construction movement more than 80 years ago, the problem the rural areas confronted was not the absence of farmers,  but the absence of landlords. To borrow a term from the field of agricultural economic history, the phenomenon of "absentee landlords" was common in urban-rural relations at the time. By absentee landlords, we mean landlords who moved from rural areas to towns in large numbers in the 1930s and 1940s. Concentrated in the towns, they left behind the constraints of rural morality and controlled rural land rights from a distance, resulting in a continuous outward flow of these rights. The absentee landlords lived off their land rents, meaning that the urban-rural relationship was purely extractive. In sum, the land-centered financial relationship between urban and rural areas was the axis of urban-rural relations during the period of absentee landlords.

The intellectuals involved in rural construction more or less ignored the rural-urban financial relationship, and promoted rural construction in a way that focused solely on the villages themselves, thus defining the problems in terms of the villages and blinding themselves to exterior issues. This article will discuss the analysis of absentee landlords in the classic literature, and draw lessons from those rural reconstruction plans that did attach importance to the urban-rural financial relationship, all in an attempt to provide a framework for the current rural revitalization plan.
 
Today’s rural revitalization plan is faced with hundreds of millions of absentee farmers, behind which there are also urban-rural financial problems. Since the 1990s, farmers have consistently abandoned rural society to work and live in cities and towns, sometimes buying or building homes in the nearest town after returning home, forming a large group of absentee farmers. They have left their hometowns and villages, leading to the hollowing out and empty nesting of rural society.

While migrant workers at the beginning of reform and opening went to the cities and eventually came home, more recently, and especially in the past two decades, a large proportion of absentee farmers have purchased properties in cities and towns and have gradually become "multi-residence farmers" (i.e., owning two or more residences in villages, towns, counties and other places). The key point is that farmers today have no stable source of income in the countryside and must work to earn income to deal with the pressure of the mortgages on their property in town, so it is difficult for them to fully return to the countryside.
 
The emergence of absentee landlords and absentee farmers in different eras reminds us that we should avoid talking about villages merely in terms of villages, and that we should set aside generalizations and empty arguments about urban-rural integration to ask, in the concrete context of history and contemporary reality, why urban-rural financial relations have achieved domination over farmers in two very different ways in the past century. How can this unidirectional domination be eliminated? Here I will seek to shed light on present practices of rural revitalization by combing the literature related to absentee landlords and how they emerged.

In addition, with the help of statistical yearbook data, I will compare the commodity housing sales boom in different regions or cities of the country in recent years from a macro perspective, looking for connection with the phenomenon of absentee farmers.  At the same time, I will also analyze particular groups of absentee farmers and their urban-rural residential patterns under the pressure of urban property lending at a micro level, taking one village, one town, and one county in central China as examples.
 
Land Finance and Rural Reconstruction in the Age of Absentee Landlords
 
Understanding the phenomenon of urban absentee landlords is both a prerequisite for an in-depth analysis of urban-rural financial relations in the 1930s and 1940s, and a key to understanding why the rural construction movement fell into a trap and unable to advance. Groups of absentee landlords are not uncommon in the history of Chinese towns and cities, and began to increase significantly in the mid-to-late Republican period.
 
The historian Fu Yiling 傅衣凌 (1911-1988) found that in the mid- to late Ming period, rural landowners began to move to the towns following the spontaneous development of a commodity economy and the prosperity of towns in the Jiangnan region; however, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, the main group of landowners resident in China's cities was not yet composed of migratory landowners, but instead members of the imperial family, gentry, and merchants. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, landlords' migration from the countryside to the cities began to become a common phenomenon both in regions with developed commodity economies and those with relatively closed economies.

Based on the Survey of Rural Practices in China 中国农村惯行调查, the economist Dwight Perkins (b. 1934) calculated that more than half of the rural land rights of 37 villages in eight northern provinces were not held in local villages, and a rural survey of 41 counties in Hubei, Anhui, and Jiangxi provinces conducted by the Department of Agricultural Economics of Jinling University in 1935 showed that as many as 80% of the land rights were held by absentee landlords. Based on the data of the Mantetsu survey and Fei Xiaotong's ethnography, Philip C. C. Huang (b. 1940) found that some villages in the North China Plain and the Yangtze River Delta had no landlords at all, and that the landlords mainly lived in the towns. In southern China, the absence of landlords was even more common.

Chen Hansheng 陈翰笙 (1897-2004) found that over 75% of the arable land in Panyu County, Guangdong Province, was rented land, and the difference in the distribution of land rights between urban and rural areas was very great. The absentee landlords who moved to the towns had control of subsoil rights, i.e., land ownership, which meant that the income from use of the land flowed toward the towns.
 
The absentee landlord phenomenon occurred almost simultaneously with the rural construction movement launched by Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, James Yen (Yan Yangchu 晏阳初 1893-1990), Dong Shijin 董时进 (1900-1984), and others. The phenomenon of land finance, which emerged in the 1930s, was in fact closely related to the land system. It meant the separation of the location of the land from its ownership in space and time, which was directly reflected in the rapid flow of rural land rights to towns and cities, and led to the urban control over rural land rights, as the traditional urban-rural relationship entered a new era of domination by land rights finance.

More importantly, when rural land rights were traded, pawned or pledged by absentee landlords, what was once a hands-on, intra-village land tenancy relationship was transformed into an extremely abstract extra-village land relationship based on finance. In other words, the agrarian social economy formerly grounded in substantive morality was transformed into an economy of calculations based on formal rationality. The profit-hungry nature of the urban landlords led to a series of rural crises. By controlling urban-rural finance, industry and commerce, as well as banking, they indirectly controlled land rights and deprived the villages of their relative independence, indirectly leading to the destruction of the traditional socio-economic structure and the involvement of the farmers' lifelines in the larger political and economic system, leaving the villages at the mercy of the external financial system.

The failure of the early rural construction movement was more or less due to its failure to note the dominance created by urban-rural land-finance relationship, and the isolation of rural construction from the towns and the world economic system, as the movement solely targeted the farmers.
 
Fei Xiaotong 费孝通 (1910-2005), R. H. Tawney (1880-1962), and others had a slightly different approach to rural reconstruction in China. They began with  a systematic examination of absentee landlords in the hope of understanding urban-rural relations as a whole. Tawney found that China's urban landowners preferred to make financial investments in suburban areas, thus transforming the traditional tenancy relationship between landowners and farmers into a purely financial relationship. In Land and Labor in China, Tawney noted, "Chinese capital, however, did not invest in agricultural improvement, but was instead diverted to land price speculation in Shanghai."  For this reason, rural and agricultural development faced an ever greater shortage of capital investment and finance. Land speculation by absentee landlords left small farmers all the more directly exposed to capital, the object of capitalism’s fishing expeditions. In many villages located close to the cities, the farmers' way of life was destroyed, and Chinese agriculture, the countryside, and the farmers suffered an unprecedented crisis in the early 20th century.
 
Around 1940, Fei Xiaotong further proposed a rural reconstruction program based on the foundation Tawney had laid.  A main focus of the three books he published at this time, The Economy of Jiangsu Villages 江村经济, Agricultural Land in Lu Village 禄村农田, and Rural Reconstruction 乡土重建 was precisely the concern Tawney raised about absentee landlords. Fei Xiaotong's survey of Kaixiangong 开弦弓village revealed that about two-thirds of the village's sub-soil rights were held by urban landowners: "Sub-soil ownership simply indicates a right to land rent that can be sold in the marketplace like bonds and stocks…Due to the free market in sub-soil rights in town, the personal relationship between landowners and the land they owned is reduced to a minimum. Most absentee landowners knew nothing about the location of the land, the crops grown on it, or even about the people who pay the rent. Their only interest is in the rent itself."

The tangible relationship between landlords and farmers in traditional rural society became a distant "invisible relationship" or an "invisible domination" between the absentee landlord community and the farmer class, and the former moral relationship was transformed into a formal logic of domination. This meant that the political and economic system of the rest of the world had entered Chinese rural society, and a breach had been opened into the land economy of traditional Chinese society, forcing small farmers to face the larger capital market.
 
Against the background of such urban-rural land-financial relations, Fei Xiaotong put forward his plan for rural reconstruction. Fei believed that in order to rebuild China's rural society, the first step was to rebuild the towns and cities in such a way as to prevent absentee landlords from living off of land rents, to "transform then from consumers into producers, so that the residents of the towns and cities could find a more reasonable and stable income outside of land rents and interest.”  In other words, it was necessary to change the abstract, extractive relationship that the absentee landlords had with the farmers, into a more concrete and positive reciprocal financial relationship, so as to promote rural employment and production by bringing the town to the villages.

At the same time, cooperatives would be established in rural society that could organize reconstruction work such as capital lending, agricultural-industrial production, and distribution of consumption items. The hope was to not only raise funds for agricultural production, but also to establish decentralized rural industries and rebuild a comprehensive mutual aid relationship between workers and farmers, and between urban and rural areas. In addition, the state needed to promote the construction of villages with farmers as the mainstay, encourage intellectuals and village gentry to return to the countryside, and restore the virtuous function of traditional "dual-track politics" in which the politics of the central government and the politics of the local gentry were mutually supportive. In short, transforming the financial dominance between urban and rural areas and restoring the agency of the countryside and farmers were Fei’s and Tawney’s key moves in promoting the reconstruction of the countryside.
 
Trends of Urban Residence and Property Finance in the Age of Absentee Farmers
 
With the arrival of New China, the villages, which had experienced land revolution and collectivization, were free of absentee landlords. After reform and opening, the urban-rural household registration system was gradually loosened, and as reforms deepened, farmers flocked to cities and towns in large numbers. According to the 2021 bulletin released by the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s urbanization rate was 64.72%, and the total number of migrant workers was 292.51 million, of whom 171.72 million were working away from home and 120.79 million were working closer to home. Were we able to calculate in detail the number of migrants working at the county level, the scale of outward migration would be even more impressive.
 
As a response to the outflow of farmers, the urban real estate industry developed rapidly. In particular, between 2010 and 2020, the real estate industry in cities below the third tier boomed, and the main force of home purchasers was farmers moving to the cities or migrant workers returning to settle in their hometowns. This means that a large number of rural households are now left empty as farmers move to nearby towns, and the countryside has ushered in the age of the absentee farmers. Especially for the central provinces of China, the urbanization of farmers and the phenomenon of migrant workers returning to their hometowns to buy houses constitute the new living pattern in the era of absentee farmers. Where these absentee farmers live will obviously affect the process of rural revitalization.

We will begin with the national commercial housing sales data, compare the changes in the scale of urban settlement in Beijing and Shanghai with those in central provinces, and then use the field survey data of a particular county to reveal the settlement pattern of absentee farmers and the property financial pressure behind this pattern.
 
Statistics show a gradual and dramatic increase in national commercial housing sales over the past two decades, but the growth trajectories of the Beijing-Shanghai region and the central provinces are completely different. Due to space limitations, we will use the national data as a reference and choose two types of data to launch the comparison on a vertical timeline. One is the sales area and annual growth rate of commercial properties in developed regions, represented by Beijing and Shanghai; the other is the sales area and annual growth rate of commercial properties in developing central regions, represented by Jiangxi and Henan (both are provinces with a large proportion of migrant workers returning to their hometowns).

Table 1 [not reproduced] shows that from 2000 to 2010, the sales of commercial houses nationwide increased continuously and maintained a high growth rate, although the growth rate has begun to slow since 2010. And in these two time periods, the data sets for Beijing and Shanghai, Jiangxi and Henan, are very different. Prior to 2010, Beijing and Shanghai's annual sales of commercial housing generally maintained positive growth, but we often see negative growth since 2010; by contrast, Jiangxi and Henan almost always showed positive growth, and especially between 2013 to 2018, the growth trends in Jiangxi and Henan show a sharp contrast with the developed regions. The increase in sales of commercial housing in central provinces such as Jiangxi and Henan is largely due to the development of the real estate industry in counties and cities, and local farmers or returning migrant workers are the main force in the real estate market in these counties and cities.


Since 2010, the annual growth rate of commercial housing sales in the capital cities of central provinces is obviously higher than that of first-tier cities; it is worth noting that the growth rate of commercial housing in the counties of central and western China is even higher. In central regions such as Jiangxi, Anhui, Hunan and Henan, the sales of commodity houses in counties grew faster than that in first- and second-tier cities. Figure 1 [not reproduced] shows that the annual growth rate of commercial housing in Beijing was lower than the national average after 2013, which represents the growth rate of first-tier cities, while the annual growth rate of commercial housing sales in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province was significantly higher than the national average between 2011 and 2018.

County F is a county in Jiangxi with a medium to high economic level and a population of only 320,000 people.  Its annual growth rate of commercial housing sales between 2013 and 2018 was not only higher than the national average, but often surpassed that of the provincial capital, Nanchang. Since 2010, the sustained growth of commercial housing sales in China’s midwest has relied heavily on real estate markets similar to that of County F. 
 
In the wave of urban housing commoditization, the main location for farmers moving to cities or for migrant workers returning home to purchase homes is their home counties. Rural areas in the central provinces are the regions sending out the most migrant workers. Farmers buy houses in their home counties and become absentee farmers in rural areas for the following reasons: First, it is difficult for migrant workers to buy houses and settle in first-tier or second-tier cities in the east due to the difficulty of affording high housing prices and the barriers of the household registration system. Second, educational, medical, employment, transportation, and pension resources are more concentrated in county towns in the central provinces, which offers obvious advantages compared to the countryside.

In addition, owning property in the county town has become the "hard currency" in regional marriage markets, meaning that ownership of such property is step one in starting a family, and whether they own such property is the first question men looking for a partner will be asked.  Some migrant workers have saved over the years and can come up with—perhaps just barely—the down payment for a house, and with the help of a bank mortgage, they can become city dwellers. One might say that the process of the absentee farmers moving to the county towns is virtually the same process as the spread of commercial housing in these areas.
 
In addition, there are some farmers or returning migrant workers who do not buy houses in the county town or build new houses in their original villages, but return to their home townships, purchase a residential site, and build a small three- to five-story building as a dwelling. The township is more convenient than the village, so leaving the village to live in the township is another type of residence pattern for absentee farmers. In sum, hundreds of millions of farmers are living in different areas such as villages, towns, county towns and big cities, and the size of the urban-dwelling absentee farmer population is getting larger and larger.
 
The residential pattern of Chinese farmers in the new era can be described in terms of four patterns. The first pattern is those who remain resident in the village.  Although those left behind in the villages in recent years have been increasingly characterized in terms of empty nests containing the elderly, women, and children, they remain nonetheless important agents of rural revitalization in practice. The second pattern is those who move to the township and generally build houses there.  These farmers are somewhere between town and village, having left the village but not the area, and having left the soil without necessary abandoning their farmer status.  They are both part of the new urban residence pattern and closely implicated in rural reconstruction.

The third pattern describes those who have purchased houses in the county town. More and more people are doing this, which is leaving the villages with a serious lack of agency.  The fourth pattern describes farmers with multiple permanent dwellings, including in villages, townships, and cities. The distribution and movement of such "multi-residence" farmers are related to the specific nature of the flow of people and material goods between urban and rural areas, and their spatial residence status, and whether they are “resident” or not depends on construction activities in the towns and in rural areas.
 
These four living patterns are closely related to urban and rural property finance, and will affect the process of rural revitalization. When a farmer buys a house in town, this means that a large portion of his income is extracted by the urban property finance system. When farmers enter the towns, and buy a house in the county town or build a house in the township, their mortgage turns them into "house slaves" in the county town real estate market, and urban employment is a must. They thus live in townships, county-towns, prefecture-level cities or cities built up around workplaces 务工城市, and occasionally return to the countryside. Those living in townships or county-towns or having multiple dwellings are mainly young and middle-aged, and every year they move between their hometowns, new homes, and work sites.

Particularly, those farmers who buy houses in county towns and cities have mortgages that last for decades and require lasting urban employment, ensuring their “absentee” status unless rural industries flourish, providing them with a guaranteed job so that they can afford to repay their mortgages. In short, the booming real estate industry in counties and cities has drawn the rural population and its labor income toward the towns, and the real estate financial problems faced by such absentee farmers are completely different from the real estate financial problems faced by absentee landlords.
 
Multi-Resident Farmers as seen in One Village, One Township and one County and the Revitalization Problem under the Pressure of Property Loans
 
In order to further understand farmers’ residence patterns in the new era and the property-related financial pressure they face, we will analyze specific cases. I once studied X village, which was part of Y township in F county in Jiangxi province, looking at the structural reasons for young women in village X to marry men from the county town, thus pointing out the relationship between the local marriage market and the development of the county's real estate industry. Combined with research data from 2019, the present paper uses the same case of X village, Y township, and F county to demonstrate the multiple discrete characteristics of farmers in contemporary urban-rural financial relations and the problems of rural revitalization implicit therein.
 
Village X is a natural village located in a mountainous area at the edge of County F, 36 kilometers from the county capital and 1 kilometer from the township government of Township Y. As of the end of 2019, the population of the village totaled 716 people and 163 households.  In 2019, more than 260 were villagers working further away than the county town, and there were nearly 300 villagers living in the township and the county town.
 
Although X village is a single surname clan village, as urbanization has advanced, the spatial distribution of the clan population network appears to have become extremely dispersed. Since 2000, only eight families have built new homes in X village. However, 76 families from village X bought land near the center of township Y, in the city where the township government is located, and built a total of 69 new three- to five-story houses (seven of which have two households living in them). The average cost of building and furnishing a new house for these 76 households was about 350,000 RMB (approx. $52,000 USD) (the cost of building a small 4-story building in the township has increased to about 500,000-600,000 RMB (approx. $75,000-$90,000 USD) in recent years, with more than 40 households borrowing from friends and relatives to build new houses. A total of 102 households from the village bought 113 units of commercial housing in the county town (eight households bought two or even three units), 99 of which were purchased with mortgages. 

The mortgage ratio for the village was 87.6%, and the total mortgage amount come to roughly 50 million RMB (approx. $7.5 million USD). In other words, for a village of several hundred people, the bank mortgage alone comes to 50 million RBM, and when you add in the interest on the mortgage, the debt doubles to roughly 100 million RMB (approx. $15 million USD).   I should also point out that 63 of the 76 households that built new houses in the township also bought houses in the county seat, which can be considered typical for multi-residence farmer households.
 
Y township has ten administrative villages and 91 village groups and a total of about 18,000 people. Village X is one of the more populous and wealthy natural villages in township Y. Since 2000, the resident population in the township center has soared and has now about 4,000 people, compared to some 1,500 twenty years ago. In recent years, hundreds of families from villages other than village X have bought land in the township center to build new houses. In general, it seems that the living space in township centers has expanded, and many farmers have left their remote mountain villages to come to the township center for the general convenience of life and transportation.  A decade or so ago, some people would spend all their savings from years of working or even borrow money to "move to town."

Since 2010, more than 80% of the households living in township centers have also purchased commercial houses in the county town, which is completely consistent with the characteristics multi-residence members of X village.  In addition, many villagers also bought commercial homes in the county town without building homes in the township.  A cadre from Y township said, "Most people in our township have bought houses in the county, and those who have not bought houses in the village can't afford them, and probably will never be able to afford them. Everyone has a mortgage; no one can buy a house outright."
 
County F has a population of about 320,000, of which some 180,000 live permanently in the cities, but the total urban population is much greater if the absentee farmers are included.   The county’s real estate market started to boom around 2000, with more than 35,000 units of commercial housing sold in the last decade or so, in addition to the large number of low-cost housing units, public housing units and other welfare initiatives launched by the government.
 
The two main factors driving rural households to purchase homes in the county towns are the concentration of educational institutions and the ease of finding marriage partners.   After the consolidation of the county school system in the 2010s, children had to go to school in the county towns, which meant that parents needed to be with them, which led to a surge in the number of commercial housing sales, averaging over 2,500 units per year, including 3,181 units in 2016. And in the marriage market, owning a house in the county town is an important consideration. Village young men without a house in the county town are at a definite disadvantage.

The vast majority of farmers buy their homes with mortgages, even those who can afford to pay full price for their homes, because they must set aside some funds for renovations or emergencies. Farmers in county F have huge mortgage loans from banks, and in addition they carry many private loans. After purchasing a house in the county town, many laborers still go to work in the Yangtze River Delta or Pearl River Delta as usual in order to repay their loans. The real estate market in county F is exploding, with the average price of new commercial houses reaching about 6,300 RMB (approx. $940 USD ) per square meter in 2019. Those farmers who can afford to buy new houses will be burdened with heavy mortgage payments, while those who can’t can only look at the houses and sigh.
 
This snapshot of the particular situation of one village, one township, and one county outlines the features urban housing system for the absentee farmers and the financial pressure their mortgages place on them. We presume that this system is not an isolated case, and is indeed quite common in many provinces, especially in counties and cities in the central region of the country. The larger phenomenon has the following characteristics: first, many county towns have an extremely high proportion of absentee farmers, with most middle-aged and young people not living in the village, which means that they are unable to attend to village affairs in a timely and effective manner; second, there are many multi-residence households having two or more places of residence; and third, mortgage pressures are huge. In order to repay the loan, they have to go away to work in able to secure a steady income. Even without the pressure of repayment, they have to find stable jobs to sustain their urban household consumption.
 
In addition, this residential pattern has a distinct population distribution characteristic, which is that the residential distribution of absentee farmers to a certain degree reflects declining educational and occupational levels:  farmers with higher education and labor skills tend to purchase houses in real estate markets higher up the food chain.  Accordingly, they are bound to the spatially more distant urban real estate financial system.  One might say that farmers’ living patterns, in terms of how urban or how rural they are, correspond to an imbalanced talent structure in which the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Unless rural revitalization can create sufficiently attractive industrial structures and ways of living in the countryside, this structure will be difficult to change. If the talented young and middle-aged villagers are far away and cannot see to village affairs in a timely and effective manner, this will inevitably delay or even suspend many rural revitalization efforts. All in all, the living patterns of absentee farmers are dispersed and they are dependent on the urban property system at all levels, and everything is deeply influenced by the structure of urban employment, medical care, and education.
 
This residential pattern greatly affects the promotion of rural revitalization strategy at two levels: grassroots government rule and the structure of rural-urban financial relations. From the perspective of grassroots government, the increase in the number of absentee farmers does not reduce the burden of rural governance, but instead increases the "emptiness" of grassroots administrative work.
 
The leader of an X village group said, "Usually, when something needs to be done, I can't find anyone at all, so I have to pay someone with money, and I still can’t find anyone.  Fortunately, we have WeChat, so I can readily send out word about what needs done, and eventually find someone through the village insurance system…Things have really changed.  When we were little, the village leadership would go door to door to understand what was going on.  Now no one goes door to door, and a lot of the houses are falling down, so how are we supposed to find anyone?...Most of our work involves dealing with the township.”  And township workers not only work in a top-down system, but they also have to deal with empty villages, where they cannot find anyone to do what is needed.  The Y township cadre in charge of poverty relief said:  “None of the farmers are in the village, and when we fill out forms, there’s a lot of guesswork.”
 
The property and financial relationships of the new era will affect the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy in an even longer-term way. The Strategic Plan for Rural Revitalization (2018-2022) states that "the basic realization of agricultural and rural modernization" will be achieved by 2035. However, as shown in Table 2 [not reproduced], around 2035 is also the critical moment when many of the mortgages taken out over the past ten years will come to term (many farmers’ mortgages even extend past 2035). In other words, the critical operating period of the real estate financial system linking urban and rural areas will temporarily overlap with the planning period for rural revitalization practices. If the countryside does not have a thriving industrial structure to solve the problem of full employment for the absentee farmer group, they will not be able to repay their urban debts and stay in the villages.

From the perspective of the residence patterns described above, the migration flow and residential distribution of Chinese farmers has gradually shifted away from the "migratory bird" style of long-distance movement to a pattern of lesser migration to nearby townships and county towns, a new residential pattern built on the villages, townships and cities of the regional societies in which the farmers already live.  This new settlement pattern has reshaped the farmers’ relationships to small and medium-sized cities and small towns, and has become the key to promoting the integrated development of urban and rural areas, and is also related to the specific practice path of rural revitalization.

The enormous pressure of mortgage payments makes it necessary for absentee farmers to find sustainable salaried work so as sustain their ability to repay loans over a long period. In this sense, farmers living in cities cannot directly support rural revitalization in the countryside unless the countryside truly achieves industrial prosperity and thus fully solves the employment problem. Of course, industrial prosperity is itself a goal of rural revitalization, illustrating the paradoxical state we are in. If absentee farmers have to maintain their "absentee" status in order to keep up their mortgage payments and meet the basic consumption needs of their families, then the return of agency to rural revitalization truly becomes a problem.
 
Revitalizing the Countryside in the Context of Rural-Urban Financial Reciprocity and Diversified Residence Patterns
 
From absentee landlords to absentee farmers, the rural-urban financial relationship mediated by land or property is a real obstacle to rural development, and the revitalization dilemma hidden in the current era of absentee farmers is more prominent than in the previous period of absentee landlords. The vast majority of farmers remained in the countryside during the period of absentee landlords, and the towns only exercised their implicit control over rural land rights through financial capital, meaning that the agents involved in an eventual rural revitalization remained physically present.  Today, however, this potential agency is seriously compromised, because once the farmers move to the cities, they fall under the domination of the financial system through which they buy property. 

The dispersed residence patterns of today’s farmers illustrate the problem of agency in rural revitalization, which again leads us back to the question of the domination of city-dwelling small farmers by capital.  Some researchers who take the household as the unit of analysis have called those families living between town and city “amphibious” families, and are concerned about the employment, pension, and health care issues for these families.
 
It is true that this "amphibious" or "multi-residence" lifestyle straddling urban and rural areas is not ideal, and indeed has increased the burden of many farmer families. They are not only under great mortgage pressure, but also face various problems in education, medical care, and urban life. Many farmers who have moved to the cities are thinking solely about how to quickly sell off the mountains, forests, arable land, and their houses back in the village at a good price to cover the debts they owe in the cities. Therefore, if we want to carry out rural revitalization, encouraging people to return to the village it not enough—instead, we must look for the return of agency to the villages from the perspective of the “in between state” (i.e.,. between town and village) in which the farmers find themselves.
 
The data on the rapid commercialization of real estate in the central provinces, as well as the fieldwork cases mentioned above, accurately present the spatial distribution of young and middle-aged farmers in the process of contemporary rural revitalization. Young and middle-aged people are supposed to be the most active group in rural society, "those who participate in public affairs and deal with conflicts of interest in the community." Their absence has led to the weakening of the overall meaning of village life. The children, the elderly, and the women left behind find it difficult to interact with the grassroots government and outside capital, and the left-behind group itself is disorganized and dispersed. Therefore, there is a risk that the right to negotiate and take charge of village affairs will fall into the hands of outsiders or even a few profit-seekers.

From the perspective of grassroots governance, the absence of the core social structure of the village also greatly reduces the efficiency of village self-governance. In addition, many village cadres do not live in the villages but in the towns, so they are mainly "reactive" and do not “take the initiative” in village affairs, and it is often difficult for them to deal with the specific problems of rural revitalization practices personally. The absentee farmers are different from the farmers in the past, in that they not only have to face the traditional pressure of keeping the village alive, but also have to face their own pressure to survive after moving to the town.
 
But there is reason to hope. The “absentee” state of the farmers is not absolute, and the pattern of “multi-residence” farmers varies from place to place. We should reevaluate the new residential patterns in the light of the urban-rural financial relationship and the different social directions this relationship might take, so as to find a suitable path for rural revitalization in the new era. The philosopher and student of rural China Wu Chongqing 吴重庆(b. 1964) once referred to rural villages facing a population exodus as "acquaintance societies without subjects" and listed four characteristics of such societies: "public opinion dwindles away, everyone loses face, social capital disperses, and the characteristics of an acquaintance society revive periodically."

If we compare this to the multi-residence settlement pattern of farmers referred to in this paper, we find something new. For example, precisely because of the dramatic change in settlement patterns, the social forces that constitute face and public opinion in traditional rural society are shifting to the larger village-township-city nexus, so that the core social mechanisms shaping public opinion and face are gradually being generated in urban society.  Precisely because of the huge mortgage pressure they are under, farmers in dispersed residence patterns are unable to recoup social capital from within their own groups. 

In addition, the annual revival of the characteristics of an acquaintance society created by the massive return to the village of migrants working far from home will also change due to the normalization of the multi-residence pattern. The urgent task of rural revitalization is to rebuild a complete social and economic structure and profoundly rethink the town-centered urban-rural financial relationship. 
 
First of all, we should establish a localized rural industrial system so as to enhance rural employment opportunities and at the same time promote an  employment system that involves both village and town, to cope with the financial pressure of property-ownership in urban areas. Fei Xiaotong once advocated the establishment of decentralized cooperative factories in rural societies according to local conditions. We should copy Fei's idea and try to develop decentralized rural businesses between urban and rural areas.

Decentralized rural commerce offers the hope that farmers do not have to leave their hometowns, and with the help of industrial and commercial resources or cultural heritage resources scattered in various towns and villages, farmers can live off of local production and sales, supplementing their income through agriculture. Although today’s urban-rural economies are still centered on towns and cities, with the continued advancement of the Internet, digitization, and the continuing construction in county towns, there is room for further integration of rural commerce and the development of farmer-oriented rural e-commerce networks that take into account both production and sales. The specific goal would be to establish a three-dimensional reciprocal commercial network between urban and rural areas based on the multi-residential village-township-county pattern.

At the same time, some absentee farmers could return to the villages and take advantage of home production in economic planting and agro-product processing industries to consolidate rural online business operations and establish social and economic organizations that could truly reflect the farmers’ agency. If a diversified employment system involving planting, processing, online business and cultural tourism could be established in the villages, the economic vitality of village society could be restored.
 
Second, the existing town-centered real estate financial relationship characterized by negative extraction should be transformed into an urban-rural financial relationship providing reciprocal benefits, and the rational distribution of financial resources and the overall development of urban-rural integration should be promoted by inclusive financial policies. Both urban and rural areas are producers and consumers, and both should be “centers.” The absentee farmers or "multi-residence farmers" are the main force of urban construction and consumption, and they deserve to get something back. The state should not only promote the integrated development of urban and rural industries, but also lead the various real estate and financial concerns in cities and towns that are making money off of the backs of the farmers to turn around and invest in the countryside. 

Fei Xiaotong argued that the central town of each regional area is not an isolated unit, but has the moral responsibility to drive the development of the entire urban-rural area. He also pointed out that "the relationship between big towns and small towns is that of big fish to small fish; big fish have to help small fish and small fish have to help the shrimps. To me, this is what socialism means, as distinct from capitalism, where the big fish eat the small fish and the small fish eat the shrimps." Establishing a reciprocal urban-rural regional development system and financial relationship requires rejecting any unidirectional profit-seeking. 
 
On April 29, 2021, the 28th meeting of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress adopted the Law of the People's Republic of China on Promoting Rural Revitalization, which clearly states in Article 55: "Local people's governments above the county level should take measures to help farmers who are stably employed and living in cities to voluntarily and orderly settle in these cities, and should not demand that they give up their rights in land under the responsibility system, their rights to land on which to build a house, or their rights to collective income distribution as conditions for their moving to the cities.”

As long as urban-rural development is a mutually beneficial development, farmers are more inclined to return to towns and villages, and their "multi-residential" living patterns can be easily transformed into an open-ended initiative between urban and rural areas. To sum up, the biggest problems and constraints encountered in current rural revitalization efforts are not found in the countryside, but in the towns.
 
Finally, the fact that new residential patterns for farmers have appeared in the new era means that a new social system is emerging, which requires active interventions on the part of urban and rural social governance systems. The diverse residence patterns of today’s farmers mean that contemporary Chinese farmers do not live in isolation, which in turn means that the focus of rural revitalization must be on the urban-rural continuum and not on some imagined village. The dispersion of rural agents has greatly reduced the efficiency of grassroots governance, and the increase of urban-dwelling farmers has not reduced the burden of rural governance, but instead increased the number of top-down tasks, while the grassroots government needs to face the dilemma of the absentee farmers in empty nest villages.

​However, this in itself is a new requirement for the modernization and transformation of the grassroots governance system. The multi-dwelling and mobile nature of the absentee farmers exists in obvious tension with the previous cellular governance system, which needs to be transformed according to local conditions. The conditions described in this paper appear in different degrees in different parts of the country, so specific rural revitalization approaches should be different. The grassroots government should introduce new projects, new capital or new financial tools from the perspective of mutual development between urban and rural areas, and propose different rural revitalization solutions in the diversified living structures of absentee farmers, trying to turn the diversified living structures of absentee farmers in the new era into positive factors for promoting balanced urban-rural development and urban-rural integration.
 
Notes

[1]黄志辉, “从不在地主到不在农民：农民居住格局的转变与城乡互惠关系中的乡村振兴,” published online on 开放时代/Open Times on June 8, 2022.

[2]Translator’s note:  The author uses the phrase 空心空巢/kongxin kongchao, lit., “empty heart, empty nest.”  Kongxin generally means “hollow” and “empty nest” has much the same connotation in Chinese as in English, i.e., referring to villages where young men, and often young women, are away working, leaving only the elderly and young children.