Beyond the ‘Hidden Agricultural Revolution’ and ‘China’s Overseas Land Investment’: Main Trends in China’s Agriculture and Food Sector

This article has three parts. The first part discusses the multiple agricultural production modalities that currently can be observed in China. By analyzing the complexity of the existing modalities, it will be shown that agricultural production in China still relies strongly on peasant farming. The second part explains that the domestic agrarian change influences China’s relation with the global food market. This implies that China’s overseas agricultural investment and the domestic agrarian situation should be studied together instead of being separated from each other. The third part focuses on the internal changes of agricultural production in China. Based on the thesis of ‘hidden agricultural revolution’ as elaborated by Philip Huang, it is argued that dietary transition indeed plays a critical role in the restructuring of the agricultural production in China. But this is only an exogenous driving force. The endogenous drivers of structural change in agricultural production are the rapid increase in land rent and labor costs in China. Agricultural structural change is a process of mutual interaction between the exogenous conditions and endogenous conditions.