Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Land Development, Labour Commodification and the Restructuring of Welfare in
Post-reform China and Vietnam

Minh Nguyen (Universität Bielefeld)

10. Februar, 18 Uhr

Invalidenstr. 118, Raum 117

This paper examines how the commodification of labour is shaped by the interactions between seemingly unrelated processes of welfare and land restructuring in China and Vietnam. It shows the changing mechanism of value extraction from rural labour as a commodity along with the land restructuring. Until recently, value extraction profited from the unpaid reproductive labour of migrant workers’ family members and the social welfare function of self-subsistence agriculture in the countryside, which helped to reduce the reproductive costs of migrant labour. With industrial relocation, vast areas of what were used to classify rural and agricultural land have been converted for urban residential and industrial purposes via policy instruments that privilege capital over labour. Rural people whose land and rural livelihoods are lost to these processes find themselves exposed to a much more commodified context of social reproduction, in which they no longer have recourse to the social welfare function of land while facing the increasing costs of household reproduction. With the option of returning to farming forever gone, the compensation they receive might provide them with financial resources to address their immediate needs and consumption desires, yet they are left with self-employment and factory work as the main livelihood options. As land and housing are central to the welfare of workers, the land restructuring has gone hand in hand with the restructuring of welfare systems that ensures an expansive, almost universal yet minimal level of social protection while promoting self-responsibility as the mainstay of wellbeing and livelihoods. The intertwining effects of land and welfare restructuring, we argue, help to maintain the devaluation of labour for the sake of value extraction and facilitate the commodification of labour.