Politically directed accumulation in rural China: The making of the agrarian capitalist class and the new agrarian question of capital

We study the formation of the agrarian capitalist class in the pig farming sector in a Chinese county. We propose a new framework for analyzing the dynamics of accumulation and class formation in agriculture that focuses on the role of the state and public resources. In what we call "politically directed accumulation," local states in China, driven by a political logic of maximizing fiscal resources and improving performance record, select actors who either have accumulated non-agrarian capital or possess political capital to serve as their agents (political selection) and then capitalize their farming operations by transferring to them public resources (political capitalization), creating a new agrarian capitalist class. The accumulation in this case happens largely without the dispossession of other agricultural producers but instead is assisted by the state's mobilization of public resources. This study advances the call for the renewal of the agrarian question of capital and proposes that the role of the state is now the most important factor in creating different paths of agrarian transition.