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When large-scale common land is taken from villagers by investors with little compensation, their labour unneeded, villagers’ livelihoods tend to be largely destroyed. This implies a tendency to focus on what has been taken from villagers during the land-based change, which has valid and has far-reaching social relevance. But as the rise of the industrial tree plantation (ITP) sector in Guangxi shows, some villagers are capable of having their livelihoods maintained and even expanded when big investors come and acquire massive amounts of land. This seems to be an anomaly at a first glance, considering what has been taken from villagers, but these unexpected and positive livelihood changes can be explained when one closely examines the dynamic of what is taken and what has been left to villagers. During this ITP boom, although large-scale collectively owned forestland is taken by investors and few work opportunities are created to incorporate those affected, villagers’ control over farmland plots and their access to off-farm work opportunities remain (including the land system and labour dynamics). This paper highlights the importance of analysing “taken-left” dynamics to more fully capture diverse livelihood changes.

This paper reflects on the concept of the Plantationocene through an analysis of sugarcane plantations in Guangxi province, China. It argues that although these plantations are owned and operated by local villagers, they are de facto controlled by corporations, and subject to state intervention through a ‘zoning scheme’. They are constructed and operated according to the same logic as other plantations all over the world, namely, the logic of extraction based on cheap land and labor. By demonstrating that plantations are not necessarily large-scale and do not always entail the alienation of land and labor, this paper hopes to empirically broaden the concept of the Plantationocene and to highlight the extractive nature of and the power relations around plantations.

The land rush has remained, and is likely to remain, a significant global phenomenon despite waning international media attention. The scope of the phenomenon is likely to be wider than previously thought. Quantifying the extent of land deals in order to study the social phenomenon spotlights the relevance of two distinct but dialectically linked ‘scopes’, namely, the scope of land deals in terms of the precise geographic physical land area of Operational land deals, and the scope of land deals in terms of the larger extent of lands implicated in land deal-making, of which only a part ends up as operational land deals. The latter category is necessarily bigger than the former, and its logic results in the production of Non-operational land deals. Studies have been overwhelmingly about Operational land deals, inadvertently downplaying the relevance of Non-operational land deals. The challenge is to study both Operational and Non-operational land deals because they are co-constitutive.