Mobilizing compliance: how the state compels village households to transfer land to large farm operators in China.

Since 2007, as the result of an aggressive government program to industrialize agriculture, more than one third of Chinese farmland has been transferred from smallholding households to large farm operators. The scaling up of agriculture is a global phenomenon, but nowhere has the scale been so vast and the time period so compressed. So far, there has been little investigation into how this massive transfer of land is being accomplished. While official accounts present land transfers as voluntary, in our investigation of transfers in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, we found the methods employed included various types of coercion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]