Economic Development with Limited Supplies of Family Labor: Chinese Peasant Families in Balancing Demographic and Economic Requisites

Abstract

In the absence of alternative organizations for efficient economic management in the countryside, the Chinese state decided to rehabilitate the peasant family as the core organization of rural production activities. While rural reform measures have provided peasant families with unexpectedly favorable economic opportunities, the simultaneously strengthened birth control policy has created an ironic shortage of family labor in this supposedly overpopulated country. In examining the Chinese experience of rural reform, this paper places its theoretical focus on the complex

relationship between population change and economic development as is shaped by various economic functions of the peasant family. It is theoretically argued and empirically shown here that the family-reliant strategy of economic reform has fundamentally undercut the effectiveness of the population control programs and has ramified such unintended consequences as the reconstruction of ''families of old designs" and the inverted proletarianization of small peasant families.