https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419849683 Review of Radical Political Economics 1–20 © 2019 Union for Radical Political Economics Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0486613419849683 rrpe.sagepub.com Original Manuscript Semi-private Landownership and Capitalist Agriculture in Contemporary China Burak Gürel 1 Abstract Although the existing scholarship on the capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture uses the concepts of the Marxist political economy to analyze class differentiation, it has not systematically analyzed the role of the Chinese state (as manifested in the current semi- private land system) in this transformation with reference to Marx’s theory of agricultural rent. Capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture in the context of continuing strong government control over farmland provides a unique opportunity to assess the validity of Marx’s hypothesis that private landownership is a barrier to capitalist development in agriculture and that state ownership of land is a possible way to overcome it. Analysis highlights two advantages of the current system for the capitalist transformation of Chinese agriculture. First, by enabling local governments to transfer large and consolidated tracts of farmland to agribusiness companies and large farmers and relieving them from the burden of dealing with each and every private owner for land access, the semi-private landownership system minimizes the transaction costs incurred by agrarian capital. Second, farm workers are guaranteed access to small plots of land and this subsidizes agrarian capital by reducing the costs of the reproduction of labor power, thereby putting downward pressure on wages. JEL Classification: P32, P1 Keywords China, capitalist agriculture, land privatization, state, peasant 1. Introduction Land tenure has always been one of the central subjects in the studies of agrarian transformation under capitalism because land is among the most important means of agricultural production and differences in terms of access to land is a major determinant of agrarian class differentiation. These studies also argue that two kinds of changes in the legal system are necessary to develop capitalist agriculture. First, land should be transformed into a commodity that can be freely exchanged in the market. Second, laws should protect property owners against arbitrary encroach- ments by the government. Although a number of cases demonstrate that the establishment of 849683RRP XX X 10.1177/0486613419849683Review of Radical Political EconomicsGürel research-article 2019 1 Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey Date received: May 14, 2017 Date accepted: April 14, 2019 Corresponding Author: Burak Gürel, Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology, Koç University, Istanbul, Turkey Email: bgurel@ku.edu.tr