Scholar He Xuefeng says smallholders, not big farms, best fit today's rural China

Fieldwork overturns common stereotypes

He Xuefeng (贺雪峰), a leading scholar of Chinese agriculture long associated with the so‑called Central China "localist" school (华中乡土派), argues in a new book that China is a "big country of small farmers." The book, Big Country, Small Farmers (大国小农), published by Renmin University Press (人大出版社), is based on long‑term, on‑the‑ground investigation and pushes back against facile narratives of a uniformly hollowed‑out countryside. Short summary: many rural dynamics are more resilient and more local than urban‑centred accounts suggest.

Land, migration and who actually farms

He finds that migration to cities is selective and often eases land pressure in the home village: migrants tend to be the more capable, risk‑taking people, while those who remain — what he calls "middle peasants" (中农) — end up cultivating larger plots through informal transfers from migrant kin. Land abandonment exists but is concentrated on marginal plots with poor irrigation or bad terrain; good farmland remains attractive. It has been reported that the book offers three different tallies — roughly 900 million people counted as members of rural collectives, 700 million by hukou registration, and about 500 million who actually live in the countryside — and, He contends, policy must focus on stabilising incomes for those who truly remain in rural areas.

Why large‑scale industrial farming is not a panacea

Can inland China follow the coastal path of industrialised rural development? He says no. The coastal boom — the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas — benefited from geography, trade and proximity to export‑oriented manufacturing. Today, Chinese industry faces broad overcapacity and tighter global trade conditions; reported geopolitical frictions and shifting supply chains further shrink room for a second wave of coastal‑style industrialisation inland. Large capital‑led "modern" farms, he warns, often disrupt village society, provoke land conflicts, and sometimes fail to raise net output — a lesson many local governments have learnt the hard way.

Policy takeaways: targeted investment and community care

He offers concrete policy prescriptions: invest targetedly in rural infrastructure (especially irrigation and consolidation of fragmented plots), support locally embedded smallholder production, and address rural ageing through community‑based subsidies and mutual care rather than wholesale institutionalisation. He also cautions against uncritical "capital to the countryside" campaigns that risk dispossessing less mobile villagers and inflaming social tensions. In short, He’s empirically driven argument reframes China's "three rural" (三农) challenges and argues that realism, not grand stylistic shifts, should guide rural policy.