Numbering Land: The Mathematics of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms

Abstract

Numbers are too often considered objective and unbiased, while my work shows that they are ethical, embodied, and spiritual. My dissertation, Numbering Land: Ethical Measures of Geography and Subjectivity in Agrarian Reforms, is an ethnography of numbers in land reforms and everyday agriculture. It examines the contribution and vulnerability of rural landholders in the state’s statistical governance of agrarian resources. The dissertation investigates the Land Right Authorization (tudi quequan) from 2016 to 2019, the first and most comprehensive digitization of all arable land in the country, a project designed to further the privatization of rural land in China. Numbering Land examines how China's agricultural data, and especially the land data, has been produced. My research demonstrates that rural residents, who account for more than one-third of the population, have provided the measurements and calculations for agricultural administration and land reforms throughout China's recent history. The data they reported have formed the basis of the government’s statistical reports. Drawing on these documents, the government formulated and implemented policies that eventually came back to the peasants. Based on fieldwork and archival research in a Hakka speaking area, Meizhou, in Guangdong Province, I found that when rural residents engaged in national land surveys, they confronted the "false numbers" they had generated from past land reforms. Land Right Authorization offered people the opportunity to create new data, but it was also a trade-off between the benefits of future land sales and the risks of taxation and land grab. Their reckoning of land has been intertwined with kinship, ethical ideologies, and popular sciences such as numerology and geomancy (fengshui). The dissertation traces the social life of numbers that is entangled with people’s pragmatic consensus on social relations and historical knowledge of geography. Numbering Land will be among the first monographs on China’s Land Right Authorization, a privatization land reform and GIS cadastral survey. The dissertation explores what gains and perils rural residents have incurred by providing data to the government, particularly numbers about their land and agricultural properties. The dissertation shows that landholders have produced the first-hand data about their own properties, which, in turn, is subject to changing legal definitions of land. I then extend the discussion of numbers as part of larger social reforms to their implications in everyday agricultural production, demonstrating how numbers mediate people’s ethical judgments, political ideologies, and bodily experiences. By looking at the circulation of data, I view rural inhabitants beyond mere “research subjects” of state’s statistical projects, but rather reconceptualize their agency in historical and contemporary terms. The dissertation thematizes numbers as an unsettling actor in both routine life and techno-scientific projects, questioning the power dynamics in technologies invented by government and giant corporations.