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Abstract
The rapid industrialization of agriculture is an important part of agrarian change in China. Scholarship on agrarian change throughout the world already has a firm foundation for discussing the effects of capitalist agriculture on family farming, whether it inevitably entails the emergence of wage relations on a large scale, or how to understand the relationship between agricultural capital and family farming. Research on agrarian change in China, too, has begun to enter this theoretical current. This article uses a dragonhead enterprise as a case to explore how enterprises profit by integrating farmers into their industrial chains. Although the enterprise did not have direct wage relations with the integrated “caretakers,” this study shows that the contracted farmers’ returns from planting amounted to no more than wages for the labor they invested. Moreover, the enterprise profited upstream and downstream from agricultural production by controlling important conditions of production such as land, with profit actually derived from the agricultural surplus produced by the farmers. Therefore, hidden wage relations have already formed between such enterprises and the farmers, and in this sense family farming has already been transformed.