Refuting Wen Tiejun

One of China's best-known rural theorists champions co-ops and state steering. Qin Qingwu counters that romanticises the village and ignores implementation.

Wen Tiejun, economist and professor emeritus at Renmin University of China, is one of China’s best-known public intellectuals on rural affairs. Fluent and combative, this left-leaning thinker warns that, in a global economy wired by capital, technology and data, peripheral places—China’s countryside included—can be hollowed out by the city’s gravitational pull and by footloose capital flow. He urges ecological farming rooted in smallholders, farmer co-ops, and a revival of rural civic life.

Wen Tiejun

Wen’s views strike a chord with Chinese audiences weary of land grabs, speculative booms, and environmental damage, but they have also drawn considerable criticism for romanticism and weak arithmetic. Qin Qingwu, a retired commentator and former director of the Rural Development Research Institute at the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences, argues that Wen underplays hard constraints such as limited smallholder yields, ageing demographics, and the high coordination costs of co-ops. In Qin’s view, self-reliance” without market discipline drifts into inefficiency. He also stresses that capital is not inherently predatory: with clear rules and benefit-sharing, villages and firms can both gain.

Qin Qingwu

Qin’s criticism was published on his personal WeChat blog on 9 October.

—Yuxuan Jia

秦庆武：对温铁军教授几个观点的质疑

Qin Qingwu: Questions on Professor Wen Tiejun’s Arguments

As a leading scholar on China’s Three Rural Issues (agriculture, rural areas, and farmers), Professor Wen Tiejun has long drawn significant attention from academia and policymakers. His proposals on “de-dependency,” his thinking on rural construction, and his critiques of globalisation and capital expansion have played an important role in prompting Chinese society to reconsider pathways for rural development.

I have known Professor Wen for thirty years. In the mid-1990s, after I became director of the Rural Development Research Institute at the Shandong Academy of Social Sciences, I frequently took part in seminars convened by agricultural authorities. At the time, Professor Wen was serving as director of the Ministry of Agriculture’s Office for Rural Reform Pilot Zones, and Shandong’s Department of Agriculture had a corresponding provincial office. Whenever the province hosted seminars on rural reform, he was often invited. As a result, we met regularly at these events, where I listened to his reports and talks.

Professor Wen is a gifted orator, and his lectures are often intellectually demanding. He says he frequently travels alone with a backpack to rural communities around the world for fieldwork. He often secures state-funded research projects worth several hundred thousand yuan, organises teams to study the Three Rural Issues, and has published several widely influential books. I have purchased and read a number of his works.

At the time, as a grassroots researcher focused on the Three Rural Issues, I held deep admiration for Professor Wen and regarded him as an expert on rural reform. I invited him to Shandong on several occasions to attend meetings we organised. On one such occasion, when Shandong’s local television planned a program on the Three Rural Issues and invited him to Jinan, the two of us recorded a conversation together.

Professor Wen was born in the early 1950s and studied in the Department of Journalism at Renmin University of China. After leaving the Ministry of Agriculture, he served as president of China Reform magazine. Following his appointment, he sent me letters and issues of the magazine and solicited contributions from me. He was later hired by Renmin University of China as dean of the School of Rural Economics. What surprised me is that after retirement, he continued to give talks everywhere, and I often come across his speeches in videos, with him effectively becoming an online influencer.

However, after listening to many of these talks, I have come to feel that we diverge on a number of ideas and that many of his arguments merit further debate.

Any academic position should be refined through reasoned debate and critique. With full respect for Professor Wen Tiejun’s scholarly contributions, this article will try to question and explore several of his core views, with the aim of fostering a deeper academic conversation.

1. On “De-dependency”

Professor Wen has long emphasised a “de-dependency” theory, arguing that China should reduce reliance on a Western-led global order by strengthening endogenous development mechanisms, particularly drawing on rural society to achieve economic autonomy. This perspective, to a certain extent, addresses the structural inequalities developing countries face in the process of globalisation, but it leaves several practical questions about implementation.

First, the “de-dependency” theory fails to articulate a clear alternative for the international economic order. Globalisation, defined by cross-border flows of capital, technology, and information, is now deeply embedded in national economies worldwide. Full “de-dependency” is unrealistic and risks sliding into a state of isolation. China’s four decades of growth under reform and opening up have stemmed from active participation in global value chains. A one-sided effort to pull away from external markets could reduce efficiency of resource allocation and impede innovation, with particular consequences for export-oriented manufacturing and agro-processing.

Second, the theory makes an overly optimistic assumption about state capacity. It presumes that China can marshal sufficient institutional capability and resource allocation tools to build a comprehensive domestic circulation. In reality, substantial regional disparities remain, fiscal pressures are mounting, and frictions in urban–rural factor mobility persist. Without effective market mechanisms and incentives, self-sufficiency pursued through administrative mobilisation or rural community building often settles into low-efficiency equilibria.

2. On Rebuilding the “Rural Community”

Professor Wen calls for rebuilding rural society through a rural community-building movement, treating it as a strategic pivot to address urbanisation and ecological crises. He proposes developing ecological agriculture rooted in smallholder production, promoting farmers’ cooperatives, and reviving rural cultural values. These ideas reflect strong idealism and humanistic concern, but they face challenges in large-scale implementation.

First, the production efficiency of smallholder agriculture should not be discounted. Although ecological agriculture supports environmental protection and food safety, its per-unit yields are generally lower than those of large-scale modern agriculture, making it harder to meet rising population demand. Particularly in terms of food security, excessive promotion of the smallholder model may weaken the country’s overall grain production capacity. Moreover, ecological agriculture often depends on high-value-added products with limited market size, leaving it more exposed to price fluctuations and thus less resilient to risk.

Second, the performance of farmers’ cooperatives is uneven. Professor Wen often cites the cooperative systems of Japan and South Korea, but those institutions were built on high levels of urbanisation, stable demographics, and sustained government support. Rural China, by contrast, faces rapid population outflows, severe ageing among those who remain, and high organisational and mobilisation costs. In many places, cooperatives are largely nominal—tools for obtaining policy subsidies rather than genuine communities of shared interest.

Third, efforts to “revive” rural culture should be wary of romanticisation. Traditional rural society does embody ethics of mutual aid and ecological wisdom, but it also has structural problems, including insularity, hierarchical norms, and gender inequality. Idealising the countryside as a moral sanctuary may instead obscure a clear analysis of the real difficulties of rural governance.

3. On the Entry of Capital into the Rural Areas

Professor Wen is highly cautious about capital entering rural areas. He argues that outside capital infringes on rural land rights, undermines community structures, and exacerbates income disparity. The concern is well-founded, and the risks he highlights are especially evident in places that have seen “land enclosure” drives and forced demolitions and expropriations.

However, treating capital simply as an “invader” or “exploiter” overlooks its potential positive role in rural revitalisation. On the one hand, modern agriculture cannot develop without capital investment. Infrastructure, agricultural technology, brand marketing, and market expansion all require stable funding. In villages with weak collective economies, industrial upgrading is difficult to achieve through internal accumulation alone.

On the other hand, the entry of capital need not produce negative outcomes when accompanied by sound institutional constraints and benefit-sharing mechanisms. In parts of Zhejiang, for example, village–enterprise co-development models use equity cooperation and guaranteed dividends to let villagers share in corporate gains, achieving mutual benefits for capital and community. The key lies in institutional design rather than blanket rejection. Although Professor Wen’s stance reflects a sincere concern for protecting vulnerable groups, taking it to an extreme may suppress diverse possibilities for rural development.

After watching his talks, my impression is that he consistently targets capital while rarely, if ever, scrutinising government power, and at times even seems to lend it tacit support. His rhetoric doesn’t read like official publicity, yet it is more deftly phrased than the official line. For audiences unaccustomed to questioning and critique, his arguments can be especially persuasive.

4. On Urbanisation and the Transfer of Rural Population

Professor Wen often characterises urbanisation as “spatial expansion driven by the logic of capital,” arguing that it worsens resource misallocation and social rupture. This critique aligns with the left political economics tradition, emphasising the collusion of power and capital behind urban expansion.

However, this perspective overlooks the complex drivers and multiple functions of urbanisation. Cities are not only sites of capital accumulation; they are also key platforms for technological innovation, the concentration of public services, and labour and population mobility. Professor Wen often emphasises smallholder agriculture as a reservoir for social stability. He fails to see that China’s smallholder economy has largely given way and that rural labour that has moved to cities no longer wishes to return.

Development economics holds that the process of urbanisation is an inevitable trend in social development. As urbanisation advances, the transfer of surplus rural labour to towns and cities is historically expected. China’s urbanisation has greatly increased labour productivity and expanded access to education, health care, and transportation. Hundreds of millions of rural migrants have improved household incomes by working in cities and achieved upward mobility.

Reducing urbanisation to a process of “capital plundering the countryside” neither matches most migrant workers’ actual choices nor does justice to the city’s role as a growth engine. A more balanced view should acknowledge urbanisation’s double-edged effects: guard against environmental pressures and social exclusion arising from disorderly expansion, while affirming its positive contributions to poverty reduction and development.

5. On the Land System and Social Stability

It is worth noting that some aspects of Professor Wen’s analysis invite methodological scrutiny. His work relies largely on macro-historical narrative and institutional comparison, foregrounding structural contradictions while giving comparatively less attention to micro-level mechanisms and empirical evidence.

For example, in analysing land-system changes, he often works within a tripartite “state–capital–farmer” framework, yet provides relatively little quantitative evaluation of specific policy pilots. Likewise, in assessing the rural economy during the collective economy era, he emphasises its role in maintaining social stability while saying little about the period’s low agricultural productivity and food shortages. At times, the argument reads as if he were advocating a return to pre-reform rural collectivisation, which I find astonishing.

Academic research needs theory building, but without solid empirical support, arguments risk slipping into value-driven narratives and losing force. By contrast, recent political-economy work that combines big-data analysis, fieldwork, and causal-inference methods offers more operational ways to understand rural institutional change.

6. On State Autonomy

Another point for discussion is Professor Wen’s optimistic view of state autonomy. He contends that the Chinese government can rise above capital interests to protect farmers’ rights and, through policy, channel resources back to the countryside. This claim has some validity in China’s institutional context, where the state has demonstrated strong mobilisation capacity in poverty alleviation and infrastructure.

However, the behaviour of local governments is often more complex. Under dual pressures of public finance and performance evaluation, grassroots governments may be more inclined to support projects that can quickly boost GDP rather than rural investments with long cycles and slow results.

In addition, bargaining over interests and rent-seeking within the bureaucracy can distort implementation. In practice, many “pro-farmer” policies are diluted or diverted during implementation, reflecting tension between central government declarations and local government practice. Therefore, it is unwarranted to claim based on central policy signals alone that the state can fully escape the logic of capital.

7. Does Wen Advocate Turning Back the Clock on Rural Reform?

It should also be noted that some of Professor Wen’s views are simplified or misinterpreted in circulation, which affects the quality og public discussion. Shorthand labels such as “de-urbanisation” or “return to the countryside” are not his words, yet the media often pin them on him, fueling public misunderstanding.

This reminds us that the public communication of academic ideas must be attentive to context and boundaries to avoid extreme interpretations. The academy should also foster the exchange of diverse voices rather than treating any scholar’s views as beyond question.

In a broader theoretical lineage, Professor Wen’s thinking draws heavily on dependency theory, world-systems theory, and postcolonial critique, which emphasise the passive position of peripheral countries within global capitalism. These traditions have been invaluable in revealing structural inequality, yet their explanatory power is increasingly tested by the evolving global economic landscape of the twenty-first century.

Today’s global value chains are more fragmented, and emerging economies have achieved “reverse flows” in certain sectors through technological learning and industrial upgrading. China is a representative case: its shift from “world factory” to an exporter of high-tech products shows that development paths are not fully determined by a core–periphery structure. Overemphasising “dependency,” therefore, risks underestimating the strategic agency of late-developing countries.

8. On the Future Direction of Rural Development

Looking ahead, rural development should move beyond binaries such as “city vs. countryside,” “capital vs. community,” and “modern vs. traditional.” The real breakthroughs lie in integrative pathways: how can urban resources flow back to the countryside while preserving rural ecological and cultural value? How can modern management and technology be introduced without undermining farmers’ agency? How can fair distribution mechanisms be embedded in market-based operations? The answers are unlikely to emerge from a single theoretical paradigm. What is needed is a more inclusive body of knowledge that incorporates Professor Wen’s concern for social justice while also accommodating other scholars’ focus on efficiency, innovation, and institutional evolution.

In sum, questioning Professor Wen’s views does not deny his scholarly value; it aims to deepen the discussion. His critical spirit, problem awareness, and concern for local realities remain indispensable resources for the social sciences in contemporary China.

Yet every theory has its limits. Only through open dialogue and continual testing and revision can ideas better serve real-world change. Rural revitalisation is a systemic undertaking that spans economic, social, cultural, and ecological dimensions and requires multidisciplinary, multi-perspective collaboration. It is essential to value diverse voices, neither blindly following authority nor reflexively dismissing dissent, and, through reasoned debate, to seek development paths that fit national conditions and keep pace with the times.

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