Community Practices and Relationship-Making in a Korean-Chinese Rural Village: Focusing on the Reconfiguration of Social Relations in Village A after the Land Transfer Policy

This study anthropologically analyzes how the implementation of China's land rights policy has influenced labor exchange practices, land leasing, power restructuring, and class stratification within an ethnic Korean (Joseonjok) rural village in Jilin Province. Drawing on seven months of fieldwork conducted in 2013, the researcher closely observed the labor practices, norms of reciprocity, modes of power exercised by village officials, and the interactions and tensions between cultivating and non-cultivating households. The findings reveal that village committee cadres, led by the village secretary, have effectively monopolized land management, state subsidies, and the mobilization of labor, thereby consolidating their power and evolving into a dominant economic interest group. Meanwhile, traditional forms of reciprocal labor exchange have lost their former egalitarian and mutual character, transforming into asymmetrical relationships imbued with power and hierarchy. Large-scale landholders (大戶) benefit most from labor exchange, while non-cultivating households－those who have ceased farming due to age, illness, or employment in South Korea－are increasingly excluded from reciprocal labor networks, despite still holding land-use rights. This study demonstrates how a national policy－China's land transfer system－has been locally distorted and entangled with everyday power structures to deepen class divisions. Furthermore, it reveals how the communal ideal of “reciprocity” functions as a mechanism for reproducing power, and how silence and emotional management in rural life serve as key instruments for maintaining unequal social orders.