Why does collective labor re-emerge in a marketized rural society? Evidence from rural China

As global market transformation and neoliberal restructuring deepen, labor relations have become increasingly individualized and commodified. Labor relations traditionally rooted in locality, kinship, and collective organization have gradually weakened in rural societies. Evidence from some Chinese villages, however, challenge this trajectory. Collective forms of labor organization have not disappeared under marketization; they have been reconstructed and sustained through institutional innovation. Why collective labor re-emerges in marketized rural settings and how it is reproduced remain underexplored. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in a village in northwestern China, this study employs qualitative methods to examine the reconstruction of collective labor during rural marketization from a labor relations perspective. The findings show that institutional arrangements such as shareholding cooperation, co-governance, and long-term benefit sharing reshaped labor relations across three dimensions: distribution, governance, and values. Labor relations have shifted from individual gains to shared benefits, from administrative management to collaborative governance, and from economic rationality to community identity.