In the absence of alternative organizations for efficient economic management in
the countryside, the Chinese state decided to rehabilitate the peasant family as the
core organization of rural production activities. While rural reform measures have
provided peasant families with unexpectedly favorable economic opportunities, the
simultaneously strengthened birth control policy has created an ironic shortage of
family labor in this supposedly overpopulated country. In examining the Chinese
experience of rural reform, this paper places its theoretical focus on the complex
relationship between population change and economic development as is shaped by
various economic functions of the peasant family. It is theoretically argued and
empirically shown here that the family-reliant strategy of economic reform has
fundamentally undercut the effectiveness of the population control programs and
has ramified such unintended consequences as the reconstruction of ''families of
old designs" and the inverted proletarianization of small peasant families.