As /u/Back-n-Forth noted, peasant is the usual translation of a Chinese word 农民 (nongmin - meaning literally agricultural person) and is a relatively recent import to China and originates from Marxist literature; 农民 was a translation of peasant in Marxist works. In the West, peasant has two aspects to its meaning; one, that the person is a small agricultural holder, usually unconnected from the market and two, that the person has low social status or is culturally backwards. The word has a more precise definition in Marxist literature and is less derogatory as it simply describes one of the classes of society - there is still a Marxist academic journal called the Journal of Peasant Studies. In the West and even among modern Marxists, the term has fallen out of use and is not used to describe modern small-scale agricultural landholders in the West, in part because subsistence agricultural farming long since became a thing of the past and also because farmers are not considered to be part of some separate, backwards (unenlightened) class.

So why do most translators continue to render 农民 as peasant with respect to China? Before the Communist Revolution in 1949, the majority of Chinese (particularly in Southern China) worked in a sharecropping arrangement with a landlord. The amount of land that these farmers worked was usually at the level of subsistence farming. Moreover, very few of these people were literate, traveled outside of their home area, and lived an existence that would be barely distinguishable from that of their ancestors (including living in primitive dwellings and belief in local folk religions). In the eyes of the small urban elite in China, the backwards rural masses prevented China from achieving its greatness. Peasants consumed and later grew opium, they joined up with strange messianistic cults (the Taiping Rebellion), they gambled too much, they remained unconnected from markets and larger society, they had no national consciousness. One (suppressed in modern China) example is that during Japanese invasion of China where many peasants initially welcomed the Japanese invaders, caring less about Chinese nationalism than they did about possible relief from predatory landlords and petty local officials.

After 1949, the Communists sought to transform the position of peasants. Marx had thought that peasants were not worth organizing, since, although poor, their backwards and traditional ways of thinking prevented the emergence of any class conciousness among them. Mao, however, thought that peasants were actually the key to revolutionary success. His goal was to transform China, starting with the peasants. Through collective farming and ownership, peasants would transform into modern citizens and the distinction between mental and manual labor would fade away. While collective farming proved to not live up to its economic promise, many of the other reforms to raise the conciousness of the rural majority in China did make some headway. Education at leat through grade 6 became standardized across China. Ideological campaigns were a regular feature of village life in China. Anti-supersition campaigns sought to destroy temples dedicated to folk religions and supersitious ideas.

By the death of Mao, rural China had undergone some relatively dramatic changes though the extent of these changes varied across location and cannot be said, even in the most radical cases, to have brought rural Chinese residents up to the level of sophisitication as urban residents. After the 1979 reforms kicked off, (simplifying somewhat) collective farms were disbanded and each resident of rural areas was given their own small piece of land on which they could grow whatever they pleased (and made the most money), rather than the collective deciding on which crops to grow. This began the process of integrating rural residents into a market economy. Additionally, the surge of industrialization created a strong demand for additional workers in urban areas, drawing more rural residents out of traditional ways of living and into city life. It is true that the Chinese government put in place residency restrictions (户口 - the hukou system) in the late 1950s, meaning that rural residents were not permitted to move to cities and these restrictions have largely stayed in place since, the economic pull of market forces overwhelmed the nominal movement restrictions in the 1980s. This wave of migration that began in the 1980s further blurred the cultural line and 'backwardness' of rural residents vis-a-vis city residents.

Right now in China, there is still a lot of discrimination and low opinions of rural residents by city dwellers (one of the more creative insults: 土包子 - literally: earth dumpling) as being backwards and uncultured, this gap between the two continues to shrink as education quality improves in rural areas, the flows of residents between cities and rural areas increases, and access to internet and other cultural amenities also becomes more equal. There are still some rural residents that live on a subsistence basis, but most rural residents these days fully participate in the modern economy and, while not as well educated as city dwellers, speak the common tounge (Mandarin), watch the same TV programs, and have the same apps on their phones to participate in culture (抖音 - TikTok) as city dwellers. The only reason to use the word peasant these days as a translation for 农民 is due to inertia, as they really bear nothing in common with peasants from the pre-1949 era.

Sources:

Origins of the Chinese Revolution by Lucien Bianco

State and Peasant in Contemporary China by Jean Oi

China: A New History by John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman

Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power by Chalmers Johnson

Unlanded peasants are ubiquitous. There is, however, an important distinction to be made between the African and European unladen swallow.

Seriously though, many an academic has made a career out of arguing for a change in the use of a common word with respect to different cultural contexts. And that’s okay in some circumstances. But I personally find that changing a single word usually does not substitute for deep contextual knowledge. For example, to use the word in “peasant” in an East Asia context seems just fine to me. Granted it’s also good to understand that many East Asian theories of the estates significantly differed from European models, such that the agrarian class in Asia was often respected more than the merchant class, which is reversed in Europe. But there is nothing in the word “peasant” itself that hinders this level of understanding. Practically speaking, “peasantry” implies a non-enslaved agrarian class living close to the land in the context of a non-democratic society (you won’t find a theory of peasantry in Jeffersonian agrarianism). Beyond that, the way peasantry manifests in various anthropological contexts can be quite diverse, and should be recognized as such.

A similar semantic parallel can be made with the proper use of the term “jungle”. Some academics get very upset when you use the term “jungle” for African rainforests. The etymological origins of “jungle” are Indian, one of many words that were picked up by the British in the subcontinent, along with words like “shampoo” and “pajama”. Some academics take the stance that “jungle” is ecologically inappropriate for Africa (I’m not very convinced) or politically inappropriate since “jungle” has imperialist connotations (frankly, the English language itself has “imperialist connotations” if we are to be so broad, it was a promiscuous, bastard language since before the Normans conquered the Saxons, and before the Romans conquered the Britains; see Marlow’s reminisce on the Thames in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.) From my perspective, “jungle” is much like the English term “the Bush”, but in a more tropical context. “The Bush” is used colloquially both by Alaskans and Australians to refer to their wild backyard, and semantically, there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with that. In the end, it’s important to understand that we have the power to expand our breadth of understanding, and our vocabulary, and we even have the power to invent new vocabulary, but we must also understand that language, like many phenomena, has something like a life of its own, and scholars must work with that dynamic life, rather than against it, if they are to expand their academic specialty in the most efficient and practical way.