Rethinking China’s Rural Revitalization from a Historical Perspective

positions: asia critique, 2014

This collection of mostly ethnographic studies of rural China, with some contributions from the rather different discourse world of Chinese anthropology, seeks to bring into visibility the heterogeneity of life in the countryside. They argue that rural China must first and foremost be understood as socially and culturally heterogeneous. On the other hand, there is much resonance in the details among all these articles, reminding us that ethnography in contemporary China can accumulate to give us an anthropology or sociology of the state as it is seen from the point of view of its relatively denigrated or subaltern peripheries, that is, rural China. Many dilemmas and challenges facing the people described in these articles are held in common, and together they allow us to see a broad vision of contemporary China beyond the cities and the dominant mass media. Being rather ethnographic/descriptive, the articles gathered here show that good and attentive description, under some conditio...

L Architettura Delle Citta the Journal of the Scientific Society Ludovico Quaroni, 2014

After the first three decades of rapid urbanization, the Chinese government seems determined to amend the fifty-year old hukou system in order to achieve the ultimate goal of the National plan of urbanization, i.e. 900 million people living in urban areas by 2025. The hukou system would be abolished completely in "small" cities and more gradually in cities referred to as "medium". A comparison between the physiographic situation of the Chinese territory of the late Nineteenth century and the situation of the current urban and rural areas strengthens the hypothesis of a complete restoration of macro historical regions to recover the structural constants capable of providing a solution to the massive problems of contemporary China and giving a meaning to its modernity.

This paper aims to shed fresh light on rural–urban interaction and urbanization in a non-Western authoritarian context. It describes the change in post-Mao China from very vertical and separate government hierarchies for rural and urban areas, which inhibited rural–urban interactions, to a city-managing-county model, with rural counties around a city coming under the jurisdiction of the city government. Drawing on field research and statistical data, the paper elucidates the dynamics and complexities of this model, arguing that the combination of city-based bureaucrats favouring the city and the priority given to economic growth mandated by the central government often meant a lack of attention to rural development and support for county government. The paper also comments on the recent development of the province-managing-county model in China, and argues that given an urban-centred administrative system, whether the current reform can change the political and administrative equilibrium in China remains an open question.

2016

This paper provides insights into the local political economy of China's current in situ urbanisation as compared to the 1980s and 1990s, focusing on the role played by county and township governments in shaping urbanisation in their localities. Marked differences were observed in the extent to which local cadres are able to steer the urbanisation process and adapt the relevant policies to local conditions and demands of the population. If leading county and township cadres are able to assert a relatively autonomous position vis-à-vis the superior municipality, a rural urbanisation process that considers both urban and rural interests and integrates local economic initiatives seems to become a potential alternative to the prevailing city-centred urban expansionism.

Eurasian Geography and Economics

The aim of this paper is to exam rural transformation and the persistence of rurality in China. Recent discussions on the "end of village" in China and policy suggestions that aligned to them have indicated that villages will not completely disappear unless institutional constraints are removed. Although terms such as "rural", "village" and "peasant" are used in these discussions, their meaning extends beyond the local rural landscape, their settlements and associated social status. This ambiguity not only shows the complexity of the Chinese countryside, but also calls for a clear definition of rurality. Inspired by Halfacree's framework, this paper unfolds the multiple dimensions of Chinese rurality. Using Xinxiang village as a case study, this paper has specifically investigated the persistence of two distinctive rural practices-self-reliance and the collective system-after the institutional reforms of corporatisation, conversion of the villagers' committee to the residents' committee; and conversion of household registration status from rural to urban. The continuity of these rural practices suggests that institutional attempts to modernize rural organization and urbanize the rural residents' household registration status do not bring the Xinxiang neighborhood to the end of rurality. Unlike the abruptly termination of traditional practices during urbanization which suggested by modernization theory, the continuous of rural practices in China has asserted a very different experience

Journal of Peasant Studies, 2013

Much news about today's China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the PRC's 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50%, the result of a remarkably rapid "great urban transformation" (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics, and ideologies that link, transgress, and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003; Davis 2004; McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world. This special issue addresses China's rural politics, broadly construed as the powerinflected processes and struggles that shape access to and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies, and discourses that shape those processes and struggles. Though scholarship on agrarian politics in China has taken off over the past three decades, the literature has tended to appear in area studies journals, or disciplinary outlets in which questions central to a single field are placed front and center. Our intention here is different. In commissioning a set of review essays on themes in critical agrarian-environmental studies, we sought to bring what China experts have uncovered into conversation with the China's rise has been fueled by more than 250 million migrant workers, members of the "floating population" (liudong renkou), whose labor in export processing zones, cities, and better-off villages has turned China into "the world's factory." The "household registration" (hukou) system, which has tied citizens to their place of birth since the 1950s, was relaxed in 1984 to allow peasants to move to urban areas. As the township and village enterprises that spurred economic growth and absorbed rural labor after "opening up and reform" (gaige kaifang) went bankrupt or were privatized in the late 1980s, the flow of migrant laborers increased. To this day, however, the hukou system denies "peasant workers" (nongmin gong) state services, such as access to education, health care and housing, which are reserved for urban citizens. 2 In addition, migrants continue to be looked down upon by urban residents, blamed for crimes, paid salaries late or not at all, and discriminated against (Solinger 1999; Yan 2003; Zhang 2002; Ngai 2005). As migration exploded in the 1990s, and the countryside was emptied of working age men and women, so too did a national ideology that valorized the urban and denigrated the rural, positing cities as the primary site of political, cultural, and economic worth (Bulag 2002, Cartier 2002, 2003, Ma 2005, Yeh 2013a). Cities became metonyms for development, and urbanization became a top goal of China's modernization strategy. Along with this, city dwellers were deemed to be of higher quality, or suzhi, than rural residents (O'Brien and Li 1993-94; Bakken 2000; Anagnost 2004; Murphy 2004; Kipnis 2006). This privileging of the urban and disparaging of the rural led to what has been called the "spectralization" (Yan 2003) of agriculture and the countryside, as villages became ghostly reminders of the past, a wasteland inhabited only by the 2 Note, however, that this varies by city, with some municipal governments (for example, Shanghai and Chengdu) providing more services than others (for example, Beijing). Thanks to Alexsia Chan, and her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley, for this point.

2020

China’s urbanisation drive has been unprecedented in scale. It has also produced some paradoxical outcomes and led to multiple interconnections between the rural and the urban spheres. These interconnections are the central focus of this special issue. Thus, preference is given to the term “rural–urban transformation” instead of simply “urbanisation.” The main argument advanced here is that we always need to consider the rural aspects and repercussions alongside the urban side of this dual process. This introduction first highlights some of these antinomies to set the stage for the discussion. Next, it explains how they relate to changing mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. It is proposed that a theoretical approach of functional differentiation can help us sort out the various ways inclusions and exclusions are being produced and combined. Finally, the introduction presents an overview of the articles collected in this special issue and how they relate to the aforementioned topics.

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2006

This article is written specifically for students of Chinese urbanization who are not sinologists. Four theses should inform their studies. The first is that China is an ancient urban civilization, but the processes we observe today are unprecedented. Thus, China's urbanization must be studied under this dual aspect, giving due to both historical continuities and the unique characteristics of our own era. The second thesis argues that urbanization is a set of multidimensional socio-spatial processes of at least seven different and overlapping dimensions, each with its own vocabulary and traditions of scholarship. The study of China's urbanization thus requires a trans-disciplinary approach. Thesis number three argues that urbanization involves rural-urban relations, but in contrast with many earlier studies, these relationships should be studied from an urban rather than rural perspective. Finally, and most contentiously, China's urbanization, although entwined with globalization processes, is to be understood chiefly as an endogenous process leading to a specifically Chinese form of modernity.

Środowisko Mieszkaniowe - Housing Environment , 2019

With the turn of the millennium, Chinese central government issued arrays of policies targeted to promote virtuous cycles of vitalization in rural areas, mitigate the socio-economic gap with urbanised regions, and face the problem of food security. The current transition is leading China to have an ever-saturated land where the boundaries between human settlements are elusive and blurred, shaping what is scholarly labelled as an urban-rural continuum. The settlement’s schemes realized over the last years, that consists of small or medium size towns as the result of natural villages relocation or new agglomerations, intercepts the call for urbanity, and its related amenities in terms of infrastructure and services – or, in aword, the desire for ahouse in the city – emerging from the marginalized rural citizens. The authors found that such controversial practices are shaping the new Chinese countryside which, conceived as aform of sustainable development by national programs, turned out to impact significantly on the people lifestyle as well as the built environment. Based on several months on-field observations and recent literature, the paper reveals atwo-fold degree of resilience: weak about the real production of space for dwelling and robust about the intangible culture composed by indigenous beliefs and symbolism entangled with the concepts of home and family

The Chinese urban dream is not a sudden one. Long before the “National Urbanization Plan” was issued in 2014, planning had been underway for a new type of state-engineered in situ urbanization of the Chinese hinterland. Replacing the previous system of macro scale urbanization in favor of a more balanced dissemination of urban infrastructure and a socially more acceptable concentration of resources and the population has been on the political agenda since the mid-2000s. The evolution of smaller-scale “new rural neighborhoods/communities” is particularly illustrative of this trend. However, the realization of China’s new urban dream depends on the way in which it is spun at local level. Emphasizing the enormous local variation of contemporary rural urbanization, this article introduces two counties’ comprehensive “new rural neighborhood” programs, their concepts for planning and steering the concentration and resettlement of village housing, including the related interim adjustments of household registration and land use management. The motivation and interests of local governments that shape plans for state-led rural urbanization were quite complex. Furthermore, it is argued that we can indeed find cases in which the ‘new’ notion of urbanization in China has encouraged a more comprehensive and sustainable system of localized developmental planning, not least because local governments are increasingly able to serve their own interests by designing functioning public goods and services provision schemes enwrapped in the “new-typed urbanization” dream – a logic that deserves close attention in the years to come.

Journal of Chinese Political Science, 2015

The Chinese urban dream is not a sudden one. Long before the BNational Urbanization Plan^was issued in 2014, planning had been underway for a new type of state-engineered in situ urbanization of the Chinese hinterland. Replacing the previous system of macro scale urbanization in favor of a more balanced dissemination of urban infrastructure and a socially more acceptable concentration of resources and the population has been on the political agenda since the mid-2000s. The evolution of smaller-scale Bnew rural neighborhoods/communities^is particularly illustrative of this trend. However, the realization of China's new urban dream depends on the way in which it is spun at local level. Emphasizing the enormous local variation of contemporary rural urbanization, this article introduces two counties' comprehensive Bnew rural neighborhood^programs, their concepts for planning and steering the concentration and resettlement of village housing, including the related interim adjustments of household registration and land use management. The motivation and interests of local governments that shape plans for state-led rural urbanization were quite complex. Furthermore, it is argued that we can indeed find cases in which the 'new' notion of urbanization in China has encouraged a more comprehensive and sustainable system of localized developmental planning, not least because local governments are increasingly able to serve their own interests by designing functioning public goods and services

Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 1997

Since the economic reforms launched at the end of the 1970s, China has experienced dramatic socioeconomic change which has led to the emergence of new and distinctive regions of economic interaction characterised by an extensive and intensive mix of agricultural and non-agricultural activities. This paper illustrates the nature and characteristics of these evolving Extended Metropolitan Regions (EMRs) by drawing on the experience of the Shenyang-Dalian urban corridor in Northeast China (Manchuria). The increased level of economic interaction between the cities and the countryside is characterised by accelerated labour and capital flows, rapidly expanding rural-urban commodity trade and subcontracting between urban and rural enterprises. The result is a rapid erosion of differences in the standard of living, economic function and life style between the city and the countryside.

The Journal of Peasant Studies, 2020

Rural development in the Chinese state's strategy has been a changing political-economic problematic. The state has practiced a strategic essentialism with regard to 'peasantry.' It has actively taken 'peasantry' as a temporary unifying master-category while at the same time working with the differences within the category for the long-term goal of transformation. The post-Mao contradiction, emphasizing the protection of the 'peasantry' while encouraging differentiation, offers contemporary struggles both opportunity and frustration. This essay examines how the rural has been conceptualized in reform-era policies and discusses two cases of scholar activism, the rural reconstruction movement and the food sovereignty network in China.

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, 2015

This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China’s urbanization focusing on the post-Liberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people’s migration and urban physical expansion. Three key characteristics are given particular attention: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism. The article further examines some of the important socio-spatial outcomes and challenges that China’s urbanization poses.

2018

This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity. The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes into historical perspective, and probes the relationship between nation and city, focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Changchun. Part two deals with the relationship between history and modernity, concentrating on Tunxi, a traditional trade center of tea, New Villages in Shanghai and street names in Taipei and Shanghai. Part three showcases the complexities of urban regeneration vis-a-vis heritage preservation in cities such as Datong, Tianjin and Qingdao. This book offers an innovative inter...