In Manchuria

In Manchuria

Author: Michael Meyer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2015-02-17

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1620402866

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Explores the change most of rural China is undergoing via the story of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed apartments for farmers in exchange for their land rights.


The Transformation of Rural China

The Transformation of Rural China

Author: Jonathan Unger

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-09-16

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 1315292033

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During the past quarter century Jonathan Unger has interviewed farmers and rural officials from various parts of China in order to track the extraordinary changes that have swept the countryside from the Maoist era through the Deng era to the present day. A leading specialist on rural China, Professor Unger presents a vivid picture of life in rural areas during the Maoist revolution, and then after the post-Mao disbandment of the collectives. This is a story of unexpected continuities amidst enormous change. Unger describes how rural administrations retain Mao-era characteristics - despite the major shifts that have occurred in the economic and social hierarchies of villages as collectivization and "class struggle" gave way to the slogan "to get rich is glorious." A chapter explores the private entrepreneurship that has blossomed in the prosperous parts of the countryside. Another focuses on the tensions and exploitation that have arisen as vast numbers of migrant laborers from poor districts have poured into richer ones. Another, based on five months of travel by jeep into impoverished villages in the interior, describes the dilemmas of under-development still faced by many tens of millions of farmers, and the ways in which government policies have inadvertently hurt their livelihoods.


Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

Author: Ezra F. Vogel

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-10-14

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 0674257413

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Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.


Online Urbanization

Online Urbanization

Author: Li Zi

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-01-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 9811336032

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This book highlights the new urban–rural relationship that has emerged under the influence of e-commerce in China. In this regard, it presents case studies on the Suichang rural e-commerce model and Alibaba’s rural strategy, together with analyses of online service in China. Furthermore, by means of a brief review of the urban–rural relationship throughout China’s history, and of academic literature on the study of space, it explains the special logic of urbanization in China. As such, the book makes a valuable contribution to the body of literature on the space of flows and grassrooting, aspects that are essential to appreciating the complexity of the new urban–rural relationship in underdeveloped areas (including developing countries and underdeveloped areas in developed countries) in the ongoing information era.


Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China

Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China

Author: Lena Kaufmann

Publisher: Amsterdam University Press

Published: 2021-02-19

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9048552184

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How do rural Chinese households deal with the conflicting pressures of migrating into cities to work as well as staying at home to preserve their fields? This is particularly challenging for rice farmers, because paddy fields have to be cultivated continuously to retain their soil quality and value. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and written sources, this book describes farming households' strategic solutions to this predicament. It shows how, in light of rural-urban migration and agro-technological change, they manage to sustain both migration and farming. It innovatively conceives rural households as part of a larger farming community of practice that spans both staying and migrating household members and their material world. Focusing on one exemplary resource - paddy fields - it argues that socio-technical resources are key factors in understanding migration flows and migrant-home relations. Overall, this book provides rare insights into the rural side of migration and farmers' knowledge and agency.


Chinese Village Life Today

Chinese Village Life Today

Author: Gonçalo Santos

Publisher: University of Washington Press

Published: 2021-08-22

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0295747390

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China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs, health care, and consumer goods, villagers often travel or migrate to cities, and that cyclical transit and engagement with new technoscientific and medical practices is transforming village life. In this thoughtful ethnography, Gonçalo Santos paints a richly detailed portrait of one rural township in Guangdong Province, north of the industrialized Pearl River Delta region. Unlike previous studies of rural-urban relations and migration in China, Chinese Village Life Today—based on Santos’s more than twenty years of field research—starts from a rural community’s point of view rather than the perspective of major urban centers. Santos considers the intimate choices of village families in the face of larger forces of modernization, showing how these negotiations shape the configuration of daily village life, from marriage, childbirth, and childcare to personal hygiene and public sanitation. Santos also outlines the advantages of a rural existence, including a degree of autonomy over family planning and community life that is rare in urban China. Filled with vivid anecdotes and keen observations, this book presents a fresh perspective on China’s urban-rural divide and a grounded theoretical approach to rural transformation.


The Geographical Transformation of China

The Geographical Transformation of China

Author: Michael Dunford

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-10-17

Total Pages: 587

ISBN-13: 1317614771

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The aim of this book is to examine the transformation of the geography of China in the years since the start of China's policy of reform and opening-up in 1978, as seen through the eyes of Chinese geographers. Throughout that period, Chinese geographers have studied these environmental, economic, political and cultural processes closely, drawing on sources that are far from easy to access, and have published their results in Chinese. Much of this research has underpinned the Chinese government's assessment of policies and the policy choices at different levels, yet it is not well known outside of China. This volume deals with aspects of the socio-economic geography of China's transformation including its changing relations with the rest of the world, although it also deals with the impact of China's development path on the country's ecological systems. Each chapter deals with aggregate trends and specific cases to show the ways in which the particular characteristics of China's economic and social order (economic organization, political system and cultural model and values) have shaped and are shaped by its geography.


The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern

Author: Kate Merkel-Hess

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 022638330X

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Discussions of China’s early twentieth-century modernization efforts tend to focus almost exclusively on cities, and the changes, both cultural and industrial, seen there. As a result, the communist peasant revolution appears as a decisive historical break. Kate Merkel-Hess corrects that misconception by demonstrating how crucial the countryside was for reformers in China long before the success of the communist revolution. In The Rural Modern, Merkel-Hess shows that Chinese reformers and intellectuals created an idea of modernity that was not simply about what was foreign and new, as in Shanghai and other cities, but instead captured the Chinese people’s desire for social and political change rooted in rural traditions and institutions. She traces efforts to remake village education, economics, and politics, analyzing how these efforts contributed to a new, inclusive vision of rural Chinese life. Merkel-Hess argues that as China sought to redefine itself, such rural reform efforts played a major role, and tensions that emerged between rural and urban ways deeply informed social relations, government policies, and subsequent efforts to create a modern nation during the communist period.


The Great Urban Transformation

The Great Urban Transformation

Author: You-tien Hsing

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0199568049

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As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.