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.

Explores the economic, social and financial changes that have transformed China's rural governance over the past twenty years.

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.

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities. Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China.

Two assumptions prevail in the study of Chinese citizenship: one holds that citizenship is unique to the Western political culture, and China has historically lacked the necessary conditions for its development; the other implies that China is an authoritarian regime that has always been subject to autocratic power, in which citizens and citizenship play a limited role. This volume negates both assumptions. On the one hand, it shows that China has its own unique and rich experiences of the emergence, development, rights, obligations, acts, culture, education, and sites of citizenship, indicating the need to widen the scope of citizenship studies to include non-Western societies. On the other hand, it aims to show that citizenship has been a core issue running through China's political development since the modern period, urging scholars to bring ‘citizenship’ into consideration in the study of Chinese politics. This Handbook sets a new agenda for citizenship studies and Chinese politics. Its clear, accessible style makes it essential reading for students and scholars interested in citizenship and China studies.

Over the last four decades, China has witnessed dramatic economic growth, transforming into an economic powerhouse with considerable consequences for its rural regions. In this timely book, Guy M. Robinson adeptly navigates the principal elements, key events and significant changes of the transformation of China’s countryside.

This collection provides an overview of China’s rural politics, bringing scholarship on agrarian politics from various social science disciplines together in one place. The twelve contributions, spanning history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, political science, and geography, address enduring questions in peasant studies, including the relationship between states and peasants, taxation, social movements, rural-urban linkages, land rights and struggles, gender relations, and environmental politics. Taking rural politics as the power-inflected processes and struggles that shape access and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies and discourses that shape those processes, the volume brings research on China into conversation with the traditions and concerns of peasant studies scholarship. It provides both an introduction to those unfamiliar with Chinese politics, as well as in-depth, new research for experts in the field. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.

This book attempts to introduce the theory of system science and engineering technology into the geographic research of urban-rural transformation, reveals the level-structure-function of urban-rural transformation, and promotes the scientific research on urban-rural transformation. Focusing on the systematic diagnosis of new-type urbanization, urban-rural land use, industrial structure transformation and public facilities allocation, this book explores the long-term mechanism, innovative model, and scientific way of urban-rural land optimal allocation and spatial reconstruction and develops urban-rural transformation geography. In terms of the contents, the book constructs the theory and method system of urban-rural transformation geography, analyzes the process, pattern, mechanism, and response of urban-rural transformation, reveals the evolution characteristics, types, and regional differences of urban-rural regional system, and finally puts forward the optimal decision-making of urban-rural transformation. This book not only provides references for graduate and researchers in geography, regional development, urban and rural planning, resource science, environmental science, human-earth system science, sustainability science, and other related fields but also guides the decision-making of planners and government officials.

'The Industrialization of Rural China' highlights the economic & social achievements of the Maoist regime. Using a constructed dataset covering China's 2000 plus counties & complemented by a detailed econometric study of county-level industrialization in the provinces of Sichuan, Guangdong & Jiangsu, the author shows that history mattered.