Download or read book The Transformation of Rural China written by Jonathan Unger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book In Manchuria written by Michael Meyer and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2015-02-17 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three years, Meyer rented a home in the rice-farming community of Wasteland, hometown to his wife's family. Their personal saga mirrors the tremendous change most of rural China is undergoing, in the form of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed high-rise apartments into which farmers can move in exchange for their land rights. Once a commune, Wasteland is now a company town, a phenomenon happening across China that Meyer documents for the first time; indeed, not since Pearl Buck wrote The Good Earth has anyone brought rural China to life as Meyer has here. Amplifying the story of family and Wasteland, Meyer takes us on a journey across Manchuria's past, a history that explains much about contemporary China--from the fall of the last emperor to Japanese occupation and Communist victory. Through vivid local characters, Meyer illuminates the remnants of the imperial Willow Palisade, Russian and Japanese colonial cities and railways, and the POW camp into which a young American sergeant parachuted to free survivors of the Bataan Death March. In Manchuria is a rich and original chronicle of contemporary China and its people.
Download or read book The Transformation of Governance in Rural China written by An Chen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the economic, social and financial changes that have transformed China's rural governance over the past twenty years.
Download or read book Agricultural Reform and Rural Transformation in China since 1949 written by Thomas DuBois and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-07-11 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its founding, the government of the People's Republic of China has strived to transform rural production, the theme of this volume of History of Contemporary China. Fourteen articles translated from the Chinese journal Contemporary History (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu) offer both empirical account and theoretical analysis of a broad range of historical events and issues, such as the guiding policy framework of the “three rural issues,” the causes and consequences of the deep plowing movement and the development of public canteens during the Great Leap Forward, child care, enterprises and collectives, and private lending in the post-Mao era, and the changing dynamics of interregional flows of goods and people throughout the second half of the 20th century. These studies shed light on the historical origins of some of the agricultural and rural problems in China today.
Download or read book Transforming Rural China written by Guy M. Robinson and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Blockchain Chicken Farm written by Xiaowei Wang and published by FSG Originals. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice "A brilliant and empathetic guide to the far corners of global capitalism." --Jenny Odell, author of How to Do Nothing From FSGO x Logic: stories about rural China, food, and tech that reveal new truths about the globalized world In Blockchain Chicken Farm, the technologist and writer Xiaowei Wang explores the political and social entanglements of technology in rural China. Their discoveries force them to challenge the standard idea that rural culture and people are backward, conservative, and intolerant. Instead, they find that rural China has not only adapted to rapid globalization but has actually innovated the technology we all use today. From pork farmers using AI to produce the perfect pig, to disruptive luxury counterfeits and the political intersections of e-commerce villages, Wang unravels the ties between globalization, technology, agriculture, and commerce in unprecedented fashion. Accompanied by humorous “Sinofuturist” recipes that frame meals as they transform under new technology, Blockchain Chicken Farm is an original and probing look into innovation, connectivity, and collaboration in the digitized rural world. FSG Originals × Logic dissects the way technology functions in everyday lives. The titans of Silicon Valley, for all their utopian imaginings, never really had our best interests at heart: recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety, as a result of tech’s reckless pursuit of progress, have shown as much. We present an alternate story, one that delights in capturing technology in all its contradictions and innovation, across borders and socioeconomic divisions, from history through the future, beyond platitudes and PR hype, and past doom and gloom. Our collaboration features four brief but provocative forays into the tech industry’s many worlds, and aspires to incite fresh conversations about technology focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.
Download or read book Transforming Rural China written by Chih-Jou Jay Chen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is often assumed that privatization leads to profit, and that well-delineated property rights and a strong private sector will help boost an economy. This book investigates the property rights in Chinese enterprises in the reform era, finding that distinction between the public and the private are blurred, that national reform policies are implemented unevenly across the country, and that enterprises owned by local governments, in Shanghai, for example, are actually extremely profitable.
Download or read book Rural China Takes Off written by Jean C. Oi and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-05-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A distinctive and important contribution."—Thomas P. Bernstein, author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages
Download or read book Online Urbanization written by Li Zi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Chinese Village Life Today written by Gonçalo Santos and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2021-08-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book China in War and Revolution 1895 1949 written by Peter Zarrow and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-06-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing historical insights, essential to the understanding of contemporary China, this book explores the events that led to the rise of communism and a strong central state during the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Peasants and Revolution in Rural China written by Chang Liu and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores rural political change in China from 1850 to 1949 to help us understand China’s transformation from a weak, decaying agrarian empire to a unified, strong nation-state during this period. Based on local gazetteers, contemporary field studies, government archives, personal memoirs and other primary sources, it systematically compares two key macro-regions of rural China – the North China plain and the Yangzi delta – to demonstrate the ways in which the forces of political change, shaped by different local conditions, operated to transform the country. It shows that on the North China plain, the village community composed mainly of owner-cultivators was the focal point for political mobilization, whilst in the Yangzi delta absentee landlordism was exploited by the state for local control and tax extraction. However, these both set the stage, in different ways, for the communist mobilization in the first half of the twentieth century. Peasants and Revolution in Rural Chinais an important addition to the literature on the history of the Chinese Revolution, and will be of interest to anyone seeking to understand the course of Chinese social and political development.
Download or read book The Rural Modern written by Kate Merkel-Hess and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-08-17 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China written by Ezra F. Vogel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Rural China 1901 1949 written by Xianming Wang and published by . This book was released on 2022-09 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highlighting the interwoven relationship between Chinese rural society and larger historical forces, this book charts the evolution of China's rural society from 1901 to 1949, concentrating on the major changes of this period and the scenarios developed to modernize rural society during the half century leading up to the Revolution. The modern history of rural China is one of sweeping institutional and structural transformation across many dimensions. As the first half of the twentieth century unfolded, against a backdrop of turbulent changes across a country that underwent industrialization, urbanization and modernization, China's agriculture, rural population and rural communities encountered many crises, but also showed remarkable resilience and capacity for adaptation and reform. In each of the six chapters, the author delves into one aspect or examines one period of this massive transformation, and identifies the social, economic, political and cultural signifi cance of these tumultuous processes at work. The book will appeal to both scholars and general readers interested in modern Chinese history and the transformation of rural China.
Download or read book Rural Urban Migration and Agro Technological Change in Post Reform China written by Lena Kaufmann and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Gender and Employment in Rural China written by Jing Song and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With China’s rapid advancements in urbanization and industrialization, there has been significant labor movement away from agriculture in the rural regions. Using four village case studies, Song examines how this restructuring process affects the rural population. Much of her research is centered on their various perceptions and reactions towards the market reforms. How are their lives reshaped through the employment transition? Along with the changes of family life and the diversification of development models, how do an individual’s gender and background play a role in determining employment? These are the broad questions that Song addresses through detailed analysis of four different villages, in light of China’s move towards decentralization of its rural economy.
