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Illuminating the complex processes of China's uneven urbanization through the lens of the transition from village commons to public goods, this book is set in three urbanized villages in Shenzhen, Chengdu, and Xi'an, which have experienced similar demographic explosions and dramatic changes to their landscapes, the livelihoods of its inhabitants, and the power structures governing their residents. Graduated provision is the delivery of public goods informed by the teleological ideology of urbanization, and by neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and has been employed as an answer to the challenges of making public goods, such as welfare provisions, public parks, education, and senior care, equally accessible to all in recently urbanized communities.

Based on an in-depth investigation of different regions of China's vast countryside, Improving Village Governance in Contemporary China vividly describes rural governance mechanisms against the background of China's rapid urbanization. China's rural areas vary greatly from region to region with respect to the pace and mode of change. Rural governance in China is decided by how the state transfers resources to villages, and by the linkage between the transfer style and the specific situation of each village. Only when grassroots governance is based on rural democracy (with peasants as the core) can villages become more harmonious.

This book uses the concept of the region to introduce traditional Chinese villages in ten typical areas. Most of the villages have been included in the World Cultural Heritage List or the Tentative List and reflect the diversity of rural and traditional life. Richly illustrated with pictures of architectural decorations, dwellings, day-to-day country life and aerial views of settlements, it not only enhances readers'knowledge of China's traditional architectural culture but also provides inspiration for architectural creation. It is a valuable resource for graduate students, lecturers and researchers in the field of traditional villages, heritage conservation and Chinese architectural culture.

Rapid urbanization of economic zones in China has resulted in a special social phenomenon:'villages-in-the-city.'Underdeveloped villages are absorbed during the expansion of urban areas, while retaining their rustic characteristics. Due to the rural characteristics of these areas, social security is much lower compared with the urbanized city. This book uses Tang Village, a remote area in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, as an example to establish a comprehensive analytical framework by integrating existing crime theories in analyzing villages-in-the-city. The analysis covers the community, individual, and macro levels to detail the diverse social and behavioral factors causing crime at multiple levels. First, a brief history of the urbanization process of Tang Village is provided to establish how urban planning contributed to the issues in the village today. The authors go on to explain how socially disorganized communities dictate the crime hotspots and the common types of crime. The book examines other risk factors that may contribute to the level of crime such as weak social controls, building density, and floating populations of poor working-class migrants. The routine activities of victims, offenders, and guardians are examined. The book concludes with the current trends in the social structure within the villages-in-the-city and their expected outcome after urbanization.

“Village Life in China - A Study in Sociology” is one of the author's fascinating written accounts of his experiences living and travelling China during the late 19th century, this particular volume focusing on the subject of rural life in the country. He wrote this book while living among the local population in small agricultural villages, noting down his observations and compiling them into this insightful glimpse of 19th-century rural China. Arthur Henderson Smith (1845 – 1932) was a missionary famous for spending 54 years doing missionary work in China. He wrote many books about his time there, presenting China to many foreign readers for the first time. Other notable works by this author include: “Chinese Characteristics”, and “The Uplift of China”. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in a modern, high-quality edition complete with the original text and artwork.

In 1979, the Chinese government famously introduced The Single Child Policy to control population growth. Nearly 40 years later, the result is an estimated 20 million'missing girls'in the population from 1980-2010. In Lost and Found, John James Kennedy and Yaojiang Shi focus on village-level implementation of the one-child policy and the level of mutual-noncompliance between officials and rural families. Through in-depth interviews with rural parents and local leaders, they reveal that many had strong incentives not to comply with the birth control policy because larger families meant increased labor and income. In this sober exploration of China's Single Child Policy throughout the reform period, the authors more broadly show how governance by grassroots cadres with greater local autonomy has affected China in the past and the challenges for resolving center-versus-locality contradictions in governance that lie ahead.

This book is based on an empirical research on the governance and reform of the contemporary township system in China. It provides an insightful and innovative understanding of China's township system. The book consists of four parts. The first part discusses the historical changes, present situation and practical operation of China's township system. The second part compares several practice models of reform, and analyses the motivational forces, path and trend of the reform process. The third part studies the reconstruction of modern township governance system and other relevant institutional innovations. The fourth part focuses on the investigation and case analysis of the actual operation of the township system at multi-dimensional levels.

This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.

Focusing on Shenzhen as a representation of the general urban village phenomenon in China, this book considers the impact of China's economic reform on urbanization and urban villages over the past three decades. Shenzhen's urban villages are some of the first of their kind in China, unique in their diversity and organizational capacity, but most notably in their ability to protect village culture whilst coexisting with Shenzhen, one of the fastest urbanizing cities on earth. Providing a study of regional contrast of urban villages in China with newly collected fieldwork materials from Guangzhou, Beijing, and Xi'an, this book also considers recent developments within urban villages, including attempts at marketization of the so-called xiao chanquanfang (the quintessential urban village apartment units). It also addresses the corruption scandals that engulfed some urban villages in late 2013. Through cutting edge fieldwork, the author offers a cross-disciplinary study ofthe history, culture, socio-economic changes, and migration of the villages which arguably embody Chinese social mobility in an urban form.

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.

The outbreak of organised, violent peasant protests across the Chinese countryside from the late 1990s to the early 2000s has attracted much scholarly interest. In this study, An Chen endeavours to understand from these protests the question of the Chinese government's control in the countryside and the impact of this violent resistance on China's rural governance in the context of market liberalisation. Utilising extensive field research and data collected from surveys across rural China, the book provides an in-depth exploration of how rural governance in China has been transformed following two major tax reforms: the tax-for-fee reform of 2002–4, and the abolition of agricultural taxes (AAT) in 2005–6. In a multidimensional analysis which combines approaches from political science, economics, finance and sociology, Chen argues that private economic power has merged with political power in a way that has reshaped village governance in China, threatening to fundamentally change its political structure.

The last three decades have seen dramatic changes in Chinese cities. While many tend to read these changes as the result of institutional reforms, macro planning, and top-down development, the author of this study focuses on the undercurrent at the bottom, from the margin, and without voice. Based on immersive fieldwork, she explores how a different place was created through the everyday life practices of rural migrants in two Chinese urban villages. Readers are invited to dive into a small, marginal, yet intricate and vibrant neighbourhood, where thousands of ‘rural outsiders'found their settlement in the city. In this border space between the rural and the urban, place-making was not merely the government's redevelopment plan that would sooner or later demolish the whole area, it was also a dynamic process unfolding through people's everyday doing and living, such as their housing practices, street gathering, boiler house visits, public telephone calls, television consumption, and festival celebration. Featured by its cross-disciplinary horizon and intimate documentation, the present work exhibits an exemplary locale of a ‘progressive sense of place'in contemporary China and provides original insights in how people's everyday life acts as an alternative arena of the politics of place-making between multiple forces.

During the early 1980s China embarked on what can be seen as one of the world's largest social experiments ever. Decollectivization meant much more than the reorganization of agricultural production into family based farming. It signalled significant changes to rural social relations, when privatization, marketization and increased geographical mobility started tearing apart the economic and social institutions that had structured collective village life under Mao. The focus of this book is on how rural society has been reorganized in the 21st century. The first chapters outline the basic organizational structure of rural China and can be used as an introduction to the topic in a classroom setting. They show how the state and its social scientists draw up plans to overcome the perceived lack of rural social organization, and discuss the often problem-ridden implementation of their ideas. The second section presents case studies of institutions that organize key aspects of rural life: Boarding schools where rural children learn to accept organizational hierarchies; lineage organizations carving out new roles for themselves; “dragonhead enterprises” expected to organize agricultural production and support rural development, and several others. The book is of theoretical interest because of its focus on the re-embedding, or reintegration, of individuals into new types of collectivities, which are less predetermined by tradition and habit and more a matter of, at least perceived, individual choice. Most chapters are based on extensive fieldwork and contain vivid examples from daily life, which will make the book attractive to anyone who wants to understand how Chinese villagers experience the extraordinary social changes they are going through.

The existing literature on rural China characterizes socioeconomic diversity as a uniquely regional phenomenon: north versus south, coastal versus inland, urban versus rural. Unlike most work done at the village level, this book shows the large variations between the twenty-three villages within one suburban township, including wide differences in size, lineage structure, economic activities, and levels of well-being. Furthermore, these village differences are intimately linked to historical variations which are just as striking.

The studies collected in this volume were written by anthropologists, architects, geographers, historians, a sociologist, and a veterinary ecologist. Taken together they form an exceptionally coherent survey of Chinese villages, ranging from the dry north to the humid southeast and southwest of this vast country. Going beyond books on Chinese vernacular architecture that focus on individual dwellings, this work examines the village ensemble itself, the various settings for the habitation, work, and leisure of China's large rural population.