China's New Socialist Countryside

China's New Socialist Countryside PDF Author: Russell Harwood
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this case study examines the impact of economic development on ethnic minority people living along the upper-middle reaches of the Nu (Salween) River in Yunnan. In this highly mountainous, sparsely populated area live the Lisu, Nu, and Dulong (Drung) people, who until recently lived as subsistence farmers, relying on shifting cultivation, hunting, the collection of medicinal plants from surrounding forests, and small-scale logging to sustain their household economies. China's New Socialist Countryside explores how compulsory education, conservation programs, migration for work, and the expansion of social and economic infrastructure are not only transforming livelihoods, but also intensifying the Chinese Party-state’s capacity to integrate ethnic minorities into its political fabric and the national industrial economy.

China's New Socialist Countryside

China's New Socialist Countryside PDF Author: Russell Harwood
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804785
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this case study examines the impact of economic development on ethnic minority people living along the upper-middle reaches of the Nu (Salween) River in Yunnan. In this highly mountainous, sparsely populated area live the Lisu, Nu, and Dulong (Drung) people, who until recently lived as subsistence farmers, relying on shifting cultivation, hunting, the collection of medicinal plants from surrounding forests, and small-scale logging to sustain their household economies. China's New Socialist Countryside explores how compulsory education, conservation programs, migration for work, and the expansion of social and economic infrastructure are not only transforming livelihoods, but also intensifying the Chinese Party-state’s capacity to integrate ethnic minorities into its political fabric and the national industrial economy.

Rural Policy Implementation in Contemporary China

Rural Policy Implementation in Contemporary China PDF Author: Anna Ahlers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317970608
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
At the turn of the millennium, the disparities between rural and urban livelihoods, underdevelopment and administrative shortcomings in the Chinese countryside were increasingly seen as posing a manifest threat to social harmony and economic and political stability. At that time the term "three rural problems" (sannong wenti) was coined which defined the main issues of rural life that needed to be targeted by government action: agriculture (nongye), villages (nongcun) and farmers (nongmin). In turn, with the launch of the 11th Five-Year Plan in 2006, a pledge was made to shift the focus of developmental efforts to the long-neglected countryside, which is still home to half of the Chinese population. This book presents an analysis of adaptive local policy implementation in China in the context of the "Building of a New Socialist Countryside" (BNSC) policy framework. Based on intensive field work in four counties in Fujian, Jiangxi, Shaanxi and Zhejiang Provinces between 2008 and 2011, it offers detailed analyses of the form and impact of county governments’ strategic agency at certain stages and within certain fields of the implementation process (for example, the design of local BNSC programs, the steering of project funding, implementation and evaluation, the establishment of model villages and the management of public participation). Further, this study illustrates that BNSC is far more than the ‘empty slogan’ described by many observers when it was launched in 2005/2006. Instead, it has already brought about considerable shifts in terms of the process and outcomes of rural policy implementation. Altogether, the results of this research challenge existing paradigms by showing how, against the background of contemporary approaches to rural development and recent reforms initiated by the central state, local bureaucracies’ strategic agency can actually push forward effective – albeit not necessarily optimal – policy implementation to some extent, which serves the interests of central authorities, local implementors and rural residents. By tying into the larger debates on China's state capacity and authoritarian adaptability, this book enriches our understanding of the inner workings of the Chinese political system. As such, it will prove invaluable to students and scholars of Chinese politics, public policy and development studies more generally.

China's Rural Development Policy

China's Rural Development Policy PDF Author: Minzi Su
Publisher: Firstforumpress
ISBN: 9781935049067
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
As China strives to achieve nothing less than a 'harmonious society' - despite the pronounced and institutionalized class structure that divides rural Chinese from urban, eastern from western, and rich from poor - a key element of that effort is a 'new socialist countryside'. The author assesses the prospects for China's rural revitalization programs now in their initial stages. The author draws on her extensive, front-line field research to discover precisely why Beijing's rural development polices, though helping many, have thus far bypassed hundreds of millions of farm households. Not least, she also identifies the capacities and political-economic conditions that hold the greatest promise for successful policy implementation. This book assesses the prospects for the rural revitalization programs that are a key element of China's quest for a 'harmonious society'.

Going to the Countryside

Going to the Countryside PDF Author: Yu Zhang
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472054430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, modern Chinese intellectuals, reformers, revolutionaries, leftist journalists, and idealistic youth had often crossed the increasing gap between the city and the countryside, which made the act of “going to the countryside” a distinctively modern experience and a continuous practice in China. Such a spatial crossing eventually culminated in the socialist state program of “down to the villages” movements during the 1960s and 1970s. What, then, was the special significance of “going to the countryside” before that era? Going to the Countryside deals with the cultural representations and practices of this practice between 1915 and 1965, focusing on individual homecoming, rural reconstruction, revolutionary journeys to Yan’an, the revolutionary “going down to the people” as well as going to the frontiers and rural hometowns for socialist construction. As part of the larger discourses of enlightenment, revolution, and socialist industrialization, “going to the countryside” entailed new ways of looking at the world and ordinary people, brought about new experiences of space and time, initiated new means of human communication and interaction, generated new forms of cultural production, revealed a fundamental epistemic shift in modern China, and ultimately created a new aesthetic, social, and political landscape. As a critical response to the “urban turn” in the past few decades, this book brings the rural back to the central concern of Chinese cultural studies and aims to bridge the city and the countryside as two types of important geographical entities, which have often remained as disparate scholarly subjects of inquiry in the current state of China studies. Chinese modernity has been characterized by a dual process that created problems from the vast gap between the city and the countryside but simultaneously initiated constant efforts to cope with the gap personally, collectively, and institutionally. The process of “crossing” two distinct geographical spaces was often presented as continuous explorations of various ways of establishing the connectivity, interaction, and relationship of these two imagined geographical entities. Going to the Countryside argues that this new body of cultural productions did not merely turn the rural into a constantly changing representational space; most importantly, the rural has been constructed as a distinct modern experiential and aesthetic realm characterized by revolutionary changes in human conceptions and sentiments.

Chinese Village, Socialist State

Chinese Village, Socialist State PDF Author: Edward Friedman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300054286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
This portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and how it in turn shaped the revolutionary process. The book is based on evidence gathered from archives and interviews with villagers and rural officials.

Blockchain Chicken Farm

Blockchain Chicken Farm PDF Author: Xiaowei Wang
Publisher: FSG Originals
ISBN: 0374721254
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
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.

How China Became Capitalist

How China Became Capitalist PDF Author: R. Coase
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137019379
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
How China Became Capitalist details the extraordinary, and often unanticipated, journey that China has taken over the past thirty five years in transforming itself from a closed agrarian socialist economy to an indomitable economic force in the international arena. The authors revitalise the debate around the rise of the Chinese economy through the use of primary sources, persuasively arguing that the reforms implemented by the Chinese leaders did not represent a concerted attempt to create a capitalist economy, and that it was 'marginal revolutions' that introduced the market and entrepreneurship back to China. Lessons from the West were guided by the traditional Chinese principle of 'seeking truth from facts'. By turning to capitalism, China re-embraced her own cultural roots. How China Became Capitalist challenges received wisdom about the future of the Chinese economy, warning that while China has enormous potential for further growth, the future is clouded by the government's monopoly of ideas and power. Coase and Wang argue that the development of a market for ideas which has a long and revered tradition in China would be integral in bringing about the Chinese dream of social harmony.

A Landscape of Travel

A Landscape of Travel PDF Author: Jenny T. Chio
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295805064
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
While the number of domestic leisure travelers has increased dramatically in reform-era China, the persistent gap between urban and rural living standards attests to ongoing social, economic, and political inequalities. The state has widely touted tourism for its potential to bring wealth and modernity to rural ethnic minority communities, but the policies underlying the development of tourism obscure some complicated realities. In tourism, after all, one person’s leisure is another person’s labor. A Landscape of Travel investigates the contested meanings and unintended consequences of tourism for those people whose lives and livelihoods are most at stake in China’s rural ethnic tourism industry: the residents of village destinations. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Ping’an (a Zhuang village in Guangxi) and Upper Jidao (a Miao village in Guizhou), Jenny Chio analyzes the myriad challenges and possibilities confronted by villagers who are called upon to do the work of tourism. She addresses the shifting significance of migration and rural mobility, the visual politics of tourist photography, and the effects of touristic desires for “exotic difference” on village social relations. In this way, Chio illuminates the contemporary regimes of labor and leisure and the changing imagination of what it means to be rural, ethnic, and modern in China today.

Red Revolution, Green Revolution

Red Revolution, Green Revolution PDF Author: Sigrid Schmalzer
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633029X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In 1968, the director of USAID coined the term “green revolution” to celebrate the new technological solutions that promised to ease hunger around the world—and forestall the spread of more “red,” or socialist, revolutions. Yet in China, where modernization and scientific progress could not be divorced from politics, green and red revolutions proceeded side by side. In Red Revolution, Green Revolution, Sigrid Schmalzer explores the intersection of politics and agriculture in socialist China through the diverse experiences of scientists, peasants, state agents, and “educated youth.” The environmental costs of chemical-intensive agriculture and the human costs of emphasizing increasing production over equitable distribution of food and labor have been felt as strongly in China as anywhere—and yet, as Schmalzer shows, Mao-era challenges to technocracy laid important groundwork for today’s sustainability and food justice movements. This history of “scientific farming” in China offers us a unique opportunity not only to explore the consequences of modern agricultural technologies but also to engage in a necessary rethinking of fundamental assumptions about science and society.

The Rural Modern

The Rural Modern PDF Author: Kate Merkel-Hess
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022638330X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
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.