Chinese Village Life Today

Chinese Village Life Today PDF Author: Gonçalo Santos
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295747390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
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.

Chinese Village Life Today

Chinese Village Life Today PDF Author: Gonçalo Santos
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295747390
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Gao Village

Gao Village PDF Author: Mobo C. F. Gao
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 9780824821234
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen University. Since emigrating to Australia in 1990, he has returned every year to Gao Village, where his brother still lives. Several accounts of village life in China have been published, but all have been by Western or urban Chinese scholars. Mobo Gao's account is in every sense one from the inside. Though written as an academic work, it does not eschew personal stories and experiences relevant to the themes addressed. These cover a forty-year period and fall into four distinct themes; the village before and after land reform; the commune system; the dismantling of the communes; and the unfolding impact of the market economy, including increased migration to urban areas, from the late 1980s onwards.

In Manchuria

In Manchuria PDF Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620402866
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
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.

Village Life in China

Village Life in China PDF Author: Arthur H. Smith
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description


A Century of Change in a Chinese Village

A Century of Change in a Chinese Village PDF Author: Lin Juren
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538112361
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
Over the last half century, China has evolved from a poor rural country to a geopolitical powerhouse. Rapid urbanization has been at the heart of that transformation, and as migrant laborers have left their villages, what has become of the rural communities that were once the center of economic, social, and cultural life? And how do contemporary Chinese scholars understand those changes? These are the questions that this compelling book answers. Lengshuigou village, located near the Shandong provincial capital of Jinan, was first studied by Japanese social scientists in the early 1940s and then again in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on these rich surveys, this book traces changes from the early twentieth century to the present day in family and lineage, social stratification, personal networks, annual and life cycle rituals, village politics, and elite formation. Drawing on their own large-scale survey of contemporary village households, the authors analyze the physical and institutional changes that have altered the community, as well as the shifts in interpersonal relations and attitudes that have upended centuries-old systems of patriarchy and generational order. This important book presents, for the first time in English, analysis by Chinese sociologists on the radical transformation of Chinese rural society.

Village and Family in Contemporary China

Village and Family in Contemporary China PDF Author: William L. Parish
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226645919
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
After 1949 the Chinese Communists carried out land reform, the collectivization of agriculture, and the formation of people's communes. The new economic and political organizations that emerged have made peasant life more comfortable and secure, but many economic and status differentials and traditional customs remain resistant to change. Focusing on rural Kwangtung province, William L. Parish and Martin King Whyte examine the rural work-incentive system, village equality and inequality, rural health care and education, marriage customs, and the position of women, among other topics, to determine what and how much of the traditional Chinese ways of life is left in Communist China.

Village China Under Socialism and Reform

Village China Under Socialism and Reform PDF Author: Huaiyin Li
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804771073
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
Village China Under Socialism and Reform offers a comprehensive account of rural life after the communist revolution, detailing villager involvement in political campaigns since the 1950s, agricultural production under the collective system, family farming and non-agricultural economy in the reform, and everyday life in the family and community. Li's rich examination draws on original documents from local agricultural collectives, newly accessible government archives, and his own fieldwork in Qin village of Jiangsu province to highlight the continuities in rural transformation. Firmly disagreeing with those who claim that recent developments in rural China represent a radical break with pre-reform sociopolitical practices and patterns of production, Li instead draws a clear history connecting the current situation to ecological, social, and institutional changes that have persisted from the collective era.

The End of the Village

The End of the Village PDF Author: Nick R. Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965447
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
How China’s expansive new era of urbanization threatens to undermine the foundations of rural life Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, China has vastly expanded its urbanization processes in an effort to reduce the inequalities between urban and rural areas. Centered on the mountainous region of Chongqing, which serves as an experimental site for the country’s new urban development policies, The End of the Village analyzes the radical expansion of urbanization and its consequences for China’s villagers. It reveals a fundamental rewriting of the nation’s social contract, as villages that once organized rural life and guaranteed rural livelihoods are replaced by an increasingly urbanized landscape dominated by state institutions. Throughout this comprehensive study of China’s “urban–rural coordination” policy, Nick R. Smith traces the diminishing autonomy of the country’s rural populations and their subordination to larger urban networks and shared administrative structures. Outside Chongqing’s urban centers, competing forces are at work in reshaping the social, political, and spatial organization of its villages. While municipal planners and policy makers seek to extend state power structures beyond the boundaries of the city, village leaders and inhabitants try to maintain control over their communities’ uncertain futures through strategies such as collectivization, shareholding, real estate development, and migration. As China seeks to rectify the development crises of previous decades through rapid urban growth, such drastic transformations threaten to displace existing ways of life for more than 600 million residents. Offering an unprecedented look at the country’s contentious shift in urban planning and policy, The End of the Village exposes the precarious future of rural life in China and suggests a critical reappraisal of how we think about urbanization.

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.

A Village with My Name

A Village with My Name PDF Author: Scott Tong
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022633905X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
An “immensely readable” journey through modern Chinese history told through the experiences of the author’s extended family (Christian Science Monitor). When journalist Scott Tong moved to Shanghai, his assignment was to start the first full-time China bureau for “Marketplace,” the daily business and economics program on public radio stations across the US. But for Tong the move became much more: an opportunity to reconnect with members of his extended family who’d remained there after his parents fled the communists six decades prior. Uncovering their stories gave him a new way to understand modern China’s defining moments and its long, interrupted quest to go global. A Village with My Name offers a unique perspective on China’s transitions through the eyes of regular people who witnessed such epochal events as the toppling of the Qing monarchy, Japan’s occupation during WWII, exile of political prisoners to forced labor camps, mass death and famine during the Great Leap Forward, market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. Tong focuses on five members of his family, who each offer a specific window on a changing country: a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, a pioneer exchange student, a toddler abandoned in wartime who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. Through their stories, Tong shows us China anew, visiting former prison labor camps on the Tibetan plateau and rural outposts along the Yangtze, exploring the Shanghai of the 1930s, and touring factories across the mainland—providing a compelling and deeply personal take on how China became what it is today. “Vivid and readable . . . The book’s focus on ordinary people makes it refreshingly accessible.” —Financial Times “Tong tells his story with humor, a little snark, [and] lots of love . . . Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Chinese history and family journeys.” —Library Journal (starred review)