![]() ![]() ![]() The policy framework provides the broad guidelines for a state-led transformation of China’s rural areas. However, as more and more agricultural land has been converted to urban construction land, and as many peasants don’t pursue farming anymore, urban expansion has led to central government concerns over national food security.2Īgainst the backdrop of the unregulated encroachment of urbanization into rural areas on the one hand and “hollow villages” on the other hand, the national program of “building a new socialist countryside” was initiated in 2005. At the same time, the economy has grown, and cities and towns have expanded rapidly into the surrounding countryside. The decollectivization of agriculture, market-oriented reforms, and the loosening of restrictions on internal migration have caused millions of surplus rural workers (“migrant workers”) to come to cities in search of employment and better lives. Since the People’s Republic of China (PRC) launched its “Reform and Opening-Up” Policy in 1978, the country has urbanized at an unprecedented scale and pace. Finally, I critically question these narratives by drawing on data from seven months of ethnographic fieldwork among Huaming’s landless peasants.īuilding a New Socialist Countryside: Background, Promises, and Problems Then, Huaming is introduced as a case study that illustrates the construction of divergent narratives. In this article, I first provide an overview of the background and general discourses surrounding China’s state-led rural urbanization. These findings not only allow us to more thoroughly discuss China’s urbanization policy and its impact on the people, but also prompt us to more consciously reflect on our potential preconceptions. The goal of this article is to critically examine competing narratives surrounding China’s state-led urbanization and put them in perspective by adopting a “view from below,” i.e., by including landless peasants’ own stories in the equation. Thus, narratives play an important role for both world-making and self-making.1 #Urbanization dirty land seriesA narrative essentially is a series of nonrandomly connected events that has been constructed to provide meaning-whether it appears in propaganda, the media, academic discourse, or personal life stories and everyday accounts. However, Western journalism and most of academia are painting quite the opposite picture, commonly describing a deterioration of people’s lives due to numerous problems.Īs can be seen from the case of Huaming, there are contradictory narratives surrounding the consequences that China’s state-led urbanization is supposed to have for landless peasants. This is in line with the official portrayal of government-engineered urbanization projects all across the country. The slogan was meant to express that the peasants who had to give up their land in the process of urbanization and relocate to Huaming were leading better lives than before. ![]() “Same land, different life”: Under this slogan, Huaming, a model town in the suburban Dongli District of the municipality of Tianjin, China’s fifth-largest city, was presented at the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai as a successful example of China’s rural urbanization. Re-envisioning Asia: Contestations and Struggles in the Visual Arts.Distinguished Service to the Association for Asian Studies Award. ![]()
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