Full Description
This collection provides an overview of China's rural politics, bringing scholarship on agrarian politics from various social science disciplines together in one place. The twelve contributions, spanning history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, political science, and geography, address enduring questions in peasant studies, including the relationship between states and peasants, taxation, social movements, rural-urban linkages, land rights and struggles, gender relations, and environmental politics. Taking rural politics as the power-inflected processes and struggles that shape access and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies and discourses that shape those processes, the volume brings research on China into conversation with the traditions and concerns of peasant studies scholarship. It provides both an introduction to those unfamiliar with Chinese politics, as well as in-depth, new research for experts in the field.
This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Contents
1. Rural politics in contemporary China 2. A century of rural self-governance reforms: reimagining rural Chinese society in the post-taxation era 3. Debating the rural cooperative movement in China, the past and the present 4. Chinese discourses on rurality, gender and development: a feminist critique 5. Finance and rural governance: centralization and local challenges 6. Measurement, promotions and patterns of behavior in Chinese local government 7. Rightful resistance revisited 8. Violence as development: land expropriation and China's urbanization 9. In defense of endogenous, spontaneously ordered development: institutional functionalism and Chinese property rights 10. Internal migration and left-behind populations in China 11. The politics of industrial pollution in rural China 12. The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China 13. The politics of water in rural China: a review of English-language scholarship
