Organizing Rural China Rural China Organizing [Hardcover]

The essays weave a fascinating landscape of contemporary rural society in China dominated no longer by homogenizing and centralizing policies but by an astonishing diversity of practices and temporalities. Long submerged temple communities, lineage structures, socialist ownership principles and cooperatives, urban initiatives, powerful agro-businesses and digital networks jostle and compete to offer new kinds of community and livelihood for the long-enduring peoples of this good earth.The modernization of Chinas vast and hugely important countryside has been a major concern for generations of the countrys political leaders and intellectuals and the issue has received renewed emphasis during the decade of the Hu-Wen administration. Organizing Rural China is a timely collection of fascinating studies which offer unique insights into the processes shaping the modernization of rural China. The Chinese and Western authors assembled here examine a broad range of actors involved from the political, social and economic realms and analyze state propaganda as well as relevant intellectual discourses. This comprehensive volume should be read by anyone interested in rural Chinas development.This work is an in-depth and timely analysis of the development of organizations in rural China written by a wide range of well-established international experts. The book is a valuable textbook for students in development and Asian studies, and will be of great interest for scholars and professionals working on rural China.This book is about how rural China is organized. Based on extensive fieldwork the authors present examples of both top-down and bottom-up social organizing and analyse the interplay between external and local actors.During the early 1980s China embarked on what can be seen as one of the worlds largest social experiments ever. Decollectivization meant much more than the reorganization of agricultural production into family based farming. It signaled significant changeslc