China S Disappearing Countryside

Photographs and text document disappearing cultural landscapes and lifestyles in rural China, capturing poignant scenes far from Beijing or Shanghai. Just a few kilometers from the glittering skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, we encounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching far beyond the outskirts of the cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishing marketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages, and the sites of mystic rituals, the authors of this book spent seven years exploring, photographing, and observing the vast interior of China, where the majority of Chinese people live in ways virtually unchanged for centuries. China's Vanishing Worlds is an impressive documentation in images and text of modernization's effect on traditional ways of life, and a sympathetic portrait of lives burdened by hardship but blessed by simplicity and tranquility. The scars of China's recent history and the decay of centuries-old traditions are made visible in this volume, but so is the lure and promise of technology and another life for young people. In the next twenty years, an estimated 280 million Chinese villagers will become city dwellers, leaving their ancestral homes in search of urban jobs and opportunities. In striking and evocative color photographs, we see picturesque villages set against a background of rolling hills, planned centuries ago according to the principles of feng shui; a restaurant with bright pink resin chairs and a wide-screen television; traditional buildings preserved by the accident of poverty and isolation; ramshackle rooms decorated with portraits of Chairman Mao; backpack-wearing children walking to school; festivals with elaborately costumed performers; old men playing cards; buyers and sellers at open-air markets. China's Vanishing Worlds offers readers a rare opportunity to glimpse China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be.

While China’s hybrid rural land tenure system has contributed to agricultural development, it is interwoven with rising farmland loss and social conflicts.This book examines the linkages between land tenure, development and governance in the context of China’s development transformation. Drawing on empirical studies, it advocates the exploration of innovative land tenure systems that address the wider determinants: institutions, power, politics and social development. It argues that a land tenure system can only be sustainable when it is compatible with the overall biophysical, social, political and economic conditions. This new institutional lens into the conditions and dynamics of land tenure systems marks a paradigm shift away from those focusing on the narrow meaning of land rights and tenure security strengthening, as these approaches can paradoxically contribute to weaker land and resource governance. Contributing to an enhanced understanding of the challenges China faces in agricultural development and natural resource governance and to the international debates on land tenure reform, this book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and students in development studies, anthropology, sociology, political sciences, law, geography, economics, public administration and other relevant disciplines. The lessons learnt from China also shed light on its global engagement on sustainable development and governance issues.

Giulio Verdini, PhD in Economics, Urban and Regional Development, from the University of Ferrara, is Associate Professor in Urban Planning and Design and Co-Director of the Research Institute of Urbanisation at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, People's Republic of China. Dr. Yiwen Wang, PhD in Architecture from the University of Nottingham, is Lecturer in Urban Planning and Design at Xian Jiaotong-Liverpool University, People's Republic of China. Dr. Xiaonan Zhang, PhD in Urban Geography at University of Salford, UK, is the former Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Xian Jiaotong- Liverpool University, People's Republic of China.

In 1979, the Chinese government famously introduced The Single Child Policy to control population growth. Nearly 40 years later, the result is an estimated 20 million "missing girls" in the population from 1980-2010. In Lost and Found, John James Kennedy and Yaojiang Shi focus on village-level implementation of the one-child policy and the level of mutual-noncompliance between officials and rural families. Through in-depth interviews with rural parents and local leaders, they reveal that many had strong incentives not to comply with the birth control policy because larger families meant increased labor and income. In this sober exploration of China's Single Child Policy throughout the reform period, the authors more broadly show how governance by grassroots cadres with greater local autonomy has affected China in the past and the challenges for resolving center-versus-locality contradictions in governance that lie ahead.

This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly examination of how China builds international relationships through public diplomacy practices, together with an assessment of the impact of these practices around the world. It explores the sources of China's evolving strategies, how the past influences the present, and the impact of domestic factors that shape China's communication strategies. Including a wide range of detailed examples, the book also discusses how far China is creating new models that will reshape the current landscape of public diplomacy. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.

In Night Bus, a young woman wearing round glasses finds herself on an adventurous late night bus ride that constantly makes detours through increasingly fantastical landscapes. Meanwhile a young cartoonist returns home after art school and tries his hand at becoming a working artist while watching over his aging grandmother whose memory is deteriorating. Nostalgic leaps take us to an elementary school gymnasium that slowly morphs into a swamp and is raided by a giant catfish. Beetles, salamanders, and bug-eyed fish intrude upon the bus ride of the round-glasses woman as the night stretches on. Night Bus blends autobiography, horror, and fantasy into a vibrantly detailed surreal world that shows a distinct talent surveying his past. Nature infringes upon the man-made world via gigantism and explosive abundance–the images in Night Bus are often unsettling, not aimed to horrify, but to upset the balance of modern life. Zuo Ma is part of a burgeoning Chinese art comics scene that pushes emotion to the forefront of the story while playing with action and dreams. Translated by Orion Martin.

A global future in the history of a single village After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives—especially her irascible, unforgettable father—and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang’s riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.

First published in 1980. This book analyzes Chinese society and evaluates the achievements and failures of the Maoist ideology. The central theme is the urban and rural balance in China's development from the Revolution to the late twentieth century. The Fading of the Maoist Vision shows how the original Revolutionary blueprint was altered and the ways in which China has steered a different course from that charted by Mao as the ideological vision encountered an increasingly pressing set of economic realities. The book: · Is particularly valuable in setting China's achievements in the larger context of global ideas about the problems of national development and by comparing them to the experience of India in its pursuit of the Gandhian ideal.