Farewell To Peasant China

Chinese urbanization, including the daily life, migration strategies, and life choices of villagers and townspeople, is the focus of this study by Chinese and North American scholars. The study looks at the urbanization process and the vitality of post-reform Chinese society.

Since China entered the post-Mao "Reform Era" in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese economy has taken off as few economies ever have. Labor migration, rural enterprises, rising production, and globalization have all combined to end the isolation of the Chinese countryside. Yet although China's unsurpassed economic boom has produced reams of impressive statistics, has this economic growth led to improving the livelihood of the average Chinese person? Has development accompanied economic growth? Has the promise of "opening to the outside" been fulfilled in providing a better life for China's 1.2 billion-plus people? In this book, which is based on field work, Guldin presents and explores some of the changes sweeping through China in the 1990s that are affecting hundreds of millions of people. Guldin looks at the growth of town and village enterprises, labor mobility, and the other aspects of rural urbanization to investigate the connection between economic growth and development in contemporary China. The political changes at the village level, the swelling flows of capital, data, goods, and people, new ways of thinking and behaving, and a significant surge in social inequalities are all topis for chapter discussions. Guldin invites readers to face the same question that former Chinese peasants must face, namely, how to respond, as their villages are transformed forever.

Due to the Three Gorges Dam, China’s Yangtze becomes a 600 kilometers long reservoir that submerges everything below. Therefore, more than 1.3 million people lose their houses, their arable land, as well as their personal belongings. The book in hand examines the socio-economic impact on peasant livelihood before, during and after the state-forced resettlement.

A timely and thorough analysis of the rapid urban growth in China.

China in the Post-Utopian Age is an interdisciplinary book about China in the post-utopian age, focusing on the transformations that have occurred during the leaderships of Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

From 1949 to today, China has experienced dramatic changes in its economy and urban development. This book examines these changes and looks at one city, Shenzhen, in detail. The performance and behavior of a fledgling property market in the transitional economy are analyzed in the backdrop of real estate commodification and marketization. Students and researchers in urban geography, urban planning, economics, business, and real estate will find this monograph lucid and original. Two distinctive periods divide the last fifty years of development in China. The period 1949 to 1978 was dominated by central planning. After 1978, however, economic reforms brought a new property market to many of China's cities. The economic surge of this period has transformed these cities and helped create new metropolises. The special economic zone of Shenzhen grew from what was, until 1980, a landscape predominantly made up of rice paddy fields and traditional villages. By 1995, the population of the city grew to more than two and a half million. Two modes of land provision are identified as the main contributors to Shenzhen's urban development process, which is also echoed in other Chinese cities. Incremental urban land reforms are elaborated within a broad framework of institutional change, while marketization has brought many changes to Chinese society. Continued urban reform toward a market economy seems now irreversible.

Economic transition in China has witnessed (re)centralization of resources from the margin to the core in economic, social and political senses. This book employs a marginalization lens to reveal, delineate and better understand the processes, patterns, trends, multiple dimensions and dynamics of the phenomenon, and the consequences and implications for development and well-being in the country. Bringing together a wide range of domestic and international experts and disciplinary perspectives, the book combines empirical research and conceptual analysis to provide an insightful overview of China's recent development. It contributes to the debate over marginalization and its interactions with globalization and transition in China, and has significance for various domestic and international policy arenas in respect of tackling marginalization, poverty and social exclusion effectively while striving for the achievement of the UN Millennium Development Goals in China and beyond.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seized power in October 1949 China was one of the poorest nations in the world. In fact, it was so weak it had been conquered by Japan, a country one-tenth its size, a decade earlier. Now, more than fifty years later, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is an emerging economic, political, and military superpower with the world's fastest growing economy and largest population (1.3 billion in 2005). A member of the United Nations Security Council since the early 1970s and a nuclear power, China wields enormous influence in the world community. The second edition of the Historical Dictionary of the People's Republic of China contains more than 400 cross-referenced dictionary entries on individual topics spanning China's political, economic, and social system along with short biographies on important figures_from politicians to writers and movie directors_who have shaped Chinese history during the period of Communist rule from 1949 to 2006. Supplementing the entries are a chronology, an introduction, charts outlining the structure of the Chinese government, and a bibliography of works in English, making this a superb resource for college and high school students needing a quick reference on contemporary China.