ABSTRACT
Much news about today’s China focuses on the urban. A milestone was reached in 2011, when the proportion of the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s 1.34 billion citizens living in cities reached 50 percent, the result of a remarkably rapid ‘great urban transformation’ (Hsing 2010) that began in the 1980s. By 2025, China is projected to have 221 cities with over one million inhabitants. Still, with hundreds of millions moving to urban areas, hundreds of millions more will continue to live in the countryside and work in agriculture. The fact that more people in China make their home in cities than villages marks a historic shift. At the same time, it is the product of long-standing dynamics through which the urban and rural are mutually constituted by processes, politics and ideologies that link, transgress and span both (Murdoch and Lowe 2003, Davis 2004, McCarthy 2005). Even as China becomes more urban, the politics of its countryside will continue to be central to the PRC and around the world.
