ABSTRACT
With a fifth of the world’s population and one of the largest economies in the world, China has been praised by the international community for greatly increasing literacy, reducing infant and maternal mortality, boosting the rate of economic growth, and improving other social and economic welfare indicators. These successes, however, cannot mask the fact that China’s rural development remains extremely uneven: coastal areas flourish while some inland regions are little changed from the days before the Communist takeover in 1949. China’s domestic stability and role on the world stage will depend, in large part, on its ability to bring the remaining hundreds of millions of mostly rural people out of poverty. The underlying motivation for this book is to understand the complex processes by which some Chinese villages have come to prosper while neighboring villages lag behind. Its methodology, however, is to focus not on the well-known macroregional disparities in rural living standards, but on differences among neighboring villages—where the disparities are stark but the factors accounting for them are more appropriate for controlled analysis.
