ABSTRACT
Chenggong, a former farming county adjacent to Kunming, China, is undergoing a rapid urbanizing process as the Chinese state redesignates it as the transnational hub of Southwest China connecting to Southeast Asia and South Asia. Urbanization engenders the transformation of farmland into urban space and of farming populations into urban low-wage earners. In this context, this chapter narrates the land-lost peasants’ experiences of the urbanization and their actions to resume their farming livelihood as an entrepreneurial endeavor. While it discusses the meanings of being modern among the former peasants, this chapter proposes two conceptual terms – ‘floating niche’ and ‘circular livelihood’ – to facilitate an argument that ‘floating’ signifies a creative adaptation of the land-lost peasants’ agentive responses to uprootedness, dispossession, and deterritorialization.
