ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a critique of the linear progression development paradigm and modernisation discourses outlined in Chapter 5. It then goes on to show how China's rural margins and urban centres have been relationally mutually constituted, necessitating the marginalisation of the countryside to produce urban modernity. This is followed by an illustration of how microcredit and other development interventions implicitly reproduce patterns of marginality by facilitating the extraction of resources from rural areas; by exacerbating patterns of socioeconomic exclusion; and by aggravating already precarious livelihoods through exploitation and risk transfer. The chapter concludes by analysing how the heterogeneous implementation of microcredit ultimately reflects, magnifies, and/or transforms unequal relationships of power, thereby facilitating de-marginalisation for some while feeding into undercurrents of marginalisation for others.
