Across China, many women with rural hukou are systematically denied lucrative village land rights. Village assemblies, ostensibly autonomous local political organizations, decide who is a member of the rural collective and thus...
In a recent essay, Lu Dewen (吕德文, Lǚ Déwén)—a sometimes controversial Wuhan University sociologist whose research focuses on rural governance—argues that bureaucratic formalism, meaningless busywork, and technological hegemony...
“Bridge builder” is normally a high compliment. For one family in Jilin province, however, bridge-building earned them charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” setting off another national debate about the...
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Yu Jianrong (于建嵘), a rural sociologist known for his...
Joe Zhang, the author of “Party Man, Company Man: Is China’s State Capitalism Doomed?” and a...
As part of a continuing series on urbanization in China, Ian Johnson reports for The New York...
The depth of President Xi Jinping’s commitment to reform has come under scrutiny since he took power in March. But in recent comments on an inspection tour of Hubei, he spoke about the need for far-reaching reforms in...
China researcher Mi Shih offers her insight on the new approach to rural development launched by the new regime in 2012, called chengzhenhua, or literally “city- and town-ification”. From The China Story: Chinese...
So far at the 18th Party Congress, observers have found few signs that point to substantial political reforms under the new leadership. But while Chinese political insiders debate the merits of reforming the system from the top,...
NPR revisits the village of Xiaogang, which, at the height of Maoism in China, wrote up a secret contract which allowed farmers to keep a portion of the crops they grew. Now, 34 years later, Xiaogang is widely known as the...
The Standing Committee of the 11th National People’s Congress, China’s top legislative body, closed its ninth session on Saturday. The Standing Committee approved several new laws, including one on handling rural...
From Economic Observer Online: Ma Yonghong, 25, exudes a shrewdness and maturity inconsistent with his age. Scarred by two unsuccessful attempts to shake up local politics in his mountain hometown in Shaanxi, he still harbored...
In the Times, Rosemary Righter writes about the recent reforms in land ownership and puts them in the context of the recent economic slowdown: The communist leadership has been tiptoeing towards more enlightened policies for...
The four-day meeting of the Party’s Central Committee was aimed to thrash out policies in an effort to tackle economic instabilities. Reuters reports: “The most important thing is to handle our country’s own...
Xinhua reports on the two-day rural work conference that ended yesterday: China concluded the annual central rural work conference on Sunday with a pledge to enhance rural infrastructure construction, promote stable development of agriculture and facilitate a sustained income growth for farmers next year. The pledge should be carried out in 2008 and a certain […]
From China.org.cn: On August 20, a large-scale campaign involving tens of thousands of officials was launched in southwest China’s Sichuan Province. These officials, used to working in urban government agencies, were asked to move their desks to the backward rural areas for next two years. Besides their desks, they are expected to bring the villages […]
“If they force us out of our homes, we’ll beat them up. Like peasant rebels in history, there’s nothing else we can do. With sticks and bars, we’ll lock them in the house and beat them to death. Then...
From Financial Times: In designing his economic policy programme for the next five years, President Hu Jintao is well advised to seek counsel from someone virtually unknown to those Chinese who came of age in the 1990s. He is Wan Li, 91 years old and still intellectually alert. Mr Wan was a special guest at […]
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