Nick Smith (Barnard College)

The past two decades have seen an epochal shift in Chinese urbanization, with new development programs that aim for the near-total urbanization of the nation’s territory and population. These policies are fundamentally changing the nature of rural life and the Chinese social contract. China’s villages, messy and imperfect institutions that have anchored the lives and livelihoods of rural people for generations, are being replaced by high-rise new towns, ecological protection zones, historical tourism sites, and industrialized farms. These rural simulacra reflect planners’ and policy-makers’ urban imaginations of what the rural should be and have more to do with serving urban consumers than ensuring rural welfare. Drawing on more than a decade of research in China’s villages, Smith explores the implications of these new policies for rural people and their increasingly precarious urban future.