Abstract
In The End of the Village: Planning the Urbanization of Rural China, Nick Smith examines the last two decades of China’s fraught and imbalanced rural-urban relationship. Focusing on the Hailong Village in the Chongqing Municipality—a region in China’s southwest that was designated in the mid-2000s as an experimental site for an ambitious “urban-rural coordination” program—the book ethnographically shows how a policy program officially framed as a massive redistribution of urban resources for rural development ended up “extending state-led forms of urban development to rural areas” (p. 6). This process involved not only further concentration of rural populations in towns and cities, but also “the transformation of villages into rural simulacra, which may still have a rural aesthetic and may even be formally categorized as rural villages, but which increasingly function as extensions of an urban way of life rather than as the socio-spatial milieux that support villagers’ survival” (p. 7). “Urban–rural coordination thus entails the end of the village as a meaningful form of social organization, collective action, and economic survival in contemporary China” (p. 14).
After outlining these arguments in the introduction, the author spends the first three empirical chapters documenting how various groups of actors made sense of rural development: Chongqing’s municipal planners sought to reconceptualize rural villages as extensions of the existing urban system (Chapter One), Hailong’s village leaders strived to enhance their authority and wealth by building a village-scale “growth machine” in which re-collectivized land was cheaply supplied for industrial development (Chapter Two), and Hailong’s ordinary residents nurtured vibrant community and dense social ties to survive in a system of urban-rural inequality and persistent exploitation (Chapter Three).
The next three empirical chapters again move from the scale of municipal planning to village politics to villagers’ lived experiences, investigating the political contestation (Chapter Four) and policy maneuvering (Chapter Five) triggered by the “urban-rural coordination” initiative and resulting in a fundamental redefinition of Hailong’s developmental model, and villagers’ sense of displacement and frustration caused by the program (Chapter Six). In the end, Hailong’s “socio-spatial transformation in the service of investors emptied Hailong of its substantive content as an organization of collective welfare and excluded the interests of the very inhabitants it was intended to serve” (p. 196). The scholarly implications of the ethnographic accounts are further fleshed out in a concluding chapter.
Because the book offers an empirically rich and conceptually versatile ethnography—moving between, juxtaposing, and putting into conversation different actors’ perspectives on multiple geographic and political scales—it appeals to a vastly diverse audience. Scholars across a wide range of disciplines could all easily get excited about this book—albeit for different reasons. Scholars in urban and regional studies would find the book’s proposal for an “Asian agenda for urban studies” (p. 234), emphasizing the dialectical tension between urban categories and processes, an engaging one. Those with a background in urban planning or science, technology, and society (STS) studies would pay great attention to the author’s discussion of how planning, as both a “scientific” profession and a regime of knowledge, was intimately intertwined with and shaped by political struggles. Scholars in China studies, on the other hand, would surely appreciate the way this book synthesizes and extends the rich literature on a major topic in the field: village politics and rural grassroots contention in contemporary China.
As a political sociologist primarily interested in the dynamics of political economy in the global South, I would like to highlight three aspects of the book that are particularly generative for future scholarship. First, the book provides a vivid and meticulous account of the tension, fragmentation, conflict, and contingency surrounding the Chinese state. The reader is able to see how actors variously positioned in or connected to the state mobilized different resources to defend their interests, engaged in struggle and compromise, and transformed policy projects beyond what they were supposed to mean in official rhetoric. Multiple political logics and sources of authority clashed in unexpected ways. This account is consistent with the recent “disaggregating turn” in the sociology of the state, which sees the state not as a monolithic authority but as a fragmented and contested terrain (Morgan and Orloff 2017). The rich empirical material in the book provides an opening for further theoretical development in this direction, challenging us to thoroughly rethink what “the state” is in a supposedly “authoritarian” context, even though the author themself has not exploited this opportunity and largely clung to a conceptual vocabulary referring to the “party-state” as a monolithic entity.
Second, between Chapters Two and Five, the Hailong Village is shown to have undergone a dramatic transformation in its model of development: from one anchored in industry, attracting both manufacturing capital and migrant industrial workers, to one anchored in real estate, centering residential and commercial property development. A detailed account is provided of how this transformation was actualized as village leaders maneuvered policy loopholes to solidify their economic and political power, but this account also raises a broader question that the book itself leaves unexplored: how Hailong’s transformation was actually a microcosm of a sweeping, more fundamental shift in China’s entire political economy over the last two decades from labor-driven to land-driven, from a heavy reliance on exploitation in industrial production to a focus on highly speculative property development, as Chuang (2020) argues. The rich material in this book could therefore be repurposed to interrogate the nature, causes, and consequences of this broader political-economic transformation, which in turn could serve as a vantage point to comprehend the latest dynamics of global capitalism.
Third, the book’s overarching argument and empirical accounts call for a re-engagement with a core question in development studies: what does “development” really mean, especially in the rural context (Ferguson 1994)? Pushing us to look beyond conventional economic indicators such as resource transfer, infrastructure construction, and GDP growth, the author shows how policies that were supposedly meant to jumpstart rural development and improve villagers’ economic well-being—such as Chongqing’s land and household registration reforms—actually ended up expropriating rural communities of indigenous growth initiatives and tearing down their social fabric. Parallel to the argument made on an international scale by dependency theorists, rural “development” could well lead to increased dependency of the countryside on urban centers. One could further ask: what would the alternative be? What would it mean for rural communities to take charge of a developmental process that preserves some sort of village autonomy from the sweep of urbanization? The book does not provide answers to these questions, but it does help start new, thought-provoking, and potentially agenda-setting conversations, which more than qualifies it for a great piece of scholarship.