A comprehensive analysts of China's rural reforms, this book links local experiences to national policy, showing the dynamic tension in the reform process among state policy, local cadre power and self-interest, and the peasants' search for economic growth. Key topics covered include: the responsibility system, privatization and changing property rights, industrialization, social conflict, cadre corruption, urban-rural relations, conflict over land, rural urbanization, and the impact of globalization. The introduction skillfully integrates the themes that run throughout this work and the concluding chapter focuses on current and future problems in rural China.

David Zweig

Introduction: Scholarly Debates and Rural Development as the Countryside Moves into the Twenty-First Century; I: Restructuring Property Rights and Decollectivization; 1: Opposition to Change in Rural China; 2: Decollectivization in China, 1977-1983; 3: Explaining Diversity in Rural China; II: Conflicts, Norms, and the Search for New Institutions; 4: Prosperity and Conflict in Post-Mao Rural China; 5: Struggling over Land in China; 6: Law, Contracts, and Economic Modernization; III: Markets, Hierarchy, and the Restructuring of Urban-Rural Relations; 7: From Village to City; 8: Dilemmas of Partial Reform; 9: Urbanizing Rural China; IV: Industrialization and Internationalization: Rural China Turns Outward; 10: Rural Industry; 11: Internationalizing China's Countryside; 12: "Developmental Communities" on China's Coast; V: Reviewing the Record; 13: Development, Freedom, and the Future of Rural China