Rural Renaissance and Reconstruction Movement in China: culture-based intervention, post-rurality, planetary urbanisation

Dr Qian, Junxi   (Principal Investigator)

18

2018-09-01

85000

Rural Renaissance and Reconstruction Movement in China: culture-based intervention, post-rurality, planetary urbanisation

culture-based intervention, planetary urbanisation, post-rurality, Rural Renaissance and Reconstruction, Rurality

Human Geography

201801172004

Hui Oi Chow Trust Fund - General Award

2017

Completed

To understand the uneven geographies of post-reform China, one important conceptual register is urban-rural duality (Whyte, 2010). This concept, and the academic discourses revolving around it, underscore principally the disempowerment of the countryside by urban-centred industrialisation and modernisation, and the barring of rural people from urban standards of living and welfare. The thesis of urban-rural duality has lots of insights to offer. In particular, scholars have criticised urban-centred accumulation as akin to what Harvey (2004) terms ""accumulation by dispossession"", and bemoaned the dire consequences inflicted on rural communities: the exodus of economically active population for urban employment; vacancies and disinvestment in the built environment; decline and devaluation of rural economy; the loss of communal liveliness, solidarity and cohesion, etc. Limited work, however, has been done to analyse the ways in which grassroots actors, corporate interests and the state re-define the countryside as an object of active intervention for the purpose of social, economic and cultural re-flourishment. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there have been concerted voices among intellectuals, grassroots activists and civil society actors in China, who advocate that rural China must take on a path towards social and economic sustainability. They appeal that, to remedy rural recession, we must transcend the narrow focus on development, income increase and modernisation, which typifies state agendas of rural development and urban-rural coordination. Their outlook of rural sustainability insists on: (1) alternative economic and social practices to the rule of market and capital; and (2) the need for rural collectives to claim sovereignty over local resources and assets, so that the countryside is not easily drained and deprived by urban-centred industrial modernity. Above all, this is a decidedly new vision of regional development in rural China, which asserts that rural revival must be more inventive and imaginative than the lopsided focus on industrialisation and modernisation (Wen et al., 2003). Scholars and activists spearheading this campaign have coined terminologies such as rural renaissance (鄉村復興) and rural reconstruction (鄉村建設) to describe their ethos and philosophies, and orchestrated many experimental projects across rural China. Central to this nexus of intellectual debates and real-world engagements is the recognition that, for rural renaissance and reconstruction (RRR hereafter) to yield substantive returns to rural communities, effective approaches need to be sought to resurrect the now moribund rural autonomy, communal self-governance, collective cultural identity and grassroots participation, all of which are relished as quintessential attributes of traditional Chinese rural vernacular (Li, 2017). A particularly notable new development since 2008 is that more and more RRR initiatives have been in the form of culture-based interventions; that is, the injection of cultural elements, activities and vigour is seen as a route to communal solidarity, and a springboard for social and economic revival. The turn to culture is not a surprising move, not only because the ""expediency of culture"" (Yúdice, 2003), namely the use of culture as a resource for governance, political mobilisation and economic development, is now a global phenomenon, but also because in the rhetorics of RRR, the rural question is very much framed as one of cultural identity, belonging and values. Yet, culture-based RRR also raises theoretical questions beyond the contour of mainstream literatures on culture-based development. In particular, existing RRR experiments in China are predominantly broached and led by intellectuals, social workers, artists, architects and business people from urban backgrounds. As a result, culture-based RRR is inextricably enmeshed in heavy traffics and circuits of capital, knowledge, technology, lifestyles and policy discourses between the urban and the rural. In this vein, most culture-based initiatives do not discredit development, modernity and market outright, but seek to chart an equilibrium between rural cultures and urban modernity, between rural self-governance and broader political economic forces. This leads us to engage with two widely debated concepts in urban and regional research to cast light on a theorisation of RRR: first, post-rurality, which argues that the countryside is not an isolated entity but enmeshed in broader spatial-temporal contours of political economies, social relations, and mobile cultures (Halfacree, 2009); and second, planetary urbanisation, which argues that the urban no longer refers to delimited territorial units but a decentred, pervasive spatial logic extending increasingly into non-urban areas (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). The proposed project examines three types of culture-based RRR in China - art-based intervention; vernacular architectural experiments; minshuku-style rural hospitality. Through detailed collection and systematic analysis of second-hand data, this project chooses not to focus on a select number of case studies but develop an overview and critical synthesis of culture-based RRR initiatives across different contexts. Theoretically, this project pursues two major questions. First, it considers how culture-based initiatives catalyse the re-invention of rural cultures, and the transformation of rural socialities. In what specific ways do culture-based interventions empower rural communities so that they are more resourceful, cohesive and participatory? Through discourses, outlooks and practices underlying culture-based interventions, in what ways are rural communities steered to navigate between communal interests and broader political economic processes, between the pursuit of authentic rural cultures and the need to engage with modernisation, development and urban standards of civility and good life? Second, this project starts from the theses of post-rurality and planetary urbanisation to develop a re-conceptualisation of Chinese rurality beyond academic discourses of urban-rural duality and the disempowerment of countryside by urbanisation. Indeed, the dense traffics of capital, people, knowledge and cultures between the urban and the rural push rural transition to unpredictable, divergent trails, and this project aims to account for the heterogeneous forces and processes that bring about both opportunities and constraints for rural revitalisation and communal self-governance. This addition of geographical perspectives is to revert a key fallacy in many sociological and anthropological discourses of rural China, which is depicted as an archipelago of underdevelopment and pristine cultures outside urban-based circulations and mobilities. Theorisation of Chinese rurality must account for the dynamic dialectic between local specificities and translocal processes of market, modernity, development and urbanisation. References Brenner N, Schmid C. 2015. Towards a new epistemology of the urban? City, 19(2-3): 151-182. Halfacree, K. 2009. Rurality and post-rurality. In: Kitchin R, Thrift N (eds.), International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, pp. 449-456. Oxford: Elsevier. Harvey, D. 2004. The 'new' imperialism: accumulation by dispossession. Socialist Register, 40: 63-87. Li, CP. 2017. Backgrounds, significances and methods of rural renaissance in China: reflections from a practitioner. Exploration and Free Views, (12): 63-70. (in Chinese) Wen, T et al. 2003. Rural reconstruction in Mainland China. Open Times, (2): 29-38. (in Chinese) Whyte, MK (ed.). 2010. One country, two systems: rural-urban inequality in contemporary China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Yúdice, G. 2003. The expediency of culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.