This book presents a new perspective on attempts by the contemporary Chinese government to transform the diverse conditions found in countless rural villages into what the state's social welfare program deems 'socialist new villages'. Lili Lai argues that an ethnographic focus on the specifics of village life can help destabilize China's persistent rural-urban divide and help contribute to more effective welfare intervention to improve health and hygienic conditions of village life.
- Cover
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1. The Local Intimacies of China’s Rural-Urban Divide
- I. The rural-urban divide as a mobile and relative dyad
- II. Seeing like a state: A sketch of the making of rural-urban divide
- III. The discourse of “the three-nong question”
- IV. Situating the research, methodology and theoretical basis
- An Overview of Shang Village
- 2. Dirt, Hygiene, Habitus
- I. House, home, and family
- II. Daily hygiene
- III. Weisheng
- IV. New house, new village
- V. Unavoidable trash
- VI. Uncanny modernization
- 3. Immanent Sociality: Open-ended Belonging
- I. The Xiaogang Village paradox
- II. Society of familiars
- III. Everyday sociality
- IV. The art of social relations
- V. Migration: A general background
- VI. Migrant life: Reproducing belonging
- VII. New village, new families
- 4. Culture Plaza: Why Culture? Whose Plaza?
- I. Building the Culture Plaza
- II. Cultivating a new type of peasant who has wenhua
- III. Planting poplars to develop the economy
- IV. Interpreting the “scriptures” from above
- V. Everyday life and the travels of “culture”
- VI. Discerning wenhua, the cultural
- 5. The Uncanny New Village
- References
- Index
- List of Figures
- Figure 1 – The location of Zhaozhou County in China
- Figure 2 – Ayi’s side house and main house
- Figure 3 – Ayi’s hall room
- Figure 4 – Ayi cleaning the hall room
- Figure 5 – Ayi’s kitchen
- Figure 6 – The pit latrine in Li Shu’s old house
- Figure 7 – The well and the drainage from inside to outside Ayi’s yard
- Figure 8 – Shaoli doing laundry
- Figure 9 – Ayi’s yard and the washstand outside kitchen
- Figure 10 – Li Shu’s old house and new house (the one with green door)
- Figure 11 – The hall room in a new-style house
- Figure 12 – The trash spot and the pit next to Li Shu’s house
- Figure 13 – A collective latrine by the ditch
- Figure 14 – Trash in the roadside ditch
- Figure 15 – The dirt path outside Ayi’s yard, and the pit that collects water from her drainage pipe
- Figure 16 – The village recycling business
- Figure 17 – Li Shu’s clinic
- Figure 18 – The other “neighborhood center”
- Figure 19 – The polluted river in Wenzhou migrant community
- Figure 20 – Old people chatting in the Wenzhou village
- Figure 21 – Dorm rooms
- Figure 22 – A line of locked faucets outside a migrant residence
- Figure 23 – Ping’s old side house alongside the new house
- Figure 24 – The Yellow Dragon Master
- Figure 25 – From the Old Pit to Lotus Pond
- Figure 26 – Laboring on the Culture Plaza
- Figure 27 – The Temple of Yellow Dragon
- Figure 28 – Paozi hui: preparation
- Figure 29 – Paozi hui: the show day
- Figure 30 – The Wenhua Guangchang in 2010
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