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While China’s hybrid rural land tenure system has contributed to agricultural development, it is interwoven with rising farmland loss and social conflicts.This book examines the linkages between land tenure, development and governance in the context of China’s development transformation. Drawing on empirical studies, it advocates the exploration of innovative land tenure systems that address the wider determinants: institutions, power, politics and social development. It argues that a land tenure system can only be sustainable when it is compatible with the overall biophysical, social, political and economic conditions. This new institutional lens into the conditions and dynamics of land tenure systems marks a paradigm shift away from those focusing on the narrow meaning of land rights and tenure security strengthening, as these approaches can paradoxically contribute to weaker land and resource governance. Contributing to an enhanced understanding of the challenges China faces in agricultural development and natural resource governance and to the international debates on land tenure reform, this book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, policy-makers and students in development studies, anthropology, sociology, political sciences, law, geography, economics, public administration and other relevant disciplines. The lessons learnt from China also shed light on its global engagement on sustainable development and governance issues.
Photographs and text document disappearing cultural landscapes and lifestyles in rural China, capturing poignant scenes far from Beijing or Shanghai. Just a few kilometers from the glittering skylines of Shanghai and Beijing, we encounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching far beyond the outskirts of the cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishing marketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages, and the sites of mystic rituals, the authors of this book spent seven years exploring, photographing, and observing the vast interior of China, where the majority of Chinese people live in ways virtually unchanged for centuries. China's Vanishing Worlds is an impressive documentation in images and text of modernization's effect on traditional ways of life, and a sympathetic portrait of lives burdened by hardship but blessed by simplicity and tranquility. The scars of China's recent history and the decay of centuries-old traditions are made visible in this volume, but so is the lure and promise of technology and another life for young people. In the next twenty years, an estimated 280 million Chinese villagers will become city dwellers, leaving their ancestral homes in search of urban jobs and opportunities. In striking and evocative color photographs, we see picturesque villages set against a background of rolling hills, planned centuries ago according to the principles of feng shui; a restaurant with bright pink resin chairs and a wide-screen television; traditional buildings preserved by the accident of poverty and isolation; ramshackle rooms decorated with portraits of Chairman Mao; backpack-wearing children walking to school; festivals with elaborately costumed performers; old men playing cards; buyers and sellers at open-air markets. China's Vanishing Worlds offers readers a rare opportunity to glimpse China as it once was, and as it will soon no longer be.
The Rise and Decline and Rise of China: Searching for an Organising Philosophy represents a new and promising approach to Africa/China relations. What is most impressive is that it is an encounter between African and Chinese thought, but this encounter is not just a set of stale comparisons of philosophical beliefs. This study places the concepts and attitudes in both China and Africa in their socio-political contexts, in an attempt to provide a sophisticated, sensitive, and usable history. This attempt yields dividends, especially for the primary audience of Africans, as it gives a way of learning from the vast history of Chinese experience without reducing African experience to insignificance or irrelevance (as has happened so often in dialogues between Africa and the West). This book will be of interest to anyone from within Africa interested in engaging with China as a complex and nuanced place, a place of challenge, creativity, and opportunity.
Running like a red thread through this book are the manifestations of Sino-African relations dating back many centuries. In this way, The Rise and Decline and Rise of China: Searching for an Organising Philosophy takes forward the work MISTRA conducted on the Mapungubwe society, one of the advanced states that existed in southern Africa some 800 years ago. What makes this research report unique, though, is that the treatment of these issues has been undertaken primarily from an African perspective.
Over the last half century, China has evolved from a poor rural country to a geopolitical powerhouse. Rapid urbanization has been at the heart of that transformation, and as migrant laborers have left their villages, what has become of the rural communities that were once the center of economic, social, and cultural life? And how do contemporary Chinese scholars understand those changes? These are the questions that this compelling book answers. Lengshuigou village, located near the Shandong provincial capital of Jinan, was first studied by Japanese social scientists in the early 1940s and then again in the 1980s and 1990s. Building on these rich surveys, this book traces changes from the early twentieth century to the present day in family and lineage, social stratification, personal networks, annual and life cycle rituals, village politics, and elite formation. Drawing on their own large-scale survey of contemporary village households, the authors analyze the physical and institutional changes that have altered the community, as well as the shifts in interpersonal relations and attitudes that have upended centuries-old systems of patriarchy and generational order. This important book presents, for the first time in English, analysis by Chinese sociologists on the radical transformation of Chinese rural society.
Explores the change most of rural China is undergoing via the story of a privately held rice company that has built new roads, introduced organic farming, and constructed apartments for farmers in exchange for their land rights.
This book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date scholarly examination of how China builds international relationships through public diplomacy practices, together with an assessment of the impact of these practices around the world. It explores the sources of China's evolving strategies, how the past influences the present, and the impact of domestic factors that shape China's communication strategies. Including a wide range of detailed examples, the book also discusses how far China is creating new models that will reshape the current landscape of public diplomacy. Chapters 1 and 11 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com.
In recent years China has experienced intense economic development. Previously a rapidly urbanising industrial economy, the country has become a post-industrial economy with a service sector that accounts for almost half the nation’s GDP. This transformation has created many socio-political changes, but key among them is social mobilisation. This book provides a full and systematic analysis of social mobilisation in China, and how its use as part of state capacity has evolved.
Providing an indispensable resource for students, educators, businessmen, and officials investigating the transformative experience of modern China, this book provides a comprehensive summary of the culture, institutions, traditions, and international relations that have shaped today's China. In Modern China, author Xiaobing Li offers a resource far beyond a conventional encyclopedia, providing not only comprehensive coverage of Chinese civilization and traditions, but also addressing the values, issues, and critical views of China. As a result, readers will better understand the transformative experience of the most populous country in the world, and will grasp the complexity of the progress and problems behind the rise of China to a world superpower in less than 30 years. Written by an author who lived in China for three decades, this encyclopedia addresses 16 key topics regarding China, such as its geography, government, social classes and ethnicities, gender-based identities, arts, media, and food, each followed by roughly 250 short entries related to each topic. All the entries are placed within a broad sociopolitical and socioeconomic contextual framework. The format and writing consistency through the book reflects a Chinese perspective, and allows students to compare Chinese with Western and American views.
Four other themes will addressed: politics, economics, the environment and the history of land investments in sub-Saharan Africa.