City Versus Countryside in Mao's China

Jeremy Brown is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Simon Fraser University. He is co-editor, with Paul G. Pickowicz, of Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China (2007) and has published articles in Late Imperial China and The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies.

'This is a well-written, often bitterly ironic, account of an extraordinary period in the development of modern China, but one which, in many ways, built the booming economy that we are confronted with in the second decade of the twenty-first century. As Brown concludes, the shadow of the Maoist era still casts itself across events even today, and this book does an excellent job of reminding us of this.' Kerry Brown, Asian Affairs

• Introduction; 1. The city leads the village: governing Tianjin in the early 1950s; 2. Eating, moving, and working; 3. Tianjin's great leap: urban survival, rural starvation; 4. The great downsizing of 1961–3; 5. The four cleanups and urban youth in Tianjin's hinterland; 6. Purifying the city: the deportation of political outcasts during the Cultural Revolution; 7. Neither urban nor rural: in-between spaces in the 1960s and 1970s; 8. Staging Xiaojinzhuang: the urban occupation of a model village, 1974–8; Epilogue.