On Rural Society and Village Governance in Contemporary China

The rapid marketization of rural labor, agricultural products, and land has dramatically reshaped village life and its structures of governance. This volume, edited by Alexander F. Day, collects twelve key essays translated from Chinese on this transformation of rural society and governance over the past 20 years. These essays, originally published in the leading Chinese-language journal Open Times (开放时代), cover class differentiation, the atomization of rural society, the hollowing out of rural governance, land transfer, rural activism against marketization, lineage politics, the role of agricultural cooperatives, the transformation of small peasant farmers into wage labor, and the disintegration and expansion of peasant petitioning, all exploring the transformation in rural China during the post-socialist era.