Contemporary Chinese rural life is placed in sharp theoretical and practical focus in this book. State-of-the-art techniques and perspectives are combined to take the reader into Xiaocun, a small village on the east bank of the Dianchi Lake in Kunming City. In 2003, the author published the book Crime and Punishment: The Story of Xiaocun (1931–1997), which dealt with disputes, mediation and punishment in the village following the legal anthropology tradition. At that time, neither the villagers nor the author foresaw the vast changes that were to appear a few years later. Their main economic activity then was growing vegetables and flowers; urbanisation was tsunami-like in its speed and impact. Land requisition for urban development was so swift that five years later, in 2008, there was no farmland left. Instead, there were many landmark real estate and development projects. Xiaocun has become the centre of an enlarged Kunming City. Observers, including the Xiaocun residents, are unavoidably shocked at the changes to the physical landscape in the wake of its rapid urbanisation. This book, Topography of Politics in Rural China: The Story of Xiaocun, reports the author's revisits to the village starting in early 2007. In the past few years of research on this village, the author deeply felt that the problems that make people passionate are fully exposed through issues surrounding land and housing. Well written in narrative, this book tells the story of Xiaocun in this new century from the perspective of topography, exploring the peasantry and its relations to the state in more fundamental terms.

A political scientist and an urban architect explore China’s odyssey to become an ecological civilization and transform its massive, unsustainable, urbanization process into one that creates hundreds of eco-cities. The resulting From Eco-Cities to Sustainable City-Regions is the first book-length study combining analysis of politics and power, urban design and planning issues derived from the co-authors’ interdisciplinary research, and on-site fieldwork from their political science and architectural area specialties.

Following the end of World War II in 1945, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) spent the next three decades carrying out agrarian reform among nearly one-third of the world’s peasants. This book presents a new perspective on the first step of this reform, when the CCP helped redistribute over 40 million hectares of land to over three hundred million impoverished peasants in the nationwide land reform movement. This land reform, the founding myth of the People’s Republic of China (1949–present) and one of the largest redistributions of wealth and power in history, embodies the idea that an equal distribution of property will lead to social and political equality. Power Over Property argues that in practice, however, the opposite occurred: the redistribution of political power led to a more equal distribution of property. China’s land reform was accomplished not only through the state’s power to define the distribution of resources, but also through village communities prioritizing political entitlements above property rights. Through the systematic analysis of never-before studied micro-level data on practices of land reform in over five hundred villages, Power Over Property demonstrates how land reform primarily involved the removal of former power holders, the mobilization of mass political participation, and the creation of a new social-political hierarchy. Only after accomplishing all of this was it possible to redistribute land. This redistribution, moreover, was determined by political relations to a new structure of power, not just economic relations to the means of production. The experience of China’s land reform complicates our understanding of the relations between economic, social, and political equality. On the one hand, social equality in China was achieved through political, not economic means. On the other hand, the fundamental solution was a more effective hierarchy of fair entitlements, not equal rights. This book ultimately suggests that focusing on economic equality alone may obscure more important social and political dynamics in the development of the modern world.

In 2012, the Communist Party of China (CPC) inaugurated the Xi Jinping era when it elected him to be the General Secretary of the CPC. The following year Xi was elected President of the People’s Republic of China. The Xi Jinping era has seen a remarkable transformation of Chinese foreign policy, which has been adjusted to facilitate the achievement of what Xi has proclaimed as “the Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative has become a major element of Chinese economic diplomacy, while the Chinese military-industrial complex under his leadership has strengthened China’s extensive claims in the South China Sea with reclamation works and the installation of military facilities on its occupied islands. This edited volume will focus on the countries of Southeast Asia and examine how their relations with China have been transformed in the Xi Jinping era.

Wu explores how farmers have organised themselves to initiate technical innovation, and considers communication networks and co-operative mechanisms.

The rural market in China is not only the venue where 60 per cent of the country's 1.3 billion inhabitants buy their daily necessities and sell agricultural products, but also a key area of conflict between government control and liberalization policies. Previous research on the topic has adopted a purely economic perspective, focusing on macro issues such as price control and grain procurement. This book focuses instead on peasants - the major participants in rural marketing activities. Illustrated by two comparative case studies with a diverse level of development from the Pearl River Delta - one of the most prosperous regions in coastal China - this book investigates the market hierarchy, its change of functions and the interactions between peasants and market outlets. In doing so, it shows how China's rural market district has changed since the Reform, and how these changes affect the marketing activities of peasants.

This study brings Africa into the mainstream of studies of state-formation in agrarian societies. Territorial integration is the challenge: institutional linkages and political deals that bind center and periphery are the solutions. In African countries, rulers at the center are forced to bargain with regional elites to establish stable mechanisms of rule and taxation. Variation in regional forms of social organization make for differences in the interests and political strength of regional leaders who seek to maintain or enhance their power vis-a-vis their followers and subjects, and also vis-a-vis the center.