City versus countryside in Mao's China
Subtitle: negotiating the divide
By: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781107024045
Subjects: HISTORY / Asia / General; Economic conditions; Rural-urban relations; Social conditions; Rural-urban divide; Regional disparities; Tianjin (China)
Description: "A powerful work of grassroots history showing how China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the policies of Mao Zedong, which pitted city dwellers against villagers"--

"The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. As this powerful work of grassroots history argues, the origins of China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the Mao Zedong era. While Mao pledged to remove the gap between the city worker and the peasant, his revolutionary policies misfired and ended up provoking still greater discrepancies between town and country, usually to the disadvantage of villagers. Through archival sources, personal diaries, untapped government dossiers, and interviews with people from cities and villages in northern China, the book recounts their personal experiences, showing how they retaliated against the daily restrictions imposed on their activities while traversing between the city and the countryside. Vivid and harrowing accounts of forced and illicit migration, the staggering inequity of the Great Leap Famine, and political exile and deportation during the Cultural Revolution reveal how Chinese people fought back against policies that pitted city dwellers against villagers"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 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 1961-1963; 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, 1974-1978; epilogue.