Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. 324 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$27.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-5179-1092-1.
In the 2010s, as their houses gave way to new real estate developments, inhabitants of Hailong village in western China began to speak of ghosts in their midst. Just a few years earlier, visions of shared prosperity had inspired many of them to support their ambitious village cadres’ struggle for village-led development. Why did the construction of high-rise buildings in a picturesque rural landscape give birth to haunting spectral appearances?
Nick R. Smith’s The End of the Village is a vivid ethnographic account of the sociospatial transformations constituting urbanization in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It inquires into how planning categories and local actors shape the meanings and practices unfolding under the umbrella of “urban-rural coordination,” the party-state approach to redeeming critically unequal development between rural and urban China since the early 2000s. The struggles over the future and the ultimate fate of Hailong village is an exceptional yet instructive case that chronicles the rapid transformations at China’s rural-urban edge.
Engaging both urban studies and area studies literature, the book investigates urbanization in China as a contingent product of a generative dialectical process between “the processual transcendence of urban categories and their reflexive rearticulation” (236) by various actors. It proposes the concept of “disjunctural urbanization” to capture the “dynamic tension between urban categories and urban processes [which] generates urbanization” (227) and redistributes resources in favour of, yet always outside total control of, the politically and economically powerful. The book argues, in stark contrast to the depoliticized and naturalizing official party-state rhetoric of moving towards improved rural-urban relations, that urban-rural coordination resulted in “the near-total urbanization of China’s population and territory and the incipient end of the village as a meaningful form of sociospatial organization in contemporary China” (7). The book’s argument is grounded in a rich collection of materials on social as well as spatial dimensions that are relevant to the narratives of actors shaping urbanization in Hailong village. Between 2010 and 2015, Smith conducted 18 months of fieldwork, led over 200 interviews, and engaged in participant observation as well as spatial analysis.
In six chapters, the book presents actors and their practices at three different yet highly interrelated levels along a “vertical slice through the Chinese polity” (33), namely party-state officials at the municipal level of Chongqing, local village cadres, and inhabitants of Hailong village. In the first three chapters, each level’s practices around urban-rural categorization and spatial planning is treated separately. Starting at the municipal level, readers learn about how officials tried to make sense of urban-rural coordination by operationalizing rural space in categories fit for the rationales of urban planning (chapter 1). In the second chapter, ambitious and well-connected party cadres in Hailong village attract national attention as they experiment with village-driven development rather than being subsumed by the advancing city. Finally, readers meet members of the local village community and understand how their livelihoods are intimately reliant on the sociospatial fabric of Hailong (chapter 3). The second half of the book covers the negotiations and conflicts between different categorizations and actors that bring certain plans to fruition while promised futures of improved welfare for villagers are pushed out of existence. Chapter 4 focuses on the “fuzzy science” of accommodating “competing demands of political expedience and scientific rationality” (139) in the categorization of land in municipal spatial planning. Yet, despite what was heralded as “self-urbanization” (180) by village cadres and their successful protection of the administrative village status, turning villagers into shareholders of corporatized real estate development facilitated the hollowing out of the sociospatial fabric of the village (chapter 5). Chapter 6 illustrates how the process of turning Hailong into a “village-as-city” (195) moved it into the remit of party-state controlled urbanization that accelerated the demise of community and actively eroded its resources, such as informal land-uses and reciprocal social relations. The chapter concludes with a contemplation of villagers’ emerging “ghost talk” (201). Elusive mentions of ghosts wandering new building sites—where village houses gave way to bulldozers and grave sites as eerie traces of former village life amongst new development—are the last refuge of silenced disillusionment at “the end of the village.” After a decade of rapid, exclusionary transformations of their village, even previously strong supporters of village development can only fall back on survival strategies such as settling at the margins of new Hailong City or making their exit.
The careful qualitative treatment of the sociospatial dimension of the contemporary urbanization processes is a welcomed complement to wider recent scholarship that pays attention to sociomaterial transformations more broadly. To further discuss the fate of rural China and “the village,” the book’s focus on how rural actors navigate and live across rural-urban categories might be read in productive dialogue with recent sociotechnical accounts that also defy both linear progress narratives and romanticizing depictions of rurality, such as Lena Kaufmann’s on migration patterns and agricultural practices (Rural-urban Migration and Agro-technological Change in Post-reform China, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021) or Gonçalo Santos’s work on technocratic modernization and the intimate realm of rural families (Chinese Village Life Today: Building Families in an Age of Transition, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2021). Beyond the PRC, the book situates its conceptual work of disjunctural urbanization within an “Asian agenda for urban studies” that decentres as well as reexamines the European and Anglo-American experiences of urbanization. The book offers inspiration to embark upon this sketched-out path in future comparative and conceptual work.
China scholars will find the nuanced, multiscale case study with its sensitivity to local contingencies below depoliticizing party-state rhetoric a fruitful addition to the growing body of literature on urbanization and rural development. The findings of each chapter are well situated within the existing literature, which makes this book highly readable and informative for urban studies scholars less familiar with the context of the PRC. Different readerships will appreciate the maps and photographs that substantiate the sociospatial arguments throughout the text. The lucid argumentation and enjoyable writing style make the book a valuable resource for undergraduate and graduate teaching in area studies, urban studies, and in interdisciplinary contexts.
Jelena Große-Bley
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin