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This chapter provides a brief economic history of the transition to a market economy in China. It begins in Section 3.2, with a brief account of the period of central planning. Section 3.3 examines the evolution of rural reform, and Section 3.4 does the same for urban reform. Section 3.5 considers those aspects of policies and institutions that relate to the economy as a whole. Section 3.6 examines the underlying political economy of the economic reform process. Section 3.7 draws conclusions about the relationships between policies and institutions, on the one hand, and economic growth, on the other hand, and explains how the results of this chapter will inform the analysis of later chapters.

Chapter 8 broadens the scope of this book and makes programmatic connections both between the urbanized local state and China's emerging territorial order, and between civic territoriality and the prospects of grassroots mobilization in Chinese cities and the countryside. Both issues are at the center of the recent property crisis and rural reform in China. On the former, the author proposes that while state power is restructured through the double movement of power decentralization and reconcentration among competing local states, leading cities of metropolitan regions rise to dominate the new territorial order. On the latter, two theoretical connections can be made between civic territoriality and social activism. The first one responds to debates on the relative importance of community and class in urban social movements; the second examines rural collectivism and suggests that while much‐criticized collective land ownership persists in China, peasants' collective organization and identity have been paradoxically dismantled to a significant extent.

This chapter shows another equally important reason for the Liberals' faltering rural support during 1886-1899: their abandonment, on a national level, of the language of rural reform that had helped them win victory in 1885.The first two sections briefly discuss the reasons for the Liberals' neglect of rural questions after 1885, and the alienating impact that this neglect had on voters in the counties. The remaining sections focus on the topics that dominated county politics in the absence of a compelling national agenda: agricultural depression and village depopulation in the predominantly agrarian constituencies, and the concerns of industrial labour in such semi-urbanized divisions as Holmfirth. The chapter argues that, in the constituencies where the Liberals retained significant public support, their popularity was usually brought by the efforts of a single Liberal candidate or MP who played an active role in promoting reforms of local significance.

This chapter focuses on the economic transition of China which began with the implementation of economic reforms in 1978. China followed the path of the so-called ‘dual track transition’, which means that the old system was not dismantled until the new system (market-oriented non-state sector) had developed and become sufficiently strong to take over. Two reforms in the early stages of the transition made this possible: rural reform and market liberalization. The chapter also discusses some predictions of the likely emerging features of the Chinese economy during the next phases of transition.

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, intellectuals called for urban youth to go “among the people” and “to the countryside.” While reformers were interested in encouraging the remaking and “self-transformation” of their peasant reform subjects, rural reform also remade and redefined young intellectuals, who used their rural experiences to define a shared national culture with their peasant compatriots. Through examinations of foundational rural education initiatives at the Xiaozhuang School outside Nanjing and the Chinese Vocational Education Association (both spearheaded by prominent Chinese educators strongly influenced by the American progressive movement), the chapter demonstrates that young intellectuals were as focused on using their time in the countryside to remake themselves as they were concerned with remaking rural people.

This chapter analyzes Chinese rural development in the reform era. Before the 2000s, China's reform-era agricultural policy could be summed up as decollectivization followed by resource extraction and neglect. Between 1978 and 1984, the replacement of the people's commune system with household contract farming resulted in historic poverty reduction. After 1984, however, central government investment and growth rates in agriculture started to decline. As was the case during the Maoist period, local governments were expected to be self-reliant and raise their own funds for development. Under pressure to impress higher-level officials with economic achievements, many local governments resorted to imposing heavy taxes on farmers. These went toward developing industry instead of providing public goods. In 2004, China had entered a new era in which “industry should nurture agriculture, and the cities should support the countryside.” Two policies in particular came to embody this principle. First, after a period of experimentation with rural tax reform, the central government decided in 2006 to completely eliminate agricultural taxes. Second, a policy called Building a New Socialist Countryside was introduced as the top domestic priority of the eleventh five-year plan (2006–2010).

In 1980, reform moved to the countryside. In 1958, China had achieved collectivization by imposing administrative directives and Mao Zedong had consolidated the cooperatives into people’s communes, featuring “large-scale production under greater public ownership.” However, incentive mechanisms were lacking. A precipitous decline in agricultural production ensued, leaving the rural areas in poverty, resulting in the Great Famine, and creating a dual social structure dividing urban and rural societies. For more than twenty years, farmers tried to implement household contracting that would allow them to rent land from the communes and then to farm it independently. Finally, in 1980, based on their appeals and with some support from central leaders, the Communist Party Central Committee allowed farmers to select their own modes of production, instituting a shift to household contracting. This greatly facilitated agricultural development, and as a result, rural incomes registered significant increases.

This introductory chapter sets out the book's two primary arguments, both of which take aim at artificial but widely accepted geographic dichotomies mapped onto the US–Mexico border. First, the book argues that the disciplinary distinction between “American” and “Latin American” history has obscured the confluence and interaction between US and Mexican state-led rural reform along with its attendant social upheaval during the radical 1930s. The border between the United States and Mexico not only separates “American” from “Latin American” history, it also marks where the Global North meets the Global South, or as was once popular, where the First World meets the Third World. The book's second major argument concerns that planetary dichotomy, and how it has warped scholarly understandings of a vast campaign that would remake countless human societies during the twentieth century: development.

This book has explored how the meanings of folk cultural revivals in contemporary Yan'an are woven together by multiple actors and various political, economic, and social forces and initiatives. It has used the term “hyper-folk” to refer to the production and consumption of folk revival discourses and cultural practices in post-2000 Yan'an in order to highlight the distance between what is celebrated today as “Chinese folk tradition” and what was understood as exclusively peasant culture in the past. It has demonstrated how the cultural logic of late socialism converges political, social, economic, and communal forces and relations and, at the same time, makes their meanings and practices flexible and malleable to fit in various purposes and occasions. Finally, it has used “Yan'an and folk culture” to connote a historical model of the Chinese Communist Party appropriating folk traditions to promote rural reform and national state campaigns.

Examines the aftermath of Roosevelt’s presidential conservation measures; demonstrates continuity in conservation policies between Roosevelt and William Howard Taft; and documents disagreements over the Ballinger Affair which ultimately pulled the Progressive conservation movement into open opposition to Taft. While conservation moved to the center of Progressivism as it continued to develop, the decline of alarmism about resources is charted through changing assessments of resource availability, and the work of fuel expert Joseph Holmes to improve engine and boiler efficiencies and other fossil fuel conservation. The impact of Roosevelt’s schemes for efficiency continued internationally through the (British) Dominions Royal Commission on Natural Resources, and in the Fourth Pan-American Science Congress in 1915-16, where Roosevelt’s ideas influenced the proceedings through the work of Gifford Pinchot and his allies. Tropical forestry research in the United States and its dependencies expanded, while neo-mercantilist trading blocs sought to secure raw materials for long-term use for capitalist development, in the U.S. case centred on Latin America. The consummation of the Country Life campaign occurred through action in the U.S. Congress and internationally in David Lubin’s work for the International Institute of Agriculture.