China has undergone a remarkable process of urbanization, but a significant portion of its citizens still live in rural villages. To gain better access to jobs,

This book is about Gao Village, in Jiangxi province, where the author was born and brought up, leaving when he was twenty-one to study English at Xiamen Univers

Over the last half century, China has evolved from a poor rural country to a geopolitical powerhouse. Rapid urbanization has been at the heart of that transform

This portrait of social change in the North China plain depicts how the world of the Chinese peasant evolved during an era of war and how it in turn shaped the

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist t