RATIONALITY, MOBILITYAND FAMILY: TRANSFORMATION OF RURALITY IN VILLAGERS' DAILY LIVES
ZHANG Yong1,2, FENG Jian2
1. School of Urban Planning and Design, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen 518055, China;
2. College of Urban and Environmental Science, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Abstract：Rurality refers to the characteristics that define a village, namely, the characteristics that differentiate rural from urban. The problem of hollow villages refers to the phenomenon of an increasing loss of land resources in rural areas due to housing developments with a decreasing number of residents in recent years because the urbanization lagged behind the non-agriculturization of cultivated land in China. Drawing on empirical materials detailing the transformation of rurality in hollow villages' daily life in Dengzhou, a small city in Henan province, this paper provides new insights to understand China's diverse trajectories of rural restructuring under the confluence of two simultaneous processes of urbanization and marketization. This study is organized around the following questions:How can we capture the evolving rurality from the microcosmic perspective and provide explanations for these transformation? To what extent do these findings differentiate from previous studies? Adopting the qualitative method and the quantitative method together, an empirical work based on several month in-depth interviews and questionnaires was conducted within one town in Dengzhou City of Henan Province in Middle China. Three main parts of the work focus on transformation of rurality in daily life, daily production and collective organization and collaboration respectively. It is found that the enhanced economic rationality of individual and household due to deepening marketization, and the mobility associated with rapid urbanization have a combined effect which shocked the traditional rurality in different dimension from individual to the group, as well as from the daily life to daily production.
