Between Big City and Authentic Village: Branding the Small Chinese City

While recent academic research has already produced an impressive corpus on big cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, the small Chinese city has been mostly ignored. In this article, I suggest that consideration of the small city can bring a new perspective on the wider urban fabric of which it is an element. Although small city governments have embraced urban entrepreneurialism with the same enthusiasm as China’s big cities, different configurations of space, branding and the everyday have nevertheless resulted. My case study of Kaili in Guizhou province indicates that the small city exists in a complex relationship with the big city and the village; it is pulled towards large-scale urbanization while simultaneously attempting to construct a unique city image based upon the evocation of rural cultural practices. The perspective from the small city thus suggests the need to consider the rural-urban divide – long a dominant geographical imagination of China – alongside other geographies, including a triad of the small city, the village and the big city

Social-ecological Resilience of a Nuosu Community-linked Watershed, Southwest Sichuan, China

Farmers of the Nuosu Yi ethnic group in the Upper Baiwu watershed report reductions in the availability of local forest resources. A team of interdisciplinary scientists worked in partnership with this community to assess the type and extent of social-ecological change in the watershed and to identify key drivers of those changes. Here, we combine a framework for institutional analysis with resilience concepts to assess system dynamics and interactions among resource users, resources, and institutions over the past century. The current state of this system reflects a legacy of past responses to institutional disturbances initiated at the larger, national system scale. Beginning with the Communist Revolution in 1957 and continuing through the next two decades, centralized forest regulations imposed a mismatch between the scale of management and the scale of the ecological processes being managed. A newly implemented forest property rights policy is shifting greater control over the management of forest resources to individuals in rural communities. Collective forest users will be allowed to manage commodity forests for profit through the transfer of long-term leases to private contractors. Villagers are seeking guidance on how to develop sustainable and resilient forest management practices under the new policy, a responsibility returned to them after half a century and with less abundant and fewer natural resources, a larger and aggregated population, and greater influence from external forces. We assess the watershed’s current state in light of the past and identify future opportunities to strengthen local institutions for governance of forest resources

Chinese historical microdemography

Using local studies to answer global questions, this compilation challenges traditional notions concerning historical Chinese population trends. Genealogies, epitaphs, and household registers are some of the local and primary materials used to examine the important issues of fertility, mortality, family structure, and migration patterns

Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China

Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in the 1980s and 1990s in southern Sichuan, this pathbreaking study examines the nature of ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations among local communities, focusing on the Nuosu (classified as Yi by the Chinese government), Prmi, Naze, and Han. It argues that even within the same regional social system, ethnic identity is formulated, perceived, and promoted differently by different communities at different times.Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China exemplifies a model in which ethnic consciousness and ethnic relations consist of drawing boundaries between one�s own group and others, crossing those boundaries, and promoting internal unity within a group. Leaders and members of ethnic groups use commonalties and differences in history, culture, and kinship to promote internal unity and to strengthen or cross external boundaries. Superimposed on the structure of competing and cooperating local groups is a state system of ethnic classification and administration; members and leaders of local groups incorporate this system into their own ethnic consciousness, co-opting or resisting it situationally.The heart of the book consists of detailed case studies of three Nuosu village communities, along with studies of Prmi and Naze communities, smaller groups such as the Yala and Nasu, and Han Chinese who live in minority areas. These are followed by a synthesis that compares different configurations of ethnic identity in different communities and discusses the implications of these examples for our understanding of ethnicity and for the near future of China. This lively description and analysis of the region�s complex ethnic identities and relationships constitutes an original and important contribution to the study of ethnic identity.Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China will be of interest to social scientists concerned with issues of ethnicity and state-building