Over the past twenty-five years, the Chinese county seat of Zouping has developed from a relatively impoverished town of thirty thousand people to a bustling city of more than 350,000. It has come to contain factories and high-rises, parks, bus routes, shopping malls, hospitals, and its own bureaucracy, school system, and police force. In this book, Andrew Kipnis depicts the transformations of Zouping as a place, the transformations of the lives of the formerly rural residents as they became urban people, and the interrelations between the two. While examining a site that has been industrializ ... More

Over the past twenty-five years, the Chinese county seat of Zouping has developed from a relatively impoverished town of thirty thousand people to a bustling city of more than 350,000. It has come to contain factories and high-rises, parks, bus routes, shopping malls, hospitals, and its own bureaucracy, school system, and police force. In this book, Andrew Kipnis depicts the transformations of Zouping as a place, the transformations of the lives of the formerly rural residents as they became urban people, and the interrelations between the two. While examining a site that has been industrialized and urbanized and that has undergone a demographic transition and increased integration into national and global markets, Kipnis pays close attention to how practices, imaginaries, ideologies, dreams, and nightmares from the past are reproduced in the present. He develops new ways of theorizing about the transformations typically associated with modernization through the concept of “recombinant urbanization.” While Zouping is clearly prospering, Kipnis does not depict a utopia. He analyzes dynamics of patriarchy, alienation, and anomie, processes of class formation and exclusion, and problems like pollution and traffic jams alongside more positive changes, such as increasing material comfort and growing cosmopolitanism. He gives a moving portrait of the wide variety of people who have come to call Zouping their home, as well as the rich diversity of their hopes, fears, joys, and sorrows.