China's landless peasants and the role of state-led rural urbanization: Narratives, meaning making, and the puzzle of social stability

Abstract

As part and parcel of China’s compressed modernization, processes of state-led rural urbanization through land expropriation and rural-to-urban relocation have been transforming rural Chinese people’s lives in unprecedented ways. This has led to different, often adverse outcomes for the affected populations—China’s “landless peasants”—as well as to the construction of divergent narratives about the role of the state’s measures for them. To provide a so-far missing perspective to existing research, Isabel Heger-Laube reconstructs the role of the experienced changes from landless peasants’ own narratives, drawing on the “big” and “small” stories collected through fieldwork in Huaming model town in Tianjin’s Dongli district. By focusing on ordinary people’s subjective processes of meaning making, the present study not only puts into perspective objective assessments and persistent narrative tendencies, but also sheds new light on the puzzle of social stability in the wake of large-scale, state-led transformations in contemporary China.