UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the multiple processes integral to rural transformation in western Jiangxi Province, China. It examines the spatio-historical characteristics underlying the rise of small-scale private forestry, the partial mechanization of wet-rice farming, gendered translocal family reproduction, and small-town revival in this part of rural China in the early 21st century. It emphasizes the roots of and routes towards producing the hill community and small towns in the context of wider global processes. The dissertation contends that an open and relational conceptualization of space and place entails an alternative understanding of the countryside and its place within China at large. In this sense, the hill country in western Jiangxi Province is not to be understood as a ‘case’ study of a more general phenomenon. Rather, this dissertation explains the specificity of this hill region as arising not because of its ‘local’ characteristics and isolation from the outside world, but rather due to the simultaneous interconnectedness of multiple processes.

Centering on the lived experiences and everyday life of children and mothers, this dissertation recognizes alternative possibilities for the rural population of China, which maintains a remarkable degree of agency, as reflected in villagers’ aspirations and identity. Socially constructed gender relations are critical forces that affect and reflect the complexity of the countryside and the varied regional economy in today’s China.

Theoretically, the term “multiple processes” draws interconnections through the lens of “a global conjunctural frame.” This particular frame differs from the conventional approach of studying agrarian transition as a transition from peasant society to a “modern” capitalist one. Three global conjunctural moments were important in this part of rural China: the end of the Cold War; the beginning of neoliberal forms of capitalism since the late 1980s; and the post-2008 global financial crisis. One key theoretical insight of the global conjunctural frame is to denaturalize pre-given bounded units and overcome a set of dichotomies, such as global/local, agriculture/forestry, and work/everyday life. The central threads linking the four processes are history, gender, and geography.