China's Rural Development Policy: Exploring the "New Socialist Countryside"

As China strives to achieve nothing less than a harmonious society despite the pronounced and institutionalized class structure that divides rural Chinese from urban, eastern from western, and rich from poor a key element of that effort is a new socialist countryside. Minzi Su assesses the prospects for China s rural revitalization programs now in their initial stages.

Su draws on her extensive, front-line field research to discover precisely why Beijing s rural development policies, though helping many, have thus far bypassed hundreds of millions of farm households. Not least, she also identifies the capacities and political-economic conditions that hold the greatest promise for successful policy implementation.