City Versus Countryside in Mao's China: Negotiating the Divide

摘要

Although Jeremy Brown claims that his book seeks to explain the process of how cities and villages in Mao's China became alienated from one another, in eight chapters he actually tells a great story of dynamic negotiations over the urban-rural divide that have constantly taken place between the city of Tianjin and its surrounding rural communities. Fundamental to the occurrence of these negotiations was, as Brown has documented in detail using archival sources, local publications, personal diaries and interviews, a variety of persistent resistances from the villages to Maoist policy programmes which were forced upon them by the city leadership in favour of the urban centre.