The 19 speechs in this volume explain many aspects of China's market-based rural economic reforms. They were delivered primarily to groups of government or Party officials by Du Runsheng, director of the Rural Development Research Center (RDRC) of China's State Council for much of the 1980s. The book includes an introductory chapter describing the history of rural economic policy in the People's Republic of China, notes by Du Runsheng and a glossary of important Marxist and Chinese economic terms.

This collection of papers presented at an international conference in 1987 provides a comprehensive analysis of China's booming rural non-state industrial sector, both collective and private.

"A distinctive and important contribution."—Thomas P. Bernstein, author of Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages

Annotation. Series on Developing China-Translated Research from China contains a collection of the most outstanding academic articles written by prestigious Chinese scholars of humanities and social sciences within the last 30 years. All the contributors are native Chinese scholars who have experienced China's dramatic changes by themselves. In the past, research done by Chinese scholars has not been adequately represented in English due to the language barrier. In this series, all the volumes are quality works translated from Chinese to English. This series will benefit international readers interested in China's reform process and the development of Chinese humanities and social sciences.

From Heaven to Earth combines information on events, processes and structures into a comprehensive introduction to the study of reform in rural China. It provides an invaluable complement to contemporary studies of China by economists and political scientists. Elisabeth Croll draws on her extensive research and frequent visits to China, and on her first-hand studies of villages in many different regions, to look behind the simplistic notion of 'reform' as merely a 'return to capitalism'. Taking a distinctively anthropological approach to the subject, she discusses the age-old peasant dreams of sons and land, and how they have been shaped and reshaped to affect the way in which Chinese peasants, men and women, think about time and change. More practically, the study focuses on rural development, emphasising that the peasant household lies at the heart of recent rural reforms, making for new relations between state and village, a new family form, modified gender relations and single or two-child families.

Since China's reform and opening-up in 1978, Zhejiang province has been one of the country's forerunners in economic, social and political transformation. This book focuses on Zhejiang's rural development and rural governance innovation over the past few decades. The provincial government has formulated favorable policies to facilitate the development of Zhejiang's rural areas since 1978. Zhejiang's farmers, endowed with the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship, have created a rural development model with farmers as the center of marketization, industrialization and urbanization. This book provides systematic analysis of the reform and development in Zhejiang's rural area as a case study of China's reform and opening-up. It offers some of the best economic and governance practices developed over the past few decades in China's rural areas. It also provides invaluable insights into the future development of China's rural areas.

A comprehensive analysts of China's rural reforms, this book links local experiences to national policy, showing the dynamic tension in the reform process among state policy, local cadre power and self-interest, and the peasants' search for economic growth. Key topics covered include: the responsibility system, privatization and changing property rights, industrialization, social conflict, cadre corruption, urban-rural relations, conflict over land, rural urbanization, and the impact of globalization. The introduction skillfully integrates the themes that run throughout this work and the concluding chapter focuses on current and future problems in rural China.

China witnessed an unprecedented economic boom in the past four decades but will soon see the end of "demographic dividend". With shrinking labor, improving the quality of human capital could be one way to maintain China’s remarkable growth. The population in rural China accounts for 41% of the total population in China but the human capital development in rural China lags far behind the urban cities. This book selects four major reforms on education and health in rural China and evaluates the impact of these reforms on human capital development. Through rigorous econometric analysis, the book looks at factors of the rural-urban gap in human capital and the causal relationship between the reforms and the human capital development. This book will be a useful reference for developing economies which are facing similar issues in the labor market.

With the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China began a program of agricultural reform intended to increase productivity. This detailed study examines what the author sees as the major changes which moved the sector from a centrally planned to a more market-oriented system--replacement of collective teams with household farming, an increase of free markets for rural products, an increased state price for agricultural products, and greater freedom to expand off-farm activities--changes in the economic structure which facilitated greater productivity. It is unique in its focus on a single township, providing new data on the effects of reform at the village level.

In this incisive analysis of one of the most spectacular economic breakthroughs in the Deng era, Jean C. Oi shows how and why Chinese rural-based industry has become the fastest growing economic sector not just in China but in the world. Oi argues that decollectivization and fiscal decentralization provided party officials of the localities—counties, townships, and villages—with the incentives to act as entrepreneurs and to promote rural industrialization in many areas of the Chinese countryside. As a result, the corporatism practiced by local officials has become effective enough to challenge the centrality of the national state. Dealing not only with the political setting of rural industrial development, Oi's original and strongly argued study also makes a broader contribution to conceptualizations of corporatism in political theory. Oi writes provocatively about property rights and principal-agent relationships and shows the complex financial incentives that underpin and strengthen the growth in local state corporatism and shape its evolution. This book will be essential for those interested in Chinese politics, comparative politics, and communist and post-communist systems.