A Half Century of Chinese Socialism: The Changing Fortunes of Peasant Families

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Abstract
Urban and rural China are worlds apart, separated in almost every imaginable way: lifestyle, daily concerns, family relationships, economic needs, empowerment, and demographic development. Three-quarters of the country's population still lives in the countryside. Who are the peasantry today? Howdo they live? What hardships do they endure? How do rural society and families deal with political and social changes? How do they react to compulsory birth limitation? In many cases, peasant families have remained the poor relation of Chinese society, victims of inequalities of all kinds: in income, access to health and education, and access to the “modern world,” the consumer society. To speak of China as a homogeneous, egalitarian, and united society must now more than ever be an absurdity, for there are in fact at least two Chinas, one urban and one rural.