Rural Resiliency: Sources of Sustainability in the Chinese Countryside

• Main Author: Mark Dailey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2009-10-01
• Series: The ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts
• Online Access: http://www.asianetworkexchange.org/articles/216

Rural China, where approximately 800 million citizens live, is experiencing a set of challenges similar to rural areas in other countries. Worldwide, although rural regions are the main sources of natural resources and human capital that feed the economic growth of urban-industrial cores, these regions at the headwaters of globalization are comparatively overexploited, underdeveloped, undervalued, and underappreciated. China’s rural-urban relationship deserves special attention, though, because of the uniqueness of some features of its current transformations, and the speed and volume with which they are occurring. In the following essay, I draw on environmental anthropology, human ecology, and resiliency theory to examine these transformations and challenges, and to propose a fundamental thesis: that China’s rural regions are sites of critically important (1) cultural and biological diversities and (2) embedded and comparatively durable knowledge and practices that are critical to the resiliency of rural systems in particular and, by extension, Chinese society as a whole.