Home Again: 
Migrant Cosmopolitanism and Change in Rural China

by
John A. Zinda

A thesis submitted
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Science
(Resource Policy and Behavior)
in the University of Michigan
April 2007

Thesis Committee:
Associate Professor Arun Agrawal, Chair
Associate Professor (Sociology) Ching Kwan Lee

Abstract:
Drawing on interview data from three counties of Jiangxi Province, China, this paper shows that return migrants and other residents of rural localities complicate rural-urban distinctions and ideas of modernity as linear progress.  The dichotomous view of the relationship between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’ that pervades discussions of development does not hold up well before current practices of labor migration.  Cosmopolitan migrants span distances between countrysides and cities and use resources from each locale in varying circumstances.  Migrants and other rural residents engage with material and cultural resources they bring from cities to bring about situated regional modernities that often contrast with dominant narratives of national modernization.  Due to varying backgrounds at places of origin and contexts at migration destinations, migrants develop varying visions of the city and countryside that affect their responses to modernizing messages.  Recognizing these variations is crucial for understanding people’s choices regarding consumption, migration decisions, and agricultural practices. 

Acknowledgments:
This project was a sometimes difficult learning experience for me, and I owe a great deal of thanks to the many people who, subjected to my frequently impetuous responses to impediments, helped me to surmount them.  Liu Ying, Zheng Lin and other faculty members in the Department of Geography and Natural Resources at Jiangxi Normal University showed extraordinary patience and inventiveness in responding to my often unreasonable requests.  Wan Zhiwei, Ju Li, of the same department accompanied me on field visits and gave invaluable help both by assisting me on field visits and explaining practical matters that a silly foreigner like myself could never conceive independently.  In Nanchang, Cheng Yun, Tang, Zhu, Chen, and many other students treated me as a classmate struggling with the same hurdles they faced in their own masters’ theses.  Their moral support enabled me to try new angles when it seemed this project might yield no results at all.  The student wetland ambassadors revived my sense of fun and allowed for revelations I had no reason to expect.  Dan Brown and Bao Shuming enabled me to stay at Jiangxi Normal University in conjunction with their research program at Poyang Lake.  Not only would this research have been impossible without their support, but seeing their research in progress jogged my mind at key points.  Peter Arbuckle and the members of Desulico read through poorly composed drafts and offered generous comments.  The members of the North Campus cooperative houses provided me with a congenial atmosphere for work.   Finally, the thanks I owe to Arun Agrawal of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan and C. K. Lee of the University of Michigan Department of Sociology, for never telling me just what to do but always telling just enough that I might find out for myself and in the process learn a good deal more, will only be realized through work far exceeding the caliber of this paper.

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . .	. . . . . . . . . . . .	5

Data . . . . . . . . . . .	. . . . . . . . . . . .	13

Conclusion  . . . . .	. . . . . . . . . . . .	28

Introduction
	The Zhu family's photo album encases a family history spanning the distances between many places.  It shows a mother and her son and daughter, all dressed in coarse cloth against cold weather.  There are glossy black-and-white pictures of the same mother as a fashion model, her face made up and her hair coiled over her head.  It shows two men in sport jackets, hands in pockets, standing by a traffic overpass.  It shows the family visiting the Temple of Heaven, where the emperor would pray for a good harvest.  It shows a group of children in nylon jumpsuits commemorating another year of school in the city.  A tattered palm-size photograph, creased and torn, shows great-grandparents posing some time before the revolution.  There is a picture of a planted field; that is the place where their three-story house now stands.
	Zhu Jianhua had bought a camera some time before he first traveled to Beijing to work in a hotel.  Using a manual he taught himself the art of photography: points of composition, lighting effects, techniques for developing film.  Migrating to the capital along with his family, took the camera with him.  The pictures in the album commemorate these journeys, showing the life that the Zhu family lived in the city, where they worked, visited famous monuments, and put their children in an urban school.  They depict these things through a lens of Zhu's desires but also document the experiences of other family members as their journeys coincided with his, showing their lives moving through rural and urban spaces.
	These are people who make themselves at home in both city and countryside, who re-create each as they navigate through spaces of difference.  In cities, they are not just rural people making incursions—they adopt urbanized livelihoods, aided by networks and capabilities rooted in rural places.  Returning to towns and villages, they change landscapes, dwellings, and lifestyles.
	This paper depicts varying ways people who travel between rural and urban places foster identities that are 'rural', 'urban', both, and neither.  It challenges the dichotomy between 'rural' and 'urban' that pervades discussions of migrant laborers in many places, particularly in China.  It also pinpoints the differentiation that exists among migrants.  Migrants are not a homogeneous stream of lumpen proletarians, but a variety of people who go to different places, do different things, and have different experiences.  The translocal subjectivities they adopt vary with their experiences of migration.  They also incite difference within their home places as other rural residents adapt their desires and practices to the possibilities that messages from cities present.  Nor do these people only become 'more urban'.  They often utilize their new tools to seek goals and affirm meanings situated in localities of origin, generating not so much urbanized villages as alternative ruralities.
	The ideas of ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ need to be interrogated not only in light of the historical connections between urban and rural sectors but also because the proliferating linkages and movements between cities and hinterlands today render a binary opposition between the two unintelligible.  This is so in many places, and particularly within China, where rapid social and economic changes have sprung from the choice relax restrictions on movements between city and countryside.  At the same time, the discourses and practices that reify a rural-urban dichotomy continue to pervade the context in which migrants live and travel.  Exclusionary policy and popular understanding construct people from rural areas as radically different from long-time city-dwellers.  Long-time residents of cities are keenly aware of the difference that separates them from migrants, who look different, speak different dialects, and come from differently structured communities.  Constructions of rural people as lacking in the qualities that make one an acceptable citizen of a modern polity reinforce invidious and disciplinary aspects of difference.  Yet as more people move between city and countryside, increasing numbers of ‘rural’ people become fluent in the practices of city life, while urban-like objects and practices appear among, and often displace, those associated with a traditional, backward countryside.  City and countryside are patently different places, recognizable as distinct locations politically, geographically, and economically, but it is logically fallacious to speak as though because of evident differences they are mutually exclusive and diametrically opposed.  Rather, city and countryside are connected increasingly tightly by people’s movements and desires and the political-economic systems people compose within these geographies.

	The dichotomy of rural and urban has been a fundamental idea in discourses and practices of modernization.  Modernity appears to grow out of the city; industrial development proceeds from concentrations of labor and capital, and elites in centers of government and finance direct the courses of trade, growth, and culture.  The city is center and source of modernness, in opposition to the countryside, home to all that is backward and traditional. History follows a linear trajectory as rural surplus labor migrates toward cities and rural places urbanize (or depopulate).
	This characterization naturalizes an idealized Eurowestern model as a beneficial and necessary evolutionary fate for all societies, questioning neither the feasibility or desirability of the conversion of the rest of the world along those lines.  It glosses over the fractures and fragmentations within and among both urban and rural sectors.  It also ignores the dependence of urban, industrial development on people and commodities from less urban areas and the links that connect cities and rural areas in mutual relationships of co-development (Cronon 1991).  Nevertheless, it has shown proven extraordinarily robust, dominating discourses in societies in various positions relative to ‘development’ and ‘modernity’ for centuries (Chakrabarty 2000, Silvey and Lawson 1999).
	The categories of “urban” and “rural” ascribe characters to people by geographic position.  Coronil (1996) describes how terms like the “west” and “east”, “first world” and “third world” with their geographic referents produce a mental picture of the world that maps developmental categories onto places and labels areas of space and their inhabitants in ways that reproduce power and privilege while fetishizing the disempowered.  The urban-rural dualism maps onto many other dyads: modern and traditional, industrial and agricultural, educated and ignorant, openminded and hidebound, liberal and authoritarian.  Not only does this categorization establish a binary coding inconsistent with the actual blurring and interpenetration of populations through communication and movement, but it provides a rationale for practices domination and exclusion based upon those categories.  Through association with backward values people categorized as outsiders to the urban center become targets for remaking by into modern subjects (Anagnost 1997, Yan 2003), while their communities and farms are reorganized in ways that make them more “legible” to the state and the market—more amenable to quantitative assessment and the production of market value (see Scott 1998).
	While the use of rural-urban distinctions to buttress the interests of urban elites has always been problematic, it becomes more so as people, goods, and meanings circulate at unprecedented rates and intensities.  As people from rural areas populate urban workplaces and return home; as residents of rural areas are connected to markets in multiplying ways; as these people encounter new ways of being and carry them to new places, translating and selectively adopting them, life in rural areas takes on characters conventionally associated with cities.  The hard and fast distinction between urban and rural, particularly as it applies to the kind of people one meets in a city or a village, becomes blurry, even ridiculous (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003b).
	Though the city is the most concentrated site for modernizers’ projects for rural-based people, these projects are by no means limited to the city.  Rather, they reach out along the channels that bind cities to rural hinterlands to proffer modern attitudes and practices in order to make farmers and their productive activities more amenable to urban-centered systems of production.  These strategies for modernization of rural subjects apply most visibly through the fostering of commodity consumption and the scientization of agriculture, through which farmers are cultivated as market actors whose actions are determined strictly through the calculation of market cost and benefit (Appadurai 1990, Coronil 1996).  The modernizing polity shapes the environment in which its rural constituents conduct their lives, through policy and discourse assembling a normative framework that rewards people for adopting patterns of production and consumption that cleave to national modernization projects.  In the process, people learn to assess their self-worth in terms of profit, material consumption, and imposed standards of conduct or civility.  Thus modernizing discourse works to fashion urbanized subjects within rural areas as well as within enclaves of rural-based people in cities.
This transformation of subjects does not seamlessly generate ideal modern subjects.  Rather, people who circulate between rural and urban localities adopt and deploy devices from, of each in ways that they find advantageous in particular situations (Gidwani & Sivaramakrishnan 2003a).  Similarly, people in rural areas who encounter difference in media images, in visitors and commodities from the metropolis, and in relatives and neighbors who migrate and return, adapt their strategies and lifestyles in ways that incorporate some aspects of urban modernness while retaining parts of their accustomed lifestyles and transforming parts of both through blending and adaptation.  The hybridity of social forms that results draws into question the presumed purity of ‘urban’ and ‘rural’ as social categories (Bauman and Briggs 2003)

	A dichotomy between rural and urban is firmly entrenched in public discourse in China.  This opposition has roots in early twentieth-century intellectual movements that repudiated traditional, by implication rural, Chinese culture and extolled urban-centric Euroamerican models of modernity (Cohen 1993, Han 2005).  It was cemented by the Chinese Communist Party's adaptations of Marxist theories of the peasantry, which combined with policies that drew on agriculture to nurture urban industry and welfare systems and prohibited cityward movement of rural people.  The regime showed ambivalence about the role of rural people, presenting them alternately as an advanced productive class schooled in the rigor of selfless labor for the mother country and as bumpkins holding the nation back with their superstition, patriarchy, and petty capitalist tendencies (Kelliher 1994).  This way of viewing rural people flatly ignored the openness that is evident in the history of rural-urban relationships in China: migration for commerce and trades was long a common means of income diversification for rural households (Cohen 1976, Fei [1947] 1997, Skinner 1976).  Favorable or disparaging, these portrayals do not attend seriously to actual life in the countryside and deny rural people the chance to have a voice in national narratives (Jacka 2006).  Meanwhile, the housing registration system, instituted in the late 1950s in order to stem migration from the countryside which threatened to undo the nascent urban social welfare system, made it virtually impossible for people to move from country to city.  Lacking urban documents, one would be unable to obtain housing or food rations (Cheng and Selden 1994).  The complex of institutions centering on housing registration, while no longer barring rural people from moving to cities, continues to limit access to public goods and services such as education, social security, and subsidized housing (Chan and Zhang 1999, Solinger 1999, Wang 2004). 
	 Institutional barriers combine with the abjection of the rural in the popular imagination, contributing to the work of maintaining boundaries between rural and urban populations.  Predominating constructions of rural people in China employ a number of discursive tools, exemplified by the categories of development and human quality (suzhi), which at once abase people of rural origin and open up tantalizing possibilities for advancement and inclusion.  In the countryside, rural people are crude and backward subjects with poor human quality, while in the cities they are a menace to social order, a necessary burden for economic development, or fetishized victims of rapacious progress.  They constitute an abjected other to the high-quality, urbane, educated population of the city (Yan 2003).  In publications of state and popular media, produced by and for urban elites, rural people are silenced, unable to articulate their own description of their place in China's society.  They appear in caricatures, as workhorses who bear privations with fortitude, as bearers of incivility threatening social order in cities, as victims of the market's abuses, as upholders of traditional morality.  In the process they are also made into passive takers of socioeconomic change, carried into the city and back home by the tides of the socialist market economy (Jacka 2006).  This construction sets up the countryside as a monolithic other and sets them up for discriminatory or at best condescending treatment by urban people and political elites.
	Nonetheless, in China and elsewhere, migrants have frequently found ways to establish themselves at destination places.  Dorothy Solinger (1999) describes how even in the early 1990s, when hukou restrictions still constrained nonlocals in fulfilling basic needs, migrants frequently succeeded in working around the system to establish footholds in the cities.  Li Zhang (2001) and Hein Mallee (2003) document how migrants have with varying success resisted the state’s attempts to block their incursion into cities by setting up schools for migrant children, making collective housing arrangements, and organizing entire communities within destination cities.  Exploiting openings in cities, they fashion lives for themselves within unfamiliar and often hostile environments.
	Nonetheless, on the basis of both institutional and discursive factors, many scholars on rural-to-urban migration in China continue to emphasize the ways that rural identity cuts migrants off from urban life (see, e.g., Jacka 2006, Murphy 2002, Solinger 1999).  Solinger (1999) and Jacka (2006) discuss how difficult it is for migrants in cities to adopt ‘urban’ identities.  Migrants may adopt practices they identify with urban lifestyles and note changes in themselves, contrasting style and bearing learned in the city with their former rusticity, but  they do not think they can actually become urban people.  This ambivalence about both urban and rural subject positions leads them to express positive and negative understandings of both urbanity and rurality, depending on individual goals and context.  This focus on intractable rural-urban difference is useful for illuminating the forces that make rural-urban migrants an underclass in cities and frequently drive them homeward, but it can distract us from the ways that migrants' subjectivities do change—and lead us to misread their experiences in urban and in rural places.  Using cultural resources from both rural and urban experiences to make sense of the positions they occupy between the urban and rural but situated at different times within each, they construct identities that are rural, urban, both, and neither, occupying subject positions that move between rural and urban places.
	These identities that shift among places correspond to what Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan (2003a) describe as “rural cosmopolitanism”.  This formulation, countering conventional definitions of cosmopolitanism which privilege the urban and modern and venerate the abandonment of local ties and practices, characterizes migrant cosmopolitans as people who are able to straddle two cultures and navigate fields of difference, deploying to their advantage in different situations resources they acquire in the countryside and in the city.  This cultural versatility enables migrants both to find a place in the city without relinquishing home-attached parts of their identities and to improve their status in rural areas.  By conveying resources and strategies between city and village, migrants also become agents in the construction of “regional modernities” (Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan 2003b).  These are ways of being modern that contrast with the conventional univocal, unilinear expressions of modernity by keeping room for difference, not only between national contexts, but also within polities.  Regional modernities express ambivalence about dominant modernist narratives, notable for their “uneven rejection and acceptance of the universalizing theses of Eurowestern modernity.”  Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan argue that this way of thinking of migrants’ subjectivities helps to explain how different groups respond differently to modernizing influences, particularly the counterhegemonic consumption practices and ethnic movements that contest the nationalizing direction of modernization.
	Migration is heavily implicated in the complex weave of constructive and regressive forces that market integration and encounters with urban-centered consumer culture have let loose in the countryside.  These influences do not run untrammeled over rural China’s amalgam of traditional culture and adaptations to the changing conditions of the Maoist and reform periods.  Migrants take these elements into the cities and form urban enclaves around them.  Gidwani and Sivaramakrishnan focus on the migrants themselves as cosmopolitan agents, but the identity practices they describe apply to nonmigrants as well.  The meanings and resources that migrants transport do not just adhere to migrants’ bodies as they move among cities and villages.  Rather, parts of them rub off, are deposited, or get snatched up in places migrants abide in, including villages.  Nor are migrants the only channel through which these things move among places: people learn modernities through mass media, through local governments, through market activity, through storytelling and imagination.  In towns and villages, returned migrants and people who have not migrated adopt different aspects of possible modernities as they fit their individual needs and strategies.  They respond to discourses of modernity and rural difference in ways that reflect increasing ambivalence about, but not rejection of, rural identities.  Doing this, they transform rural subjectivities and the places within which rurality is performed.
	While Gidwani’s and Sivaramakrishan’s work deals primarily with migrants themselves, it suggests that the movement of resources and meanings through migration as well as other channels affects the identities of non-migrants as well.  This presents an opportunity to better understand changing identities of people in rural areas, whether or not they themselves have migrated.  It is an endeavor particularly well suited for studying rural-urban connections in China.  While researchers of migration in China have gone to great lengths to describe rurality as experienced by migrants within cities (see, e.g., Solinger 1999, Zhang 2001, Yan 2003), they have been remarkably quiet about local impacts of migration in rural areas and the ways that people perform—and change—rurality in situ.  The home place lies in the background as a magical lodestone, an enduring certainty to toward which all migrants tend in their eccentric orbits through the hostile metropolis.  Much of this work lacks a critical consideration of the changing nature of home communities and people’s understandings of the importance of the places they come from, both as particular localities and as rural, agricultural sites in general.  Paying close attention to the differing ways that people in rural places understand and live rurality may help us to better understand the mixed ways changes are occurring.
	What is most striking about migrating people's stories is how they vary.  While government and media portray migrants as an undifferentiated flow—an image that fits well into a neoclassical economic model of labor flows—in actuality they are widely differentiated, coming from different origins, going to different cities, working in different sectors, varying by gender and educational background, having different relationships with co-workers and employers, with different aspirations, different personalities.  Through their experiences in cities, migrants must take on different identities—not just rural and urban identities, but those of a subordinate in a workplace, an outsider in a neighborhood, a member of a migrant community, a shopper at stores, a man or a woman in a gendered environment.  Tamara Jacka (2006) describes how migrant women in Beijing respond to taking up new subject positions, learning identities pertaining to the various roles and often adopting practices they identify as urban, but also conscious of difference between themselves and lifelong urban residents.  These changes bear influence not only in cities.  When migrants return to places of origin, they also take on new identities, as persons who have experienced the city, as handlers of disposable income, as holders of cultural cachet.  At the same time, different subject positions open up for other villagers in relation to migrants as well as messages about modernity coming through media, officials, and markets.
	Migrants' experiences in cities influence their own and other people's decisions over whether to migrate again and in what they do when they return to home places.  This differentiation occurs partly in patterned ways and partly in ways that are more specific, rising from individuals' particular experiences and identities.  Understanding these idiosyncratic factors requires us to look into people's accounts of their journeys and their decisions to return or to continue migrating, and their decisions about how to live upon returning to a place of origin.  That is what I will do below, but first I will describe the places where I spoke to people affected by migration.

Data
	In the summer of 2006 I talked to migrants and their neighbors and relatives in a number of villages in three counties of China's Jiangxi province.  Jiangxi has been known historically as a “great producer of grain”, but recently it has been better known as a “great exporter of labor” (Min, Qian personal communication, 29 June 2006).  In contrast to neighboring provinces along China’s eastern and southern coasts, Jiangxi has not seen the fast-paced rural industrialization that fueled the country’s manufacturing boom in the 1980s and 1990s.  Rather, economies in most rural areas of the province depend on local agriculture and migrant labor.  According to a study conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics of China, in 2005, some 6.49 million people left villages in Jiangxi to work in cities, accounting for 35.59 percent of the rural working population, and earning over ¥30 billion in income (Liu 2006).  Jiangxi has consistently been ranked as one of the largest labor-exporting provinces in China, topping 5 million in 2005, and can be considered representative of the major migrant-producing provinces of China’s central and western regions (Fan 2005, Jiangxi Province Office of Labor and Social Security 2006).

	I made weeklong stays in the counties of Duchang and Leping and the Jizhou district of Ji’an prefecture.  Over this time I conducted about fifty interviews with household members and local and county officials, ranging in time from several minutes to over an hour.  I also recorded observations taken while I spent time with people in towns and villages.
	Duchang County is located in north-central Jiangxi adjacent to Poyang Lake.  It is an area of floodplains and rolling hills with a large proportion of agricultural land.  Duchang is a large cotton producer, with about a third of its farmland devoted to cotton and the nearly all the rest in rice.  Official figures show that 17.4% of the county’s rural population migrated in 2005, though a county official estimates an actual figure of 25% to 30%.  Most of my interviews from Duchang County come from villages surrounding a town outside the county seat, near the road connecting the cities of Jingdezhen and Jiujiang.  In the town I interviewed town officials including the head of the town agricultural extension station.  In the county seat several members of the county forestry bureau spoke with me.  I also briefly visited several villages in the county affected by a program of compensated cropland conversion intended to restore farmland to Poyang Lake and reduce risk of damage from flooding.
	Leping City in northeast Jiangxi is downstream from Asia’s largest copper mine.  The central city has prospered recently, with rapid development of concrete, chemical, and natural resources industries, and outside of infrastructure projects, agricultural areas outside have not benefited much from this accumulation.  The area I visited suffers water pollution from the mine upstream.  Crop productivity is diminished in contaminated areas, but on remaining land residents grow rice and oil crops like sesame and peanuts.  Allong with a group of college students from my host institution, I visited a town and a neighboring village at the county’s margin, two hours by bus from the city proper, and over the course of a week interviewed about twenty residents and attended the morning market.
	Jizhou District is located on the outskirts of Ji’an, a prefectural-level city in central Jiangxi.  Jizhou District is an area of rolling hills near to one of Jiangxi’s major rivers, the Gan.  Most farmland is rice paddy, with side plots of vegetables, oil crops and melon.  The district government reports that in 2003, over 20,000 of a rural population of 115,934 (and a rural labor force of 55,610) migrated for work, with non-farm earnings accounting for 53% of rural income (Ji’an City Agriculture Bureau 2004).  In two weeklong visits to Jizhou I stayed with a family of returned migrants and interviewed people in their and surrounding villages.
	The places I visited varied in their histories of migration, though there was as much variation within localities as between them.  In every village I visited, an overwhelming majority of population between the ages of eighteen and forty-five was absent, men and women alike.  Residents and officials alike in each place gave a figure of 80% of households with members having migrated.  Migrant numbers do not differ by sex, with couples often having left together for a single destination.  Men and women differed only slightly in the jobs they took up, with only men having worked in construction and other strenuous or hazardous occupations, but nearly equal numbers of each sex in manufacturing and services.  People from the villages in Jizhou had begun migrating in 1990, while in Leping and Duchang people reported that more people had started migrating after the middle of the 1990s.  
	In comparison with the accounts of most researchers who collected data on migration in the 1990s, it seems that more migrants are staying away for longer periods of time.  Speaking with people whose offspring or siblings had migrated, I found that migrants had often been gone for over ten years, and their relatives did not anticipate that they would return soon.  Migrants who were home for family reasons also reported lengthy times away and no expectation of settling back at the village in the foreseeable future.  Yet some of these people had built or were in the process of building new houses in the village.  While their attitudes varied, most continue to feel an attachment to the home place strong enough to justify investing savings in constructing new houses there.
	As other research has found, migrant incomes exceed local agricultural incomes substantially.  Farmers reported annual net incomes ranging from ¥1,000 to an exceptional ¥20,000 for a village head with large peach and pear groves; the average agricultural income in each area for 2005 was around ¥2,300.  Reported migrant incomes ranged from ¥6,000 to over ¥30,000 per year, generally falling in the ¥10,000 to ¥20,000 range.  Even accounting for costs of transportation and accommodation in cities, these amounts far exceed most people’s earnings from agriculture.
	People’s reports on the practice of sending remittances differed from some previous accounts.  Approximately half of the parents of migrants reported that their offspring were remitting funds.  Generally, unmarried migrants remitted small to middling amounts to their parents.  While many respondents did not give specific values, reported amounts varied between 250 kilograms of rice (worth approximately ¥300) to ¥1,800 annually.  Couples who had left their children in the village sent money back or purchased grain for the caretakers.  Those who took their children with them, however, often sent very little or no funds back to relatives.  Migrants who had managed to set up stable quarters in cities provided little support for their parents, breaking with the age-old ethic of filiality that has been held to bind families together as social and economic units.
	Most migrants come back to their home places only briefly, usually for holiday observances.  They do generally return for the Spring Festival, but these visits do not substantiate claims that these people are primarily homeward oriented.  Their migration is circular in only a superficial sense: they return home, celebrate, and leave.  A number of respondents spoke of relatives who had apartments and even automobiles away from the village.  To say that the place of origin retains a significant role in their construction of identities is not inaccurate: they do show attachment to their families and to the places where they spent their childhoods.  However, it may be going too far to say that their plans are always or even in the majority of cases primarily oriented toward returning home.  They remain in contact with their families and accessible to them in time of need.  A number of residents report little intention on the part of their departed relatives to settle at home in coming years or for retirement.  Meanwhile, multistory houses they have built with outside income stand as ostentatious monuments to their continued absence.
	Yet not all migrants stay away.  A small but important proportion of migrants do return for longer periods of time or permanently.  Just as migrants who return briefly on holidays impact villages through their absence and through their transfers of financial and cultural resources, return migrants bring new perspectives on livelihood possibilities for rural people, whether through undertaking new ventures or by reaffirming long-standing practices.  They embody for their neighbors the profits and travails of cityward migration—as well as the potentialities of rural livelihoods informed by cosmopolitan practices.

	The Lu family’s farm abuts a highway that was recently built to connect two major cities in the province.  After the peach and pear harvests, as cars and trucks zoom by, they sit at the roadside beneath a large umbrella selling fruit.  Lu Zhijia had gone to Guangdong in 1990 to do construction work.  After three years he returned to support Wang Limin in rearing their small children.  They resumed farming a small plot of rice and cotton.
	In 2000, the county government introduced a conservation-and-development program subsidizing the planting of fruit tree saplings in areas prone to soil erosion.  Households were compensated for the area of land they converted to trees.  It was not a free lunch; they had to invest time in planting the seedlings, money in purchasing fertilizer and insecticide, and foregone income while the trees matured.  While the Lus still farm rice and vegetables on the side, they derive most of their income from their peach and pear trees.  Since the trees matured, they have seen an annual gross income of between ¥5,000 and ¥6,000 from fruit sales, much higher than their previous income from rice and cotton.  Five years after planting, this income has allowed them to build a new house near the road and to buy a refrigerator from which they sell bottled water and juice along with their fruit.  While they continue to grow food for household consumption, the Lus hire local people who own machinery to plow and harvest their fields.  They don’t raise pigs because the economic returns are low; feed in particular is expensive.
	A classic argument about migration has held that experience in urban environments teaches migrants how to be modern subjects and, furthermore, that migrants modernize their home places when they return (Spengler 1977).  The Chinese government’s projects to modernize the countryside also aim to make rural residents into modern citizens possessed of a consciousness suited to market participation, which is also a consciousness of the ways in which their rural lifestyles have heretofore lacked the material articles and rationality that could make them into acceptable citizens (Yan 2003).  The Lus’ experience does show an increasing involvement in decentralized market networks, through which they buy inputs and sell much of their fruit, but it shows neither that being in the city taught them to do this nor that they are simply conforming to prescriptions of one modernizationist narrative.  It was not migration but a government program that introduced them to this source of income.  It is not that the Lus are learning market logic: there is no reason to assume that they were unacquainted with market practices prior to Lu Zhijia’s journey.  Indeed, the fact that he (and other people in his village) moved to migrate when institutional openings allowed it, in order to attain family-making goals that show continuity with pre-Communist practices, if anything shows that he was well .  It is not even clear that the experience and income from migrating differentiates the Lu family from other families in their village.  This family is one among many in the area who have migrant members, and one among many who have benefited from the silviculture program—but there is no correlation between migration and participation in the program, which is determined by government fiat and the slope of your fields.  
	Further, if rural people knew how to work in markets before migrating, and before the government’s education program, then it does not make sense to say that either of those experiences is teaching them to be modern insofar as being modern entails being able to exercise market-oriented rationality.  Thinking in terms of long term investments of labor in an undertaking with delayed returns is nothing new; they have had to do these things since they began farming on their own.  They are being trained in specific practices, consistent with government projects for development and market integration, rather than in market logic per se.  Establishing the grove has involved learning skills for planting and tending fruit trees and for marketing their produce.  Wang Limin and Lu Zhijia and their neighbors say that the local government gave them brief training seminars, but that most of the process of learning has happened through reading a manual, which specified inputs and time frames for growing, and through practice—using their existing skills and networks to grow and sell their fruit.  Growing peaches and pears allows them to participate in commercial markets as opposed to the grain market that is still dominated by government quotas and price floors.  The Lus have labeled boxes that they use to package and ship fruit orders.  To be closer to their field and to the road which serves as an effective storefront, they built a house outside of the village.  These choices result both from the impacts of the state and the expanding market and from the Lus’ particular inclinations.  If to be modern is to be able to navigate markets and think beyond home place and tradition, the Lus were modern before Lu Zhijia migrated or the government brought in saplings.  They show economic rationality in their practices, but they are taking a more active role in shaping their livelihoods and subjectivities than modernization narratives usually indicate.

	The migration experience of the Zhu family began in 1990, when Zhu Changlin became the first person in their township to migrate to work.  Initially, Chen Jimin stayed in the village in Jizhou farming their contract land, but after several years she and their two children moved to Beijing.  They worked vending food in hotels for over ten years, returning for holidays and occasionally for longer stays.  Both of the children attended primary and secondary school in the capital city.  In 1997 they erected a four-story house adjacent to their older mud-brick home.  Due to difficulties in Beijing involving Zhu Changlin’s inclination to gamble, the family returned to the village in Jizhou in 2005.  All of Zhu Changlin’s, and all but one of Chen Jimin’s, siblings have migrated to the capital and stayed there.  When I visited Beijing some time after staying with in the Zhus’ village, I dined with the family of Zhu Changlin’s brother, who picked me up in a shiny sport-utility vehicle.
	Since returning to the village, the Zhus continue to farm while using savings to support their offspring, a daughter in medical school in Inner Mongolia and a son in college in Nanchang, the provincial capital.  They farm a total of forty mu, including twenty of their own and twenty sublet from relatives who have migrated to Guangxi Province.  The new grain subsidy, though modest at ¥500 per year, was sufficient to draw them back to the village in their difficulty.
	The Zhus have used some of their leftover income and assistance through a government subsidy for agricultural mechanization to purchase a motorized reaper at a cost of ¥19,000.  They are the first family in the village to own a mechanical reaper.  In the two years prior to their purchase, people in the village had rented a harvester from someone in the town.  Now the Zhus have taken over this role, and when I visited during the summer harvest, they were busy day in and day out, rolling through one section of paddy after another.  They charge the going rate of ¥50 per mu.  If it remains at that level, they expect recoup their investment within five years.  Meanwhile, Zhu says he plans in the coming year to rent out his land to other croppers, migrate to Guangxi to work in the tourism industry, and return only during the rice harvest to market this service.
	Looking through the Zhus’ picturebook, we saw selected illustrations of scenes that they have found meaningful during their movements through Jizhou and Beijing.  These pictures form a supplement to the Zhus’ descriptions of their movements.  Together they show people who have become adept at moving through different environments and who have with varying ease adapted to differing milieux, using networks of kin and friends to find a place in the city, and applying aptitudes from urban experience back at their place of origin.  Their experience in Beijing has been neither uniformly positive nor negative; it has not converted them into urbanites.  Returning to Jizhou they show both that there is not a universal, linear trajectory , but that capabilities developed in cities can be amalgamated with more conventionally rural ways of being.  Their story accords to a degree with the argument that return migrants have a modernizing impact on their home places, but it also reveals complications.  They have made use of the networks, funds, and capabilities they accumulated through migration to invest in an entrepreneurial undertaking that brought new agricultural technology (the motorized reaper) to their locality.  However, their accession to the state-subsidized project of mechanization does not realize modernizing dreams in a simple way: a program that is supposed to bring general prosperity also produces rifts.
	The Zhus’ return complicates inequalities in a locality already stratified due to migration.  Other villagers I talked to affirmed that hiring the reaper saves them a great deal of effort.  At the same time, their neighbor Wang acknowledges that utilizing the Zhus’ service puts him in a position of dependency.  As his wife and his children have moved away, though, he would otherwise have to undertake the strenuous harvest himself.  Some, like Hong Shengtian, of whom we will hear more below choose not to utilize this service because they feel it threatens their autonomy.  Ren Lihua in the neighboring village, Chen Jimin’s sister-in-law, receives no remittances from a son and daughter-in-law who migrated to Beijing a decade ago.  Widowed and aging, she is unable to work her land by herself and has to hire labor; several households in the village have gotten together to give her fertilizer and other inputs, but she still cannot break even.  Homes like hers, a structure of mud brick and tiled roof built in a traditional courtyard arrangement, contrast with the tall white-tiled houses that mark the earnings of successful migrants: the new stratification is visible in the physical makeup of villages.  Bodily present and interacting with their neighbors daily, they make an impact more constant and palpable than that of relatives who have remained in Beijing.

	The impacts of migration on rural social relations are also embodied in migrants’ children and their livelihood trajectories.  Xiaosen was born in Jizhou but took most of his schooling in Beijing.  I met him where he goes to college in the provincial capital, Nanchang, studying landscape architecture.  When he comes back home during summer break to help with the harvesting of the first crop of rice and the planting of the second, he enjoys the melons his parents have planted.  Market prices for watermelons are low this year, so he and his sister must eat up several hundred that lie in the storage room.  He looks at the house his father built nearly ten years ago, showy in comparison to the brick huts that surround it, and tells how he would have designed it: it faces the wrong direction, and the materials are shabby—see how the windows are falling from their hinges.  That will be a project for his time off from a job in architecture or housing development.
	Xiaosen led me through the area around the village, showing me the families' intermingled paddy plots, pointing out the well-tended ones flush with green and the plots where less healthy rice plants had leaves of a dull tinge and were interspersed with spiky weeds.  He explained that the keepers of the latter did not apply enough fertilizer or pesticide.  Perhaps they could not afford these inputs?  He took me up to the reservoirs that provide water for the paddies: the old one, built with the villagers’ pooled manual labor decades ago, and the newer one, whose retaining dam they built with a bulldozer hired from the city some ten kilometers away.  We walked through stands of twenty-year-old trees are reclaiming ridge-tops that were denuded when rights to collective lands were divvied out in the early 1980s.  The undergrowth is recovering, too.  In the 1990s, some villagers thought to make a profit raising goats, only the animals ate everything, including neighbors’ crops and the forest understory.  Like a number of other schemes undertaken in eager response to market opening, the mutton-raising project was abandoned.
	Xiaosen is familiar with the lifestyle and practices common in his home place but also feels alienated from them.  He still takes part in farmwork.  He knows the land and the plants, the signals of the health and maturity of crops, and he is familiar with the decisions farming requires and the institutional background within which these decisions are made.  Yet he is also accustomed to amenities and practices from the city, causing him both to feel a lack in the village and to bring in novel objects and practices.  During his summer break, Xiaosen brought his computer with him to play music and games; when I visited he was working on obtaining affordable internet access for the family’s house.  His schooling in Beijing and his parents’ ability to afford tuition costs have opened for him a path of social mobility that involves him in different practices and environments that bring with them different identities.  This path is not available to many other people his age, most of whom he says are working in factories in coastal cities.    At home he is still Zhu’s son, a nephew his uncle toasts to drunkenness with homebrewed rice liquor after a morning in the fields, and whom his parents jokingly chide for having put on weight sitting in classrooms.  But he is also an emissary of urban modernity, as well as an embodiment of the inequalities that migrant income can generate.  The messages he and others like him bring play out in ways that vary with people’s unique encounters with modernities.

	Hong Shengtian, who had worked in a Guangzhou slaughterhouse briefly in the 1990s, farms rice on just under a hectare of land.  In comparison to his neighbor Ren Limin, Hong’s family has done fairly well farming.  They have been able to take advantage of other migrants’ absence to sublet land and increase their agricultural income.  Nonetheless, this income has not allowed them to refurbish their home, and not having purchased a mechanical plow or harvester, they rely on oxen and their own labor for the whole crop cycle.  Hong recognizes the benefits of urban employment but emphasizes its drawbacks:

When you’re working in the city, people are always telling you what to do, and when it’s done the workday’s up.  Farming the soil, if you want to plant, you plant; if you don’t want to plant, you can plant a little less.  So in farming you’re a little freer. . . .  Once you’ve fed yourself, and there’s nothing to do, you can go out and tend the field—you don’t have to work.  But with work, you have to take your boss’s limits.  That is, no matter how long you’ve worked, if it’s not done, you’ll have to go overtime and finish.  But farming is different.  This clump of earth, if I don’t finish today, I can go back out tomorrow.

Farming is not easy, but it is what they have, and they are able to make do.  Though prices have fluctuated, Hong Shengtian and others say that recent policies intending to help farmers, including abolishment of the agricultural tax and the introduction of subsidies for machines and for grain production, have made farming less onerous.  He portrays his decision to farm as a willing choice.  He acknowledges that the working conditions in different workplaces are not as bad as the ones he experienced and that higher wages are available now than when he went to Guangzhou, but he sticks with his rationale that farming is preferable because of the autonomy and freedom from oversight it provides.  This conception of autonomy flows both from traditional narratives valorizing the small farmer and from contemporary depictions of the modernizing farmer as controlling his (the portrayal is usually masculine) fields through scientifically informed production practices and acting freely in the market.  Hong’s experience of migrant labor, along with his engagement with the discourse of national modernity, has shaped his decision to reaffirm rural practices.
	At the same time, while content to farm himself, Hong has no intention for his offspring to follow in his footsteps.  When I asked whether he hopes his son will enjoy similar freedom on the land, responded,

Certainly not!  I don’t wish that.  I don’t want him to have to grow up on this plot.  That is, when developing his capabilities, he should be like you Americans, live in a house, use one of those computers.  I hope that he’ll get to that level, not that he’ll have to use his hands to work like we do.  I hope they have high incomes.  Even if they take up agriculture, they must develop along this direction, through science and mechanization.

This statement reveals ambivalence regarding both rural and urban livelihood.  While he has chosen farming for himself, his aspirations for his children aim at a perceived “better life” in the city.  But he also shows ambivalence about urban life.  The desirable life he describes is the life of an educated professional, not a factory laborer.  The city is not a uniformly inviting destination: possibilities within it are differentiated, and some are to be avoided.  Hong’s statements show that he accepts of an evolutionary account of modernity, with progressive adoption of scale and technology in agriculture and movement of people into urban places and livelihoods.  But they also represent varying possibilities within that account, including the potential for a fulfilling rural life within the modern picture, an image which is absent from most images of progress in China.

	When I talked to Tang Baoling, he was on leave from a job in the coastal province of Zhejiang.  He had worked in a succession of places—first in Fujian, then in a Guangzhou paper factory, brief stints in Shenzhen and in Nanjing where it was hard to find a suitable job, now in Wenling.  Tang talked about how he moved from job to job and city to city following leads on good jobs.  People hear about opportunities from returning migrants and from relatives who are in these places; everyone has an idea about where the good wages are.  He and his wife produce shoes on contract for a factory.  They earn a piece rate—higher than what they had been paid in Guangzhou, but still paltry—and live in a tiny room on the city's margins.  Life there is hard.  They leave their child in the village with grandparents most of the time.
	Tang Baoling shows further evidence that the image of cities that migrants present is not uniform.  While urban income far exceeds what is available in agriculture—last year he and his wife made ¥20,000, approximately ten times the median net agricultural earnings in the area—costs are higher, living conditions are spare, and even when other people from the same place are present, one lacks a sense of belonging.   He keeps on migrating as much because he is accustomed to it, and expected to do such work, as because of the income it produces.  As much as he remains connected to his home community, he identifies as someone who moves.
	Tang may be exceptional in that he has no land title and thus few livelihood alternatives in the village.  However, other sojourning migrants in the same place shared similar views.  Yuan Min had returned to the village with her husband to build a house.  While they were away, their old house had collapsed, and they borrowed ¥30,000 from a relative to finance the building of another.  This loan would take a long time to repay on the ¥7,000 per year that they had earned jointly working in a clothing factory in Yiwu, Zhejiang.  Yuan Min says that once their house is complete she and her husband will see where incomes are high and go there.  Consumption demands fueled by status distinctions.  If you are going to build a house, you must build a fancy one—not only to keep up with the neighbors but because the house you build now will be the house you retires to and, you hope, into which your offspring will move when they marry.  Even when a house is built or a loan repaid, though, there are always things to purchase and savings to lay down.  These pressures can turn migrant labor into an onerous cycle.
	For Tang Baoling and for Yuan Min, cities are interchangeable; they differ only in currently available wage rates, which rise and fall due to unaccountable forces.  Having learned to get by in one city, one can get to any of them; it is not easy, but it is manageable.  This is an inversion of the common view of urban-centered modernism that denies the local situatedness of rural communities, seeing rural places as homogeneous, while accentuating concrete and particular aspects of life in a city.  It also contrasts with, but is not necessarily contradictory to, Hong Tiansheng’s recognition of both alluring and repellent sides of urban life.

	Making money in the city is also part of an intergenerational commitment to the advancement of offspring.  Most of the migrants I spoke to spend a large portion of their urban earnings financing children’s schooling.  Min sends her son to an expensive private school in a town five kilometers from their home village because she is unsatisfied with local schools.  A man in a nearby town told how his wife takes their son to the city in Shandong province where she works, to take advantage of the educational resources available there.  Xiaosen and his sister, as I noted above, have been able to pursue higher education due to their parents’ earnings.  These educational attainments may also be associated with the fact that they spent parts of their childhoods in urban areas, attending urban schools, learning how to be subjects of urbanized society.  In the process they debunk long-held understandings of essential urban-rural difference.  Fei Xiaotong, describing the difficulty local children in Yunnan had in school alongside the offspring of college professors exiled during the Japanese occupation, shows that this different was due to the fact that the professors’ children were trained in an urban subjectivity that prepared them for the tasks schooling demanded, while their classmates were adept at practices relevant to their own milieu.  He proposes that if the local children had been brought up in an urban environment, they might perform differently (Fei [1947] 1997).  Contemporary China remains pervaded by assumptions of rural difference, manifest in claims that because of their inferior human quality it is difficult to integrate rural people into urban society.  However, many parts of China are now witnessing a real-life execution of Fei’s thought experiment: as laborers move between rural and urban areas, just as they blur rural-urban distinctions in developing cosmopolitan subjectivities, children growing up in these contexts are adopting translocal cultural competencies.
	Members of the generation currently coming of age are heavily shaped by mixed rural and urban influences.  Some have spent their formative years in the cities, going to school with other children of migrants or urban residents’ children.  Others have grown up in their grandparents’ care, their parents perennially absent.  Even children who do not migrate with their parents adopt attitudes and practices with urban-modern inflections.  Practically all young people expect and are expected to undertake migrant labor unless they are fortunate enough to make it into postsecondary education.  They are adept at using the language of the market, the media, and the metropolis to talk about their plans, even as they can tell at a look and a shake which melons are ripe and may be as comfortable leading an ox as riding a motorcycle.  More even than their parents, these young people are making themselves from pieces of the city and the countryside.  Migrant parents, in turn, are familiar with the practical skills needed to get by in cities.  They are also, due to their experience in cities and exposure to urban discourse, acutely aware of the upward social mobility education appears to obtain: entering the metropolis through the gate of a university brings a very different future from entering via a factory door.  As a result, parents put their hopes in their children’s education and, as is often the case in urban families, pressure children to perform well so that they can “read their way out” of their home places.  Important barriers to rural children’s educational attainment remain, mainly due to the fact that rural schools have suffered immensely as a result of fiscal decentralization (Li et al. 2006).  Nonetheless, though the numbers of educational migrants are small compared to labor migrants, their impact is large because of their age, status, and visibility.
	Neither students nor their families and neighbors expect educational migrants to settle in their home villages.  One village I visited has produced an extraordinary number of college students, including several at prominent Beijing universities.  This is a clear source of pride for the residents, and they are not a bit dismayed that these people are unlikely to return for the long term.  Students come home on their breaks, and those who have graduated and taken up professional work in cities send remissions and visit on holidays.  Xiaosen still feels at home in his village, but there is no work there commensurate with the qualifications he is gaining and the lifestyle to which he is becoming accustomed.  For him, the village is a place to visit briefly, and possibly a nice place to retire to, but not a place to stay.  Higher education grooms him for a life that is not detached from his home place, but in which the village is not the center, either.  In the village, his and other students’ attainments engender expectations—of the students’ prosperity, of returns to family, of possible futures within city and countryside.

Conclusion
	These accounts provide several snapshots of families and individuals in villages that have been affected by outmigration.   They illustrate the counterproductiveness of a dichotomous view of rural and urban.  The rural is present in the urban, and the urban is present in the rural.  Rural places have always been connected with urban places, as sources of food, raw materials, and capital.  Their residents have historically been the actors who constituted and maintained regional markets that bound together town and country in China (Skinner 1964).  The “dual economy” that seemed to separate rural and urban economies and populations during the collectivist period did so only superficially: the urban social welfare system was dependent on surplus skimmed from agriculture and the containment of labor in the countryside (Chan and Zhang 1999).  Now, as circulation of people, goods, and ideas between urban and rural places in China intensifies, it is clear that while institutions and discourses continue to perform boundary work to important effect, the essential differences they project do not stand up to scrutiny.
	Given the centrality of the urban-rural dichotomy in dominant discourses of modernization, its blurring is problematic for projects to foster modern subjects.  Migrants and the people around them show ambivalence with regard to the dominant narrative of development.  While their journeys often accentuate alienation from rural life and the particular places they come from, migrants have mixed and varied experiences which they may carry back to their places of origin.  They do not impose consumption practices considered typical of cities; nor do people who remain in rural places uniformly adopt them.  Some go back to farming; others take up local enterprises in ways that hybridize rural and urban practices; others stay in the city for good.  Their cosmopolitanisms—their abilities to use resources from experiences of varying locations to orient themselves to different milieux—can confound conventional ways of thinking about rurality.  These activities give rise to regional modernities, ways of being modern in which locally based practices and social relations persist.
	Metropolitan-centered modernizing projects do influence the paths regional modernities take.  For example, the state exerts concrete influence on these people through its rural development policies.  These policies shape the environment in which people in rural areas act—changing the economic margins on farming, enabling the purchase of machinery, subsidizing different practices.  As these people are well acquainted with market conduct, development policies do not make them into market actors, but they do shape the field within which people make livelihood decisions.  People may act in ways that are at cross purposes with state intentions, as Hong Tiansheng has done in a way by rejecting mechanization on his farm.  They make these decisions in varied ways filtered through their interpretations of encounters with messages of modernity.
	Rural cosmopolitanism varies in form as different people encounter different aspects of modern models.  Modern messages are flowing into villages from a multitude of sources, with different valences and intensities.  Among these sources, migrants can have a particularly strong effect because they bear human testimony to the livelihoods that can be obtained through movement between places.  They bring back on their bodies and in their attitudes versions of what is possible and desirable in the growing consumer economy.  Yet they do not bring back all the same messages.  Migrants go to cities that vary in location, in position in the political economy, in work opportunities, in living conditions.  They work in hotels downtown and factories on city margins, or they live on college campuses.  Some remain conspicuous by their absence, and the splash they make when they return with full wallets and suitcases.  There is evidence that people’s experience of life and the city varies with their position in the workplace.  People like the Zhus who worked in small service enterprises—hotels, restaurants—tended to have more control over their work, and over their lives in cities.  Further study is needed to clarify how various migrant experiences affect people’s identities and orientations toward the modern, but the several views of urbanity and practices of rurality evident in these people’s accounts clearly instantiate their importance.
	Continuing to study rural or urban society in China as if either has an independent, contained reality cannot contribute to understandings that will be accurate or useful to the people concerned, whether farmers, migrants, or policy-makers.  People in rural areas are conversant with the texts of urban modernity, but rather than memorizing text and commentary to regurgitate them in eight-leg essay form, they are actively engaging the modern messages they encounter as they form identities that bridge gaps modernity presumes to be unspannable.  These cosmopolitan identities are not always liberatory: in some contexts they empower, and in other contexts they reinforce inequality and domination.  But recognizing them is crucial for coming to understand how people in China and elsewhere make decisions about whether to leave and return to rural areas, about what activities to undertake in countrysides and how to respond to government and market incursions, about what possible livelihoods are desirable and attainable.  This study recognizes some of the ways rural-urban hybridity inflects people’s subjectivities.  It awaits further work to clarify which aspects of rural-urban encounter affect people’s identity formation in which ways and with what intensity, but the recognition itself is an important step.

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