Category Archives: Events

Public lecture: Revitalizing the Countryside — East Asian Approaches

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Public lecture at University of Copenhagen featuring talks by Elena Meyer-Clement and Cornelia Reiher (Freie Universität Berlin).

May 5th, 2022 14:00-15:30 at University of Copenhagen, South Campus

The question of how to revitalize rural areas has made it onto the agenda of policymakers worldwide. One key factor for successfully reversing the traditional dynamic of rural resource exploitation and for turning rural areas into spaces of economic innovation, are human resources. However, attracting talent to rural areas has proven difficult. The talks look at dynamics of internal migration and approaches of rural revitalization by central and local governments in Japan and China. With their focus on internal migration, they shed light on practices and challenges of managing populations in the two countries and highlight the underlying ideas about who constitutes the „ideal in-migrant”.

Can migrants revitalize Japan’s countryside? Governmental promotion of urban-rural migration in Northern Kyushu (Cornelia Reiher, Freie Universität Berlin)

Who shall revitalize China’s countryside? China’s “Rural Revitalization Strategy” and new trends in governmental regulation of internal migration (Elena Meyer-Clement, University of Copenhagen)

For further details, see: https://www.thinkchina.ku.dk/events/revitalizing-the-countryside/

New Event: Seminar on Agrarian Futures in China on October 29, 2021

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Organized by the China and global Development Network, Department of Applied Social Sciences of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China, this seminar brings together thee presentations on the topic of agrarian futures in China. The presenters are drawn from the participants of a recent topical issue of China Perspectives on agrarian futures, co-edited by Karita Kan and René Trappel. René is also one of the presenters.

Project meeting January 2020

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A project meeting was held at Freie Universität Berlin on January 17, 2020. All three members of the DFG research project team, Elena Meyer-Clement, René Trappel and Xiang Wang attended the meeting.

In the morning, Xiang Wang presented the preliminary findings from her four-month fieldwork about the redevelopment of urban villages (chengzhongcun) in Guangzhou. Prof. Bettina Gransow from the Chinese Studies department and Kimiko Suda, a recent PhD graduate, also joined the presentation and the discussion session thereafter.

In the afternoon, Elena presented her fieldwork findings in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Afterwards, the project team shared their latest publications and upcoming plans for fieldwork, conferences and publications.

Second Workshop of the “Modernizing Rural China” research network took place in Freiburg

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September 27–29, scholars from Europe, North America, and Asia convened at Studienhaus Wiesneck near Freiburg to discuss land use, agrarian change, urbanization and state-society relations in a modernizing Chinese countryside. This years workshop, organized by René Trappel, Elena Meyer-Clement, and Jesper Zeuthen, consisted of paper presentations and a final steering discussion to organize future work and plan upcoming events.

Participants included John Donaldson (Singapore Management University), Burak Gürel (Koç University), Christopher Heurlin (Bowdoin College), Karita Kan (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Kyonghee Lee (University of Heidelberg), Kristen Looney (Georgetown University), Elena Meyer-Clement (Freie Universität Berlin), René Trappel (University of Freiburg), and Jesper Willaing Zeuthen (Aalborg University).

Photo credit: Daniel Kroth

A report on the workshop is published in ASIEN – The German Journal on Contemporary Asia, no. 154/155, 2020.

The next workshop will take place in September 2022.

Presentations at two workshops: “Chinese Agriculture Abroad”, Olomouc, CZ and “Eurasian Parliamentary Practices and Political Mythologies”, Heidelberg

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René Trappel was invited to discuss recent developments in governance in China at two international workshops in June 2019. Both presentations highlighted different aspects of the current approach of the Chinese government to transform the countryside.
  
On June 7-8 René participated in the “Chinese Agriculture Abroad” workshop at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic and presented on “Guiding Peasants into the Future? Vision and Practice of Agricultural Modernization in China”. The international workshop provided a stimulating forum to discuss the Chinese influence on agriculture in the bordering nations, in particular the Russian Far East. 

On June 17-18 he took part in the “Eurasian Parliamentary Practices and Political Mythologies:  Imperial Legacies, Diversities, and Representations in the 20th and 21st Century” workshop at Heidelberg and presented on “Optimizing People and the Ways to Govern Them: The Transformation of Governance in Rural China”. 

Presenting in Olomouc: 
Presenting in Heidelberg:

Panel discussion at IAMO Forum 2019

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In June 2019, Elena Meyer-Clement was invited as a panelist at the IAMO Forum 2019 at Halle (Saale), Germany. The topic of the panel discussion was “Current challenges and way forward for Chinese agriculture after 40 years of rural reform”. In this multidisciplinary panel, Elena presented her thoughts on the role of urbanization and the concentration of rural housing space in China’s ongoing “rural revitalization strategy”.

 

Paper on “Rural Rejuvenation” presented at annual ASC meeting

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In November, Elena Meyer-Clement and René Trappel presented a paper at the annual meeting of the Working Group of Social Science China Research (Arbeitskreis Sozialwissenschaftliche Chinaforschung, ASC) in the German Association of Asian Studies (DGA) in Göttingen. The title was “From ‘New Socialist Countryside’ to ‘Rural Rejuvenation’: What is new in rural China?”.

The paper compares the strategy of Rural Rejuvenation under Xi Jinping with the Building of a New Socialist Countryside in Hu Jintao’s administration, particularly from the Foucauldian perspective of governmentality. The paper argues that the Rural Rejuvenation strategy introduces new approaches to optimize and modernize the rural population, with direct state interference on the retreat and increasing use of offering new rights and benefits.

(From left to right: Moderator Daniel Fuchs, René, and Elena. Credit: Author)

Presentation about China’s migration regime in the workshop on East Asian Migration Governance

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Elena Meyer-Clement and Wang Xiang made a presentation titled “Political steering of urban citizenship: China’s migration policy for internal migrants and foreign immigrants” on the workshop on “East Asian Migration Governance in Comparative Perspective: Norm diffusion, Politics of Identity, Citizenship”. The workshop is organized by the Einstein Visiting Fellow Project led by Prof. Dr. Gunter Schubert and it took place at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin on October 12-13.

Elena and Xiang’s paper examined the changes in China’s internal migration and immigration policy since Xi Jinping’s administration. They argue that China’s new approach to governing migration is still in the making, but recent policy changes point to further adaptation of China’s approach to international trends of migrant selection, namely attraction of high-skilled labor and rejection of low-skilled labor. The paper is set for publication in the edited volume associated with the workshop.

Wang presents hukou reform research on 14th ICARDC

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(Group photo of conference attendees. Credit: ICARDC XIV Organizing Committee)

The 14th International Conference on Agriculture and Rural Development in China (ICARDC XIV) was held in Ningxia University in Yinchuan, Ningxia Province in China from October 21 to 23, 2018.

Wang Xiang made a presentation in the panel “Urbanization and Rural-urban integration” about the latest hukou reforms in Guangdong province. She argues that despite ambitious reform plans to the hukou system, the Chinese government is not abandoning mechanisms that can allocate public resources to different subpopulations and steer internal migration. The urban-versus-rural bifurcation in the hukou system is being replaced by a more refined and tiered system of differentiation that defines what kind of migrants go to what kind of cities. Despite the removal of urban-rural differentiation in the hukou system and the ambitious targets of integrating migrants, China’s citizenship regime appears to retain differentiation rather than move towards unification.

(Credit: author)

Presentation at FUB-PKU workshop on Sustainable Development Goals

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March 17-18, Elena Meyer-Clement and René Trappel participated in the workshop “Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Policy in Germany and China”, co-organized by Freie Universität Berlin and Peking University, held at Peking University. Elena gave a presentation on “Challenges of implementing sustainable urbanization in rural and semi-urban China”.