In this episode, anthropologist Gonçalo Santos analyzes some of the major shifts in Chinese village life after more than four decades of radical programs of urbanization and modernization. As China became a predominantly urban and industrial society with increasing levels of affluence, the government expanded its capacity to implement large-scale programs of development aimed at turning “backward” Han Chinese peasant populations into modern “civilized” subjects more aligned with global and national standards of modernity. Santos discusses this technocratic transition from the perspective of impoverished rural communities, drawing on two decades of longitudinal field research in one rural township in Guangdong Province. He shares his views on what has changed in rural communities over the decades and why the countryside will continue to play a central role in the future of China.
Gonçalo Santos is an anthropologist and a leading international scholar in the field of China studies. He is an Assistant Professor of Social-Cultural Anthropology at the University of Coimbra. He is also a Researcher at CIAS – Research Center for Anthropology and Health, University of Coimbra, where he coordinates the Research Group “Technoscience, Society, and Environment”. He held previous positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of “Chinese Village Life Today” (University of Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of “Transforming Patriarchy” (University of Washington Press, 2017). He is a member of the Research Group “Culture and Society” of the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of the Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and society in Asia and around the world.
