Communities Across Boundaries (Revised Edition)

The true story of the "Beijing Drift" movement, which continues to this day. China's cities, migrant populations, economy, and society in transition. A 30-year study of the lives of Beijing's "Zhejiang Village" and its inhabitants.

Zhejiang Village, gradually taking shape in the Nanyuan area, five kilometers south of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, began in the 1980s. Over the past 30 years, its unique dynamics of economic production and social reproduction, and the interplay between its internal space and external environment, have become a vivid example for studying China's migrant population, urban socioeconomic development, and institutional, power, and policy dynamics since the reform and opening up era.
Leveraging his connections as a fellow villager, the author conducted field research in Zhejiang Village over a six-year period in the mid-1990s, delving into the daily lives of its inhabitants. Using a nearly unadorned style, the book meticulously captures the numerous details of the settlement, development, and transformation of this migrant community. The book provides a close-up analysis of the formation, structure, operation, and evolution of Zhejiang Village, capturing the lives of these migrants in Beijing, their production and operations, their rural aspirations, and their interactions with local authorities, both in the places where they migrated and in their registered residences.
This book, revised and reprinted after a 20-year hiatus, not only supplements and revises the previous edition, but also includes a new preface that reviews the changes in Zhejiang Village and Chinese society since 2000, analyzing and elaborating on the "regularization" and "division-and-seizure" models. To facilitate historical comparison, a diagram of the distribution of Zhejiang Village before its relocation in 2017 has been added.

2018-03-01

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