Beneath the China Boom: A Conversation with Julia Chuang
Please join Asian Studies for a talk by Dr. Julia Chuang on her new book, Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market. The event will be moderated by Dr. Kristen Looney. Lunch will be provided.
For nearly four decades, China’s manufacturing boom has been powered by the labor of 287 million rural migrant workers, who travel seasonally between villages where they farm for subsistence and cities where they work. Yet recently local governments have moved away from manufacturing and toward urban expansion and construction as a development strategy. As a result, at least 88 million rural people to date have lost rights to village land. In Beneath the China Boom, Julia Chuang follows the trajectories of rural workers, who were once supported by a village welfare state and are now landless. This book provides a view of the undertow of China’s economic success, and the periodic crises—a rural fiscal crisis, a runaway urbanization—that it first created and now must resolve.
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Julia Chuang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She is a qualitative researcher with research interests in development, agrarian politics, and migration. Her work has utilized ethnographic and interview-based methods, and recently, she has also begun to work with computational methods as well. Julia completed her postdoctoral training at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. She received a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Social Studies from Harvard University.
Julia’s research addresses development and transnational capital flows in China. One line of inquiry looks into burgeoning land markets in rural China, where land expropriation has become a leading source of popular grievances. A second research project examines capital migration from Asia to the West, in the form of immigrant investors who seek destinations where they can safely “park” capital assets in exchange for long-term returns or political citizenship.
Her book, Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market, published in 2020 by University of California Press, won multiple awards from the ASA. Other pieces have also been published in Politics & Society, Gender & Society, Journal of Peasant Studies, and The China Quarterly.
Kristen Looney is an Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Government at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses on Chinese and Comparative Politics. Her research is on rural development and governance. Her first book, Mobilizing for Development: The Modernization of Rural East Asia, was published with Cornell University Press in 2020. Through a comparison of Taiwan, South Korea, and China, the book shows that different types development outcomes were realized to different degrees, at different times, and in different ways. It argues that rural modernization campaigns played a central role in the region and that divergent development outcomes can be attributed to the interaction of campaigns and institutions. The analysis departs from common portrayals of the developmental state as wholly technocratic and demonstrates that rural development was not just a byproduct of industrialization, as many studies have presumed.
Dr. Looney has previously published her research in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and Current History. Her research has been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Blakemore Foundation, the Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowships Program, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. She holds a B.A. from Wellesley College in Chinese Studies and Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.