In Chinese Village, Global Market, which is the outcome of more than a decade of collaborative research, Tony Saich and Biliang Hu offer a detailed case study of a village community in China's most dynamic economic region of the reform period, the Pearl River Delta. To refer to their site, Yantian, in Dongguan County of Guangdong Province, as a village is to engage with one of the central questions of this book: what happens to a community when it grows to the size of a mid-size city in a Western country, but retains the structures of a village? As seen in other parts of China, local society develops into two tiers, the permanent village residents with a village household permit, and the temporary migrants (many of whom live in Yantian virtually permanently), who constitute a much larger share of the actual local population.
Yantian village, in the pre-reform period,...