Description
Book SynopsisThis book is a collection of texts on one of China's boldest social experiments in recent years: the rural reconstruction project in Bishan. The Bishan Project (2011-2016) was a rural reconstruction project in a small village Bishan, Anhui Province, China.
The writings describe and criticize the social problems caused by China’s over-loading urbanization process and starts a a contemporary agrarianism and agritopianism discourse to resist the modernism and developmentalism doctrine which dominated China for more than a century, answering a global desire for the theory and action of the alternative social solution for today’s environmental and political crises.This practical utopian commune project ran for 6 years and caused a national debate on rural issues in China, when it was invited to be exhibited and presented abroad.
This collection of writing will be of interest to artists, China scholars, architects, and the cultural community at large.
Table of ContentsCONTENTS
Prologue
Night Play
Introduction
Utopia in Practice
Rural Youth
My Self-Urbanised Story
Nostalgia Survey
Letter to My Mother
Huizhou Fieldwork
From Nonplaces to Places
Revisiting Bishan
Blueprint
Anarchist and Ruralism
The Possibility of Rural Revival
The Agrarian Home and It’s Reconstruction
Bishan Harvestival
Go Bush!
Reality and History
Beijing’s Climate Politics
What Wukan Means
The Cultivators: Rural Reconstructionists in China
Yixian International Festival
The Urban-Rural Interactions
Field of Hope
Deep Plowing
Heart-following Houses
The Benevolent Mind
The Documentation of Local Life
Controversy and Introspection
Symbolic Boundary, Distinction and Othering
The Organic Intellectuals
Informal Life Politics
Cultural Production and Placemaking
School of Tillers
Beat the Land
Timekeepers
Memoir in Southern Anhui
New Commons
The Crisis and Experiment of the Commons
The “Commons” of Common Spaces
Agriculture, Craftsmanship and Education
The Food Politics
Renaissance of Craftsmanship?
Children’s Sense of Reality
City and Countryside
After City “Failed”
Countryside as Countryside
The Utopian Dream
Autonomy: Utopia or Realpolitik
You’re Too Shy to Talk about Utopia
The Discourse of Utopia in the Post-Mao Era
Postscript
Aftershock
Epilogue
Large Rat
Appendix
The Chronology of Bishan Project
