What does a bowl of noodles in a Shanghai eatery have to do with a paddy rice field in Anhui Province? In Rural–Urban Migration and Agro-Technical Change in Post-Reform China, published with Amsterdam University Press as part of its New Mobilities in Asia series, Lena Kaufmann traces migrant stories from urban centers back to the countryside of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). At the center of this thoughtful book are farming households, their rural–urban migrant members, and the socio-technical relations to their paddy rice fields. Her work sheds new light on social and technological change in China’s countryside by analyzing land-use strategies and migration together, while taking seriously both social and material dimensions to the decision-making of her interlocutors.
Kaufmann offers a refreshing perspective in five chapters on rural–urban migration in China by focusing on how intimately it is shaped by socio-technical logics of farming in their places of origin. She invites readers to think about “community of practice worlds” to understand her interlocutors, who are rural–urban migrants and their families in rice farming villages in Hunan und Anhui Province. Navigating the complex and dynamic developments at China’s rural–urban migration nexus, they are faced with many questions. Yet, Kaufmann’s interlocutors rarely mentioned their rice paddy fields, which they have to maintain. “You don’t talk about your bathroom either. There is no need to talk about it” (16), they explained. But Kaufmann explores how it is exactly this often unspoken “paddy field-migration predicament” of having to tend to paddy rice fields at home, while working far away in urban centers such as Shanghai, that shapes migration and land-use strategies of rural households.
