The Central China School of Rural Studies: Guest Editor's Introduction

“The central China school of rural studies,” a multidisciplinary current, emerged in the late 1990s among rural sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists studying at the Center for Chinese Rural Studies at Huazhong Normal University (CCRS). The name “Huazhong xiangtupai” (hereafter “the central China school”) became attached to them after a critical review of their work (translated in this issue of Chinese Sociology and Anthropology) was published in 2005. Disagreements among scholars attached to CCRS led He Xuefeng, Wu Yi, and others to leave CCRS and found the Center for Research on Rural Governance (CRRG) at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, where the central China school is now largely based. The school has provoked debate not only on the condition of rural Chinese society and rural policy, but also on the direction of rural studies itself. Reflecting on Chinese rural studies and influenced by the work of Fei Xiaotong, the school has pushed for the construction of a Chinese understanding of contemporary rural society and its transformation, one it believes can be formed only through intensive ethnographic research. Invoking the title of Fei Xiaotong’s Xiangtu Zhongguo (translated by Gary Hamilton and Wang Zheng as From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society), He Xuefeng, now sociology professor and director of CRRG, published Xin xiangtu Zhongguo (New Rural China) in 2003, a collection of ethnographic observations that led to the school’s name.