From the Mountains and the Fields: The Urban Transition in the Anthropology of China

This article critically reviews important developments in the anthropology of urban China. Although its primary focus is on works by China anthropologists, it addresses the interdisciplinary challenge and the increasingly ambiguous boundary between the “rural” and the “urban”. More specifically, the article analyzes major theoretical and pragmatic issues addressed by anthropologists in the following seven thematic areas: minority urbanization; urban economies and the influence of global capital; health; kinship and gender; migration; urban space and community; consumption and popular culture. Each section seeks to juxtapose competing arguments made by scholars and analyzes the larger implications of their findings. It further suggests three research directions that the anthropology of urban China could take in the future—a greater interdisciplinary approach to incorporate insights from other related fields, a larger comparative perspective that situates postreform urban China in relation to other formerly socialist countries and other developing cities in Latin America and Africa, and finally greater capabilities for integrating different levels of analysis by rescaling the levels at which social activities and institutions operate today.