Producing an ideal village: Imagined rurality, tourism and rural gentrification in China

Abstract

As with its urban counterpart, rural gentrification has been identified in different countries and is argued to have gone global. This study focuses on rural gentrification in China and proposes a more comprehensive and context-specific “imagined rurality” to explain the motivation of gentrifiers and the government's involvement in the processes of rural gentrification. The imagined rurality is shaped by the popular discourse and the governments' vision of the rural and may be different in different contexts. Through scrutinizing the process of rural gentrification in Mingyue Village, China, this research finds that gentrifiers' relocation and investments to materialize and commodify their imagined rurality have triggered the development of tourism and rural gentrification. Besides the often-underscored land ownership, local governments have also played a key role as a gentrifying agent in advancing rural gentrification and rural tourism under the background of rural revitalization. It also reveals that the process of rural gentrification is not just influenced by urbanites' imagined rurality but also conditioned by the intertwined process of tourism development. This research contributes to both the rural gentrification literature and to the literature on rural restructuring and the notions of rurality in contemporary China.