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City and Countryside as Ideological Issues: India and China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Rhoads Murphey
Rhoads Murphey
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Extract

Distinctions, and tensions, between urban and rural bases of society are as old as civilization, in every culture. Even in so city-dominated a system as the contemporary United States, where urban models seem almost to monopolize every aspect of the culture, such tensions exist and are reflected, for example, in political attitudes and politicians' strategies. Although about four-fifths of the U.S. population now lives in urban areas, and despite the dwindling number of farmers, the rural present as well as the larger rural past continue to play a distinct role within the national whole and to act on the urban sector.

Type
Cities
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 14 , Issue 3 , June 1972 , pp. 250 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1972

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References

1 1 have tried to summarize, and interpret these attitudes at greater length in ‘Man and Nature in China’, Modern Asian Studies, I (1967), 313–33Google Scholar, and in ‘Images of India’, in Change and the Persistence of Tradition in India, Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, No. 2 (1971) Ann Arbor.

2 Most notably by Skinner, G. W. in ‘Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China’, Journal of Asian Studies, 24 (1964–65), November 1964, February 1965, and May 1965.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For two samples of the extensive discussion of this issue see Morris, M. D., ‘Toward a Reinterpretation of Nineteenth Century Indian Economic History’, Journal of Economic History, 23 (1963), 606–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 612 ff., and Feuerwerker, Albert, The Chinese Economy, 1912–1949Google Scholar and The Chinese Economy, 1870–1911 (sections on handicrafts), Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, Nos. 1 (1968) and 5 (1969) Ann Arbor.Google Scholar

4 Chi-ming, Hou, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 1840–1937 Cambridge, Mass., 1965, provides an analysis of this question in the Chinese case.Google Scholar

5 For an excellent discussion of this issue see Sovani, N. V., ‘The Analysis of Over-Urbanization’, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 12 (1964), 113–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 A number of new towns have been established in India since independence in previously rural areas, some industrial, some administrative, but mainly not as part of a national policy to counter the growth of existing urban giants. Most of the new towns were founded in response to specific regional needs. For more detail and some general discussion see Ved Prakash, New Towns in India, Duke University Program in Comparative Studies on Southern Asia, Monograph No. 8,1969.

7 For a penetrating analysis of these issues in the Chinese case, including antiurbanism and attitudes toward industrialization, see Meisner, Maurice, ‘Leninism and Maoism: Some Populist Perspectives on Marxism-Leninism in China’, The China Quarterly, No. 45 (January-March 1971), 2–36Google Scholar. Moore, Barrington, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Boston, 1966, pp. 490–6, offers a discussion of populist antiurbanism and antiindustrialism in general, together with a rather sweeping and speculative point of view.Google Scholar

8 This thesis is persuasively argued, with much illustrative material drawn from both China and India, by Johnson, E. A. J., The Organization of Space in Developing Countries, Cambridge, Mass., 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar