Contested Metabolic Nodes
Shareholding Cooperatives and Planetary Ruralization in China
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 24214482 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Yong Zhang (0000-0001-6711-5791) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Publication date | 2026-09-23 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0309-1317 • E-ISSN: 1468-2427 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1468-2427.70136 |
| OpenAlex | W7214102142 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 52 |
China's recent shareholding cooperative (SC) reform heralds a shift from expropriation‐led rural change to a post‐expropriation regime in which the countryside is reconstituted through circulation, capitalization, and new forms of collective governance. Existing interpretations, whether framed as market‐driven de‐collectivization, state‐led re‐collectivization, or pragmatic neo‐collectivization, struggle to grasp the planetary and relational dynamics through which these reforms actually unfold. Drawing on multi‐scalar fieldwork in Jiyuan, an inland municipality that institutionalized SCs across 525 villages, the article advances a framework that conceptualizes SCs as contested metabolic nodes where state directives, capital flows, and local aspirations are continuously translated and reworked. Through comparative analysis of three villages located across an expanded urban–rural interface, the study shows how economic restructuring and territorial remaking materialize through differentiated practices of defensive stabilization, augmentative experimentation, and performative visibility. Relational autonomy emerges as a capacity generated through circulations: villages negotiate actively within and across the state and market logics. By foregrounding the metabolic processes where rural commons recompose collective assets, risks, and identities, the article repositions corporatized villages as active sites of planetary ruralization and laboratories of contemporary rural transformation.
Capital flows · China · collective governance · decollectivization · Expropriation · Jiyuan · relational autonomy · rural commons · rural transformation · ruralization · state-market relations · urban-rural interface · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance · Regional Development and Environment
Community Capitalism in China
Village China Under Socialism and Reform
Planetary rural geographies
Geographies of ruralization
Community self-organisation in contemporary China
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
Betting on the Big
China's Agrarian Reform and the Privatization of Land
Reconceptualising the rural through planetary thinking
The transformation of the village collective in urbanising China
State-led commodification of rural China and the sustainable provision of public goods in question
Rural restructuring in China
Creating land markets for rural revitalization
An integrated conceptual framework for the study of agricultural cooperatives
Land dispossession, rural gentrification and displacement
The Partnership Question as a Scale Question
State ‐ Led Ruralization and Its Urban Entanglements
Cities in a world of villages
Evaluating the cooperative and family farm programs in China
From state-dominant to bottom-up redevelopment
Failing entrepreneurial governance
Counterurban sensibilities in the global countryside
Beyond Growth Machine Politics
Rethinking Primitive Accumulation
Neo-collectivisation’ through property rights reforms
Rural development led by autonomous village land cooperatives
Property Rights Reforms and Changing Grassroots Governance in China’s Urban—Rural Peripheries
Redefining Rural Collectives in China
Reconsolidation of state power into urbanising villages
The Chinese Road to Capitalism
Articulating relational rurality amidst urbanization
Tourism dynamos
Variegated forms of planetary ruralisation
Rural-urban interfaces and changing forms of relational and planetary rurality
The Road to Collective Debt in Rural China
Geographical articulations of rurality at the rural-urban interface
Spaces of Extraction, Metropolitan Explosions
Accumulation without Dispossession? Land Commodification and Rent Extraction in Peri-urban China
Urbanization as A Process of State Building
Urbanizing Urban Political Ecology
A Small Entrepreneurial City in Action
The Places of Primitive Accumulation in Rural China
One village, one product
The politics of the shareholding collective economy in China's rural villages
Hukouand land
| Highly cited | No |
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