Time and Migration: How Long-Term Taiwanese Migrants Negotiate Later Life

and empirical accounts call for a reengagement with a core question in development studies: what does ‘‘development’’ really mean, especially in the rural context (Ferguson 1994)? Pushing us to look beyond conventional economic indicators such as resource transfer, infrastructure construction, and GDP growth, the author shows how policies that were supposedly meant to jumpstart rural development and improve villagers’ economic well-being—such as Chongqing’s land and household registration reforms—actually ended up expropriating rural communities of indigenous growth initiatives and tearing down their social fabric. Parallel to the argument made on an international scale by dependency theorists, rural ‘‘development’’ could well lead to increased dependency of the countryside on urban centers. One could further ask: what would the alternative be? What would it mean for rural communities to take charge of a developmental process that preserves some sort of village autonomy from the sweep of urbanization? The book does not provide answers to these questions, but it does help start new, thought-provoking, and potentially agenda-setting conversations, which more than qualifies it for a great piece of scholarship.