A Discourse Analysis of 40 Years Rural Development in China

Since the reform and opening-up policy of 1978, rural areas in China have experienced significant changes in spatial, social, economic, and environmental development. In this research, we aim to explore the changes in the discourses on rural development over the past 40 years. This can help to understand how problems are framed and why certain strategies are adopted at different times. We employ a quantitative approach and analyze keywords from 32,657 Chinese publications on rural development from 1981 to 2020. From the results, we distinguish eight development paradigms, including “household responsibility system”, “rural commodity economy”, “social market economy”, “sustainable development”, “Sannong”, “building a new socialist countryside”, “beautiful countryside”, and “rural revitalization”. We also interpret the discursive shifts in three aspects, i.e., actors, places, and activities. We argue that the key characteristic of current rural development discourse is the duality, which emerges between agricultural and non-agricultural industries, economic growth and environmental conservation, urban and rural development, topdown and bottom-up approaches, and modernist and postmodernist discourses.