Surviving Conservation: Herders and Farmers in China’s Northwest

Convener: School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies & Faculty of Oriental Studies

Speaker: Professor You-tien Hsing

Since the early 2000s, the Chinese government has launched a series of ‘anti-desertification’ campaigns in the arid northwest.  Based on her field research in the pastoral area of western Inner Mongolia and agricultural area in central Gansu province from 2011 to 2016, Hsing will talk about herders and farmers’ aspirations and strategies of living with anti-desertification programs of ecological relocation, grazing and farming bans, and state subsidies in the context of China's rapidly changing urban-rural relationships.

You-tien Hsing is Professor of Geography, Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies, and Chair of Center for Chinese Studies at University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (1998), The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (2010), and co-editor (with Ching Kwan Lee) of Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism (2009).