Bridging State and Society: College Students’ Collaborative Participation in Rural Construction in China

Abstract

Collaborative participation of college students is an emerging trend in mitigating the brain drain from rural communities. However, the impact of the collaboration on community capacity building and the roles of these students have remained unclear. This article gives some theoretical concerns on collaborative planning in the specific context of China. It employs historical materials and illustrative cases to demonstrate that rural construction in China is an interactive process between state and society, with college students, exerting a mediating role. Cases indicate that during collaborative participation, expert knowledge and local knowledge are integrated.

Keywords:

• Collaborative planning
• state-society interaction
• knowledge integration
• rural construction
• co-creation workshop

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the staff members of China Regional Coordinated Development and Rural Construction Institute, Sun Yat-Sen University, and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, for their contributions to capacity building of China’s rural areas. We are also grateful to Tuguan Village and Yunyin Village for their support to the participation of college students in rural construction.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In 2021, the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the “Five-Year Action Plan for Improvement and Improvement of Rural Living Environment (2021–2025).”

2 Data released by the Economic Research Centre of Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in 2019.

3 Data from the 2021 Rural Construction Evaluation Survey, organized by the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China.

4 In ancient China, we call the intellectual as ‘shi (±).’ After the time of Confucius, common people’s education was popularized, and shi became a general term for all who receive education. In contemporary times, people who have received a university education and possess professional knowledge can be considered intellectuals, like the college students in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China under Grant [No. 21AZD034].

Notes on contributors

Luan Chen

Luan Chen is a Ph.D. student pursuing a degree at the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University. Her work spans collaborative planning in Chinese context (‘co-creation’), bringing a wealth of experience and insights to rural revitalization. Her work often delves into everyday life in China and the interaction between the state and society, and is presented in a humanistic and open-minded manner.

Yaofu Huang

Dr Huang Yaofu graduated from Sun Yat-sen University in June 2023. During his doctoral research, Dr Huang focused on exploring the development and evolution mechanisms of rural urbanization and county-town-village, and studying the pattern and characteristics of population mobility in reshaping the county’s human settlements. Dr Huang’s research interests focus on computable villages and rural urbanization in China.

Xinhui Wu

Dr Wu Xinhui graduated from the Department of Chinese of Sun Yat-sen University with a bachelor’s degree, and a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Exeter, UK. Her main research areas are rural geography and cultural geography, and her research interests include global countryside, everyday life space, and rurality.

Xun Li

Dr Li Xun is a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, and dean of the China Institute of Regional Coordinated Development and Rural Construction. Since 2009, he has been deeply engaged in the field of urbanization research and rural construction, and has carried out rural revitalization and old community renovation in more than 50 urban and rural communities in China with the concept of ‘co-creation.’