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Since the mid-2000s, rural development and politics in China has entered a new phase that revolves around what the central government calls 'agricultural modernization'. Transforming the once-dominant smallholding, family-based agriculture has become a focal point of the government's programme of rural rejuvenation, where a range of economic changes unleashed by urbanization and industrialization also converge. We argue that in this new context, agrarian change has become the key vantage point from which to study rural China. We review key contributions of the papers in this special issue and highlight their insights on rural differentiation, land politics and rural livelihoods. We discuss how studying the ' Chinese path' of agrarian transition can contribute to ongoing debates on key themes in agrarian studies, including both the agrarian questions of capital and of labour, and how agrarian political economy offers unique perspectives on the overall processes of capitalist development in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper of two parts. The first suggests a number of questions concerning agrarian change in capitalism, grouped by their concern with social forces and dynamics internal to the countryside, rural-urban interconnections internal to the 'national', the contributions of agriculture to industrialization likewise within the 'national' and those 'external' determinants grounded in capitalist world economy. The second part draws on the papers in this special issue by Chinese scholars, to argue the continuing relevance of questions about commodification, differentiation and accumulation from below and from above, in agrarian change in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any analytical framework for understanding actual forms of the intensified incorporation of cities into the world economy needs to go beyond the exclusive focus on advanced producer services, which is characteristic of most of the World City Network (WCN) approach. Simultaneously, an account of the role of advanced producer services will strengthen Global Commodity Chain (GCC) analysis. A combination of the literatures on WCN and GCC can contribute to a broader conceptualization of the connections and connectivities of global cities. In addition, a combined approach will improve our understanding of globalization processes within many so-called ‘third-world’ cities that are experiencing booms in export-oriented industrialization and in migration from rural hinterlands as they are being integrated into Global Commodity Chains. We illustrate our argument with insights from GCC analyses of the electronics industry located in Ho Chi Minh City and the agricultural sector in its rural hinterland, the Mekong Delta. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]