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The Village Redevelopment Program is an ambitious policy which attempts to reshape the physical living environment in the countryside. In implementing the policy, local officials nationwide largely subsidize wealthy villages. Based on fieldwork conducted in two counties in different provinces, this article points to a politics of command as the main reason. It concludes that superiors, through the normal Chinese mechanisms for promoting new programs, have left local officials with little choice but to subsidize wealthy villages. This finding has implications for China's governance in a wider sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transition from traditional rural residences to urban-like multi-storey buildings and from traditional villages to rural residential communities (shequ) is one of rural China's most profound developments of the early twenty-first century. Official discourse highlights the potential benefits for villagers, portraying the new residential communities as gateways to modernity and significant steps toward reducing inequality and disparity between the rural and the urban. Based on extensive research in two counties in Shandong and Anhui provinces, this article concludes that while imposing urban-like models of residence may coincide with prosperous communities' circumstances, it may easily become a statist venture of predation and a source of tension and rural discontent in less prosperous communities [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]