In July 2007, a news report titled “Building new villages: Why are the 900 million peasants collectively mute?” started to circulate in Chinese media networks. According to the report, early in the year, five professors from the China Agricultural University had submitted a report to the central government about problems emerging in the process of “building new socialist villages”. Concerns were expressed that peasants were not able to participate in the necessary policymaking and implementation. As Professor Ye, one of the authors of the report, told the news reporter, “They are collectively mute; they lack the means to express their own opinions. However it should be them playing the leading role on the stage.”

This news story exemplifies the wide recognition accorded to a presumed urban-rural divide, and shows how national policy and discourse can be directed toward bridging this divide. The concerns expressed by Professor Ye and his collaborators are not just theirs. Their efforts to clarify and redress the “problem of the rural” (sannong wenti, see below) indicate that it would be a mistake to assume a simple antagonistic relationship – such as domination and subordination – between the State and peasants, urban and rural people. However, my discussion both takes thoughtful analysts like these sociologists as allies in setting up the problems of this book, and examines how and why such scholars continue to keep a pernicious urban-rural divide alive in China's urbandominated discourses.

Instead of trying to answer Ye's question “why are the 900 million peasants collectively mute?” I am more interested in the occurrence of the question itself, and what it tells us about the discourse on peasants: are peasants “collectively mute”? From what perspective do researchers and news reporters draw on this rhetorical question more or less in unison, and why? This chapter will tackle these questions first with a critical reading of some contemporary Chinese writing so as to pave the road for my ethnographic inquiry into the local intimacies and the lived practices of China's rural-urban divide.