“…The above changes in traditional lineage landscapes and villages have often been understood (and denounced) as part of the effacement of Chinese rurality amidst rapid urbanization (Guldin, 2000), and eventually leading to the doomsday scenario of ‘the end of the rural’ in China (see Smith, 2021). In contradiction to the prevailing pessimistic scholarship on the demise of Chinese rurality, this paper builds on an increasing number of studies which have emerged to challenge such narrow dystopian logic and articulate active rural voices in diversified ways (Bell et al, 2010; Chio, 2017b; Ghosh, 2017; Gillen et al, 2022; He & Zhang, 2022; Kumar & Shaw, 2020). In the context of the blurred rural–urban landscape, some of extant studies subscribe to the argument on persistent rurality (e.g., Chung, 2013) or that on adaptive rurality (e.g., Wilson, 2010) while many others theorize rural agencies in more radical forms of penetration, defence, resistance, protest and social movements (e.g., Halfacree, 2007; Neal, 2013).…”