“Others” Inside the Invisibly Walled World—Chinese Rural Cultural Identity Crises

This article explores the identity politics and crises of rural cultural identity in Chinese “walled” practices of urbanization and its modernization, which is not signal but a core of stability. Here, this topic was situated within historically specific modernity developments and practices which have disturbed the relatively “settled” character of rural cultural identity, above all in relation to the process of urbanization in China. Though rural people seems to have a common rural origin, they actually encountered with unprecedented cultural identity crises—the questions of becoming rather being: not “who they are” or “where did they came from”, but “what they might become” and “how they might represent themselves” during their way to modernization and urbanization. The above questions constitute the content of this paper.