Aestheticisation, rent-seeking, and rural gentrification amidst China’s rapid urbanisation: The case of Xiaozhou village, Guangzhou Junxi Qian a , Shenjing He b, * , Lin Liu b, c a Center for Cultural Industry and Cultural Geography, School of Geographical Sciences, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, China b Guangdong Key Laboratory for Urbanization and Geo-simulation, Center of Integrated Geographic Information Analysis, School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China c Department of Geography, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0131, USA Keywords: Rural gentrification Counter-urbanisation Aestheticisation Commodification Rent-seeking Post-socialist China abstract Amidst China’s immense and rapid urbanisation, gentrification has spread from urban centres to peri- urban and rural areas. Employing an analytical perspective built from the literatures on counter- urbanisation, rural immigration and rural gentrification, this study examines the two-stage gentrifica- tion processes in Xiaozhou village, Guangzhou, China. Situating rural gentrification in Xiaozhou against broader backdrops e such as urbanisation in Guangzhou and the preservation regulations imposed by the local state e this article unveils the ways in which interplays between the aestheticisation of rural living and indigenous villagers’ rent-seeking behaviour fostered rural immigration and gentrification. In Xiaozhou, grassroots artists’ aestheticisation and colonisation of the village ignited an initial stage of gentrification. The subsequent commodification of rural land and housing, induced by increasing con- centration of art students and middle class “elite artists”, led to deepened gentrification, studentification and eventually displacement of pioneer gentrifiers. In this process, local villagers’ rent-seeking behaviour went hand in hand with aestheticisation and commodification of rural space. This finding questions the representations of victimised local rural residents in much of Western literature on rural gentrification. The special role played by the government policy and institutional arrangement in the stories of Xiaozhou also has the potential to add a new dimension to rural gentrification explanations. In sum, this paper shows that explanations of the perplexing dynamics of rural immigration and gentrification can benefit from more flexible and fluid conceptualisations of “gentrifiers” and “gentrification” as a whole. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction China’s recent development are characterised by a rapid tran- sition from a rural-dominant society to a continuously enlarging urban society. According to the latest Chinese official statistics, for the very first time in history, more than 50 percent of the Chinese population has taken up residence in the numerous and expanding cities and towns (Pan et al., 2012). Serving as buffer zones between urban cores and remoter rural areas, peri-urban areas are therefore experiencing the most vigorous transformation, and have become hot spots to observe the rapid changes in both Chinese rural and urban societies. Since the early 1980s, rapid expansion of urban settlements and the construction of roads and industrial sites have encroached into peri-urban areas. Thus far, China has seen three waves of urban expansion starting, respectively, in the early 1980s, and around 1992 and 2003. These have been called the three Chi- nese “enclosure movements” (Wang and Chen, 2003). Noticeably, about 80% of new construction land during the urbanisation pro- cess was converted from rural, cultivated land, particularly in major metropolitan regions along the eastern coast. As a counter measure to the somehow uncontrollable loss of arable land, the State Council of the PRC published a strict policy known as “Basic Agricultural Land Preservation Regulations” in 1998 (He et al., 2009). In cases where restrictions on cultivated land appropriation were less effective, the local state converted entire villages or their farmland to urban construction land, and forcefully “urbanised” villagers. In other cases, villages survived relentless urban encroachment owing to the enforcement of preservation regulations by the central state or the implementation of alterna- tive development strategies by the local state. Yet, both the physical environment and socio-demographic compositions of these vil- lages were fundamentally changed due to close proximity to and constant interactions with cities. In preserved peri-urban villages, * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: junxi.qian@gmail.com (J. Qian), heshenj@mail.sysu.edu.cn (S. He). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud 0743-0167/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2013.08.002 Journal of Rural Studies 32 (2013) 331e345