{"title":"“Without the school, the village has no soul”: Rethinking school and socio-cultural resilience in rural China","authors":"Zhenjie Yuan , Yuting Wu , Xinhui Wu","doi":"10.1016/j.habitatint.2025.103610","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The physical improvement of rural settlements has increasingly received attention from the government, yet essential social infrastructure within, such as rural schools, often faces the threat of closure, hindering the establishment of a well-functioning rural habitat system. This study rethinks the role of rural schools not merely as educational institutions, but as relational infrastructures that hold potential to sustain socio-cultural resilience in transforming rural China. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic case study of a historically significant Hakka village in Guangdong Province, the paper introduces the concepts of school-based ties (<em>xueyuan</em>) and village-based ties (<em>xiangyuan</em>) to examine how identity and community are co-produced through both functional practices and symbolic forms. Findings reveal that rural schools play a dual role: providing fundamental functions such as everyday care, educational access, and community interaction, while also serving as symbolic anchors for the community through spatial memory, ritual continuity, and intergenerational narratives. The analysis contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogues in rural resilience, infrastructural geographies, and cultural identity by conceptualising rural schools as dual-track infrastructures of belonging and meaning-making. It further challenges the efficiency-driven logic of school consolidation policies by foregrounding the emotional, symbolic, and relational functions of rural education. As rural settlements confront demographic decline and institutional withdrawal, sustaining such schools may prove pivotal to preserving the cultural fabric and future viability of rural life.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48376,"journal":{"name":"Habitat International","volume":"166 ","pages":"Article 103610"},"PeriodicalIF":7.0000,"publicationDate":"2025-10-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Habitat International","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0197397525003261","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"DEVELOPMENT STUDIES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
The physical improvement of rural settlements has increasingly received attention from the government, yet essential social infrastructure within, such as rural schools, often faces the threat of closure, hindering the establishment of a well-functioning rural habitat system. This study rethinks the role of rural schools not merely as educational institutions, but as relational infrastructures that hold potential to sustain socio-cultural resilience in transforming rural China. Drawing on an in-depth ethnographic case study of a historically significant Hakka village in Guangdong Province, the paper introduces the concepts of school-based ties (xueyuan) and village-based ties (xiangyuan) to examine how identity and community are co-produced through both functional practices and symbolic forms. Findings reveal that rural schools play a dual role: providing fundamental functions such as everyday care, educational access, and community interaction, while also serving as symbolic anchors for the community through spatial memory, ritual continuity, and intergenerational narratives. The analysis contributes to the interdisciplinary dialogues in rural resilience, infrastructural geographies, and cultural identity by conceptualising rural schools as dual-track infrastructures of belonging and meaning-making. It further challenges the efficiency-driven logic of school consolidation policies by foregrounding the emotional, symbolic, and relational functions of rural education. As rural settlements confront demographic decline and institutional withdrawal, sustaining such schools may prove pivotal to preserving the cultural fabric and future viability of rural life.
期刊介绍:
Habitat International is dedicated to the study of urban and rural human settlements: their planning, design, production and management. Its main focus is on urbanisation in its broadest sense in the developing world. However, increasingly the interrelationships and linkages between cities and towns in the developing and developed worlds are becoming apparent and solutions to the problems that result are urgently required. The economic, social, technological and political systems of the world are intertwined and changes in one region almost always affect other regions.