Jing Song's sociological study provides a multi-faceted and gendered study of employment in rural China. She bases her work on an examination of rural employment as it has developed historically during the reform period in four contrasting village locations. The issue of productive activity beyond the purely agricultural in the countryside is well selected, as its role is indispensable to wellbeing in rural China, and its shape has been changing rapidly in this century. The gendering of the study is a particularly appropriate contribution: first, in providing an essential inclusion of the pervasive dimensions of patriarchy and responses to it in external workplaces and, second, in tracing the interconnections of these with parallel patriarchal dimensions and responses within households and families.

The four villages were all visited repeatedly from 2001 to 2011 as part of a large team-based study at Peking University of which the author was a member. Two of the sites are coastal and both are relatively close to Shanghai, but contrast somewhat in being more oriented toward and historically engaged either in collective enterprise (the Jiangsu site) or in private enterprise (the Zhejiang site). A third site is in Hebei, a three hour drive from Beijing, and is primarily although not exclusively agricultural, with migrant work available in the nearby urban and metropolitan areas. A fourth site is in Ningxia, in a village formerly much like the Hebei one, but incorporated into urban development in the 1990s, transforming villagers into legal urban residents and their village into a development zone.

The range of village sites is important in allowing Jing Song to excavate and contrast differing sets of constraints in the political economy of varying sites and to explore responses to these. The particular scope of the range they offer has significance as well, as all are comparatively well positioned for non-agricultural development through proximity to and, in one case, actual incorporation into an urban centre. The potential this proximity (or incorporation) offers is critical because these well-positioned cases allows insight into some of the most promising possibilities for villagers. While long-distance migration may offer wide horizons and opportunities, it comes with significant social and economic burdens for geographically separated and less affluent families. This means the movement of wider employment opportunities to at least the more accessible rural regions (as also attempted in the late collective and early reform eras) provides a positive aspect moderating or dispersing the magnetic pull of the country's leading centres. This study's cases provide a valuable window on this expanding direction in transforming uses of space and options for people to move or to stay closer to family and kin networks of cooperation, care and intimate life.

Jing Song's work is attentive to these human dimensions and views employment issues suitably in household or family context, as employment opportunities and decisions are complexly located within the dynamics of domestic groups and family life. She does not directly address critiques of household strategy approaches, but evidently shares the concern that these miss or undervalue internal household matters. Her approach remains firmly focused on external employment and sees it as “a choice negotiated at the household level and as an issue of job selectivity shaped by the market setting” (p. 15). Her volume carefully and consistently applies this approach together with gender analysis to each case in a core set of four substantive chapters. This work is based on extensive and solid field research and promises to be a valuable baseline as China's rural world continues its move to urbanize, even in the countryside.