Although Jeremy Brown claims that his book seeks to explain the process of how cities and villages in Mao's China became alienated from one another, in eight chapters he actually tells a great story of dynamic negotiations over the urban–rural divide that have constantly taken place between the city of Tianjin and its surrounding rural communities. Fundamental to the occurrence of these negotiations was, as Brown has documented in detail using archival sources, local publications, personal diaries and interviews, a variety of persistent resistances from the villages to Maoist policy programmes which were forced upon them by the city leadership in favour of the urban centre. Whether or not people in the villages ideologically resented the reality that their countryside had become a “dumping ground” to absorb urban human “outcasts,” as Brown terms them, over the years they were simply unable to bear the burden, particularly in economic terms, of the recurring arrivals of old landlords, Rightists, “bad elements” (huaifenzi), “society youths” (shehui qingnian), people of bad political background and repatriated peasant workers arising from the city's needs to either downsize its urban population or purify its social and political environment. By demanding funds and provisions for housing and employing the several hundred thousand outcasts who came to Tianjin's countryside, or even refusing to take them, the humble rural people and their cadres forced the city's administrative apparatus to maintain regular dialogues or collaboration with them on the settlements of outcasts, whether on a large scale or in individual cases. Their challenges, along with the stubborn resistance of many individual outcasts who wanted to fight or to sneak their way back to the city, practically forged tight links between Tianjin and its surrounding areas, often traversing the Maoist urban–rural divide.

This book has many merits. It significantly advances our knowledge of the era of Mao's China: specifically, that the Maoist regime was not so rigidly controlled as it appeared to be. Mao's China separated the countryside from cities by its forceful system of household registration (hukou), a “legal Great Wall” as some have termed it, but at the grassroots levels, as Brown shows in Tianjin, the wall was penetrated almost daily by the individual peasants who entered the city to sell their products at black markets or to find temporary or permanent jobs; and by the individual outcasts who, rejecting the discriminative oppression imposed on them, re-entered the city to cry for the recuperation of their urban entitlements in residence, food, job and family reunion. Beside their fights in economic life, the rural people resisted political impositions from the city, as evident in Brown's chapter on the Four Clean-ups campaign: some individuals demanded that a campaign working team return their confiscated properties, even verbally threatening the safety of these urban-dispatched workers. In brief, Brown demonstrates that although the city was in the commanding position above the urban–rural divide, below it the countryside was never passive. Rural resistances were tenacious and vital, and presaged many changes in the urban–rural relationship in the coming reform era.

This book opens a number of new topics. Mao's Shanghai has been studied to a degree, particularly in the issues of prostitution, labour movement and the Cultural Revolution by Gail Hershatter, Elizabeth Perry and others. Brown's work, using the example of Tianjin, extends the field of Maoist China's urban history to the issues of the Communist grain policy of “unified purchasing and marketing,” the Great Leap Forward famine, the “downsizing” campaign in the post-leap years and the discriminative purification of urban social and political environment. All these issues are substantially and excellently discussed in Brown's individual chapters. Brown's search for source materials is impressive, exhibited especially in his efforts on tracing a number of interviewees whose cases were filed in the archives of the 1950s or 1960s.

It is a pity, however, that Brown's work, which covers the period of 1949 to 1978, has not included Tianjin's sent-down youths of the late 1960s and 1970s, which numbered over 400,000 people. The life of this group, if discussed, would make the book more complete. One should also exercise caution in applying the experiences of Tianjin, once China's second largest industrial and commercial city, to medium- and small-sized cities located in inland provinces, where their economic capacities, unlike Tianjin, were likely insufficient to permit people to manoeuvre across the urban–rural boundary.