This study constitutes a major contribution to our understanding of women, gender and rural development within and beyond China. Examining 60 years of economic, political and social change in one village in Yunnan province, this book has both depth and breadth. Research in Lu village, also the site of Fei Xiao-tong's very fine field study conducted in the 1940s and reported in Earthbound China, enables the author to examine how larger concepts and abstractions such as Chinese culture, communist planning and market-driven reforms shape and are shaped by gender definitions and relations in everyday practice.