JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Geographical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Geographical Review. ABSTRACT.Official Chinese policies deemphasized small towns between 1949 and 1979. A shift of official policy and attitude since 1979 has allowed many small towns to be revitalized with flourishing linkages to productive rural hinterlands. SMALL towns have been an integral part of the Chinese urban system for a long time. The position of these settlements was so central in the lives of the peasantry that they were not easily subverted by the rising tide of socialism during the mid-1950s, when the rural economy was reorganized.' That reorganization was premised on ideological denial of commodity exchange and was persistently executed during the Great Leap Forward (1958) and the cultural revolution (1966-76). Rural commerce came to a virtual standstill, and small towns had stagnated and declined by the late 1970s. Subsequent shifts in policies for agricultural production and commodity exchange have rejuvenated the rural economy and revived small towns as centers of rural trade and manufacture. Once again linked to the surrounding countryside, they quickly demonstrated their ability to play an active role in modernization. The purpose of this article is to examine the socioeconomic conditions that contributed to the decline of small towns and then their revitalization.The Chinese have both a narrow and a broad definition of small town. The narrow definition relates to the Chinese administrative structure and applies to the small urban places that are designated zhen, which are officially the lowest tier in the urban system. According to Chinese census definition, a zhen town is a concentration of industry, commerce, and handicrafts that has a population of more than 3,000, of which more than 70 percent is nonagricultural; or between 2,500 and 3,000, of which 85 percent is nonagricultural; and with a need to be part of county-level administration. The Chinese census of 1 July 1982 tallied 2,664 zhen towns with a combined population of approximately 62,000,000.2 The broad definition of small towns extends the category to other urban places that qualified demographically for an urban administration but were not given zhen status in 1982 and to market towns.Small towns are urban places within the jurisdiction of a Chinese county. The seat of government for many counties is in a zhen town. Likewise a township administration or even a village committee may have its head-I G.

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