This book helps to expand the global research scope of rural gentrification and promotes dialogue between China and the West on this topic. Focusing on rural China and using data collected through pro-longed ethnographic fieldwork, this book reveals the production and consumption of rural tourism gentrification from the perspective of middle-class gentrifiers. It explores the socio-demographic characteristics, motivations, and landscape practices of the middle-class gentrifiers, and the socioeconomic effects it brings to the rural villages, which differ significantly from rural gentrification in the Western context. Government efforts to promote rural revitalization will benefit greatly from the Chinese cases set out in this study. Therefore, this book is suitable for scholars, policymakers, government officials, and students interested in rural transformation and rural gentrification.

Dr. Peipei Chen is currently a research fellow in urban and rural planning at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Nanjing University in China. She received her Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Southampton in the UK in 2021, after which she joined Nanjing University as a post-doc researcher. Peipei is interested in how the urban-rural mobilities of the middle class and their landscape practices are reshaping the rural areas in the form of rural gentrification and the working lives of entrepreneurial gentrifiers who have boosted the creative economy in the countryside. She got support from the Research Mobility Programme from the World Universities Network (2018) and the Dudley Stamp Memorial Award from the Royal Geographical Society (2018). She is also the recipient of one NSFC grant (2022).