The seminar focuses on the development of China’s rural heartlands and the urban-rural linkages. New technologies have helped modernize China’s agriculture in recent decades and allowed China’s rural labor to migrate into the cities and their industries that have driven China’s economic miracle. The modernization of rural areas, their social transformation, and the interaction of these intertwined processes are less known than China’s urban development, although China’s phenomenal development can only be fully understood by examining them.