Urban-rural hierarchy, rural agency, and planetary thinking: Learning from a village in China

This paper examines how and why the urban-rural hierarchy persists in spatial thought and governance and how planetary thinking enables a reconceptualisation of rural agency. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Houhai Village, southern China, it traces how rural actors shape political, cultural, and economic processes beyond the local scale. As Houhai transformed into China’s leading surf tourism destination, it disrupted governance hierarchies, generated symbolic capital, and inspired region-wide development models. Politically, rural actors mobilised forms of resistance and cross-scalar negotiation, influencing policy agendas and institutional arrangements. Culturally, Houhai cultivated a lifestyle economy that reshaped national imaginaries of coastal rurality. Economically, it operated through circulation and replication rather than isolation, revealing how rural economies generate transformation through mobility and connection. The study situates these dynamics within a planetary framework, moving beyond the urban-rural hierarchy to highlight the relational and co-constitutive nature of spatial transformation. It shows how local initiatives co-produce governance, representation, and markets, positioning the rural as a constitutive interior of planetary change. Rather than viewing rural spaces as shaped solely by globalisation or urbanisation, it foregrounds how rural actors also redirect and reframe these forces through situated, agentive practices. Houhai is positioned not as an exception but as a conceptual lens for understanding how power and creativity co-evolve through rural participation in global change. The study contributes to debates on agency, rural transformation, and planetary urbanisation, arguing that credible accounts of spatial development must take the rural seriously as a co-creator of change.