The gap between those living in the city and those in the countryside remains one of China's most intractable problems. As this powerful work of grassroots history argues, the origins of China's rural-urban divide can be traced back to the Mao Zedong era. While Mao pledged to remove the gap between the city worker and the peasant, his revolutionary policies misfired and ended up provoking still greater discrepancies between town and country, usually to the disadvantage of villagers. Through archival sources, personal diaries, untapped government dossiers, and interviews with people from cities and villages in northern China, the book recounts their personal experiences, showing how they retaliated against the daily restrictions imposed on their activities while traversing between the city and the countryside. Vivid and harrowing accounts of forced and illicit migration, the staggering inequity of the Great Leap Famine, and political exile and deportation during the Cultural Revolution reveal how Chinese people fought back against policies that pitted city dwellers against villagers. "This is a well-written, often bitterly ironic, account of an extraordinary period in the development of modern China." - Kerry Brown, Asian Affairs "This book has many merits...Brown's search for source materials is impressive, exhibited especially in his efforts on tracing a number of interviewees whose cases were filed in the archives of the 1950s or 1960s." - Yixin Chen, China Quarterly A powerful work of grassroots history, tracing China's rural-urban divide back to the policies of Mao Zedong, which pitted city dwellers against villagers. Jeremy Brown is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History at Simon Fraser University. He is co-editor, with Paul G. Pickowicz, of Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People's Republic of China (2007) and has published articles in Late Imperial China and The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies.