China has witnessed unprecedented changes across all spheres since the 1978 economic reform. As the previous socialist state shifted towards a market- oriented economy, China’s socio-spatial reconfiguration has attracted a vast amount of research interest. One emerging Chinese discourse in this socio-spatial reconfiguration is that of ‘small-town youth’. This area of research connects ‘small-town youth’ with the complex transformations that people and places undergo. However, I identify two major problems in such studies on post-reform China. Firstly, on-the-ground experiences of China’s peripheral urban places remain largely overlooked. While both rural villages and large urban centres in China have received great attention, studies on peripheral urban places such as ‘small towns’ remain limited. Secondly, while a transitional perspective is often adopted by studies looking at the transformation and changes in post-reform China, many fall into the pitfall of equating transitional with teleological. This means that people and places are often positioned on a value-laden linear trajectory — changes and differences of people and places are thus closed and reduced only to reify the presumed modernist trajectory. Such an overarching framework obscures the also existing on-the-ground ‘being’ and ‘happening’ where an ordinary meaningful life can be built.

This thesis goes beyond these teleological understandings of people and places in China to research a group of ‘small-town youth’ in a northwestern county town. I perform an active reading for difference of the mobility and life narratives of ‘small-town youth’ drawing on rich ethnographic details. This project identifies and challenges the underpinning logic of modernist teleology that prevails in academic and popular discourses on places and people in post-reform China.

In analyzing ‘small-town youth’, I show how China’s post-reform socio-spatial reconfiguration draws on a problematic binary of ‘small town’ versus ‘metropolis’. I trace the roots of this prevailing dualism in the broader context of urban studies, where China is positioned as behind Western urban modernity. I actively read for ‘small-town youth’ narratives for difference, seeking to transcend overarching frameworks and open up places and subjects so that diverse urban experiences could emerge. A responsive methodology is developed during the research process; as both insider and outsider, I transcend structural ways of knowing, breaking down binaries through rich heterogeneous description. When subjects narrate their mobility, danwei (work unit), emerges as a core theme, seeming to confirm a hierarchical social-spatial logic. When these narratives are re-read for difference, less-articulated, multiple reasons for mobility emerge from these complex subjects. When people narrate about the county town, buxing (not good) emerges as a core theme, also a consequence of China’s social-spatial hierarchy. By making visible the on-the-ground experiences that are less frequently articulated, I show how existing diverse experiences of yisi (meaning) can provide the impetus to free places from a hierarchical and teleological imagination.