A historical survey of the socio-cultural transformation in Chinese cities and villages from the late-Imperial to the modern periods. The process of “modernization” as well as the persistence of tradition is studied to redress some of the stereotyped pictures of Chinese society, both rural and urban. Important topics include: continuity and change in China’s city plans and their cultural meanings, the cultural meanings and importance of cities in Imperial China, the socio-economic-politico-cultural significances of treaty port cities as beachhead of Western expansion in China, urban modernization and its socio-economic-cultural impacts on China during the warlord period and under the Nationalist regime, the salient characteristics and the reality of Chinese rural society and politic in the pre-modern and modern periods, the social and economic development and devastation of the Chinese countryside between 1800 and 1940, and how the Chinese Communist Party made revolution in the countryside before 1937.