Governing (Im)Mobility: Internal Re-Bordering and Conditional Inclusion in China’s Rural Return

Post-COVID rural revitalisation policies and digital platform economies have renewed attention to returning to the Chinese countryside, yet return rarely becomes durable residence, livelihood, or recognised membership. This concept paper addresses that problem through a scoping-oriented critical literature review and interpretive synthesis of scholarship on rural return in China. It develops internal rural re-bordering as an analytic for explaining how rural return is governed as a form of conditional inclusion within national territory. The synthesis identifies three interacting mechanisms: institutional bordering, which shapes eligibility and service portability; platform governance, which shapes visibility and monetisation; and aesthetic governance, which shapes admissible rural identities, livelihoods, and spaces. Across the literature, durable return depends on whether mobility can be converted into regularised entitlements, relatively stable income, and locally recognised legitimacy, often through local intermediaries and relational labour. Rural return is therefore better understood as a conditional pathway of incorporation than as a simple demographic reversal.