“Encircling the cities from the countryside" (农村包围城市) is the foundational military and geopolitical strategy developed by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap forward, building a distributed self sustaining (military) industrial complex. It was very hard to build and maintain. Altho a lot moved to the coastal areas again, there are constant oscillations and negations between the rich costal cities and the hinterland (data centers, taobao villages)