Abstract: Previous studies of rural-urban relations during the 1960s and 1970s have emphasized a sharpening of boundaries between China’s city and countryside.Migration controls, the hukou system, and the grain rationing regime restricted movement and provided tangible benefits to urban dwellers while denying them to villagers.My paper aims to complicate this picture by focusing on spaces administered by Tianjin authorities that do not fit neatly into “urban” or “rural” labels.These intermediate zones were sites of intense and sustained rural-urban contact during the late Mao period.The Worker-Peasant Alliance State Farm (1957-present) on the southwest outskirts of Tianjin provided vegetables and milk to the city.Although farm employees engaged in agricultural labor, they earned monthly salaries and held non-agricultural hukou, unlike residents of nearby villages.Villagers eagerly competed for jobs at the farm, but city-born educated youth or political outcasts who were assigned there saw farm work as a disappointing demotion.A second “in-between” site is the Tianjin Ironworks (1969-present) in mountainous She county, Hebei. A “third front” industry established by the central leadership and administered by Tianjin officials amid war fears in the late 1960s, the ironworks put tens of thousands of salaried city youth, and thousands of demobilized soldiers, right next to isolated Gengle village.I analyze how rural and urban identities were shaped, mediated, and transformed in these spaces.Although a definite urban-rural hierarchy persisted, with many urbanites seeing themselves as superior to villagers, the rural people affected by the state farm and the ironworks sometimes benefited from the close contact with city-based projects.The unexpected consequences of these in-between spaces, from lasting friendships and marriages at the state farm to massive protests by ironworks employees demanding city wives in the late 1970s, provide a new picture of rural-urban relations during the socialist period.