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Urbanization in China
Urbanization in China Hyun Bang Shin, The London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Abstract This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society, and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China’s urbanization focusing on the post-Liberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people’s migration and urban physical expansion. Three key characteristics are paid particular attention: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism. The article further examines some of the important sociospatial outcomes and challenges that China’s urbanization poses.
Introduction Viewed from a demographic perspective, urbanization refers to the growth of the urban share of the national population. This growth can be achieved by a number of ways: the natural growth of the existing urban population, the migration of rural residents to urban areas, the physical expansion of extant urban administrative boundaries, and the emergence of new towns as beachheads of further urban growth in neighboring areas. For China, while the fertility control through the implementation of the One Child Policy since 1979 has been a constraint upon urban population growth to some extent, migration as well as the territorial expansion of urban areas has substantially increased the rate of urbanization in recent decades (Song and Timberlake, 1996; Hsing, 2010). While China’s urbanization rate reached just under 20% in the late 1970s at the time of embarking on its economic reforms, China’s 2010 Population Census revealed that almost 50% of its national population was now classified as urban. The subsequent year 2011 was the landmark point for China, seeing the majority of the national population marked as urban for the first time in its history. The United Nations Population Division has predicted that China will add another 10% by 2020 (United Nations Population Division, 2012: Table A.2). China’s new leadership from 2012 has also expressed explicitly their eagerness to make sure China’s urbanization reaches 60% by 2020, which will help boost the country’s consumption basis to create domestic demand and therefore sustain economic development in the next decade or so (Shanghai Daily, 2013; see also Chan, 2014). While the reliability of these official statistics may be subject to scrutiny and proper interpretation (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), it is important to understand what the state aspiration of urbanization aims to achieve. The recent emphasis on ‘urban’ is not a surprise. Increasingly, an urban way of life has been regarded as ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ while the rural has been associated with backwardness (Anagnost, 2004). The theme of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 written in English was ‘Better City, Better Life.’ To many spectators and visitors from outside China, the English slogan was reflecting a common sense understanding. Improved urban conditions including infrastructure, services, and environment would result in a better life for citizens. However, the
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 24
Chinese version of the Shanghai World Expo meant entirely something else. In Chinese, the slogan reads ‘Chengshi, Rang Shenghuo Geng Meihao,’ which can be literally translated as ‘City makes life happier.’ The emphasis was no longer on a ‘better city’ but on the ‘city’ itself. Constructing “urbanization as a political and ideological project” (see Shin, 2014a), the Chinese Party State was sending out a clear signal to its domestic population that an urban way of living was the way forward for the nation. This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society, and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China’s urbanization focusing on the postLiberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people’s migration and urban physical expansion. Industrial production and uneven development, land-based accumulation, and local state building are the three theses that are given particular attention.
Urbanization Trend China’s rates of urbanization have been very much influenced and shaped by the national policies that alternated between strict control and relaxation (Song and Timberlake, 1996). Since the Liberation in 1949, China has gone through dramatic changes in terms of urbanization and industrialization. The 10-year period between 1950 and 1960 was devoted to raising the industrial output through the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan (1953–57) and the political campaign known as the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in high rates of urban in-migration. The following 5 years (1961–65) were marked by the sharp decline of urban population, which resulted from the return of migrants to their origin places in order to supplement labor shortage in rural areas due to the nationwide famine at the time (Chan, 1994). It was this period that witnessed the strict control of the grain ration distribution in cities and the tightening of population move through the implementation of the household registration system known as hukou in Chinese. The 1960s and the 1970s also saw a major sociopolitical
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uprooting due to the reign of the Cultural Revolution that lasted almost a decade. Some of the most notorious campaigns and policies exercised in this period were resettlement campaigns, known as ‘shangshan xiaxiang’ (up to the mountain and down to the villages) and ‘xiafang’ (sending down). These sent hundreds of thousands of urban cadres, youths, and intellectuals to the countryside, and the number of these youths reached about 20 million (Naughton, 1995; Chan, 1994). A famous statement by Mao Zedong may express one of his main concerns during this period: ‘Chengshi taidale, buhao’ (It is no good if cities are too big). Based on the apparent restraints of urban growth in the 1960s and 1970s, Barry Naughton states that economic planners in China “consistently made choices about the role and function of cities that tended to undervalue the contribution of cities” (Naughton, 1995: p. 61). On the one hand, the stagnant growth of urban areas during Maoist era has been evaluated by many scholars as a result of strong antiurban bias. However, it must be reminded that rather than ideological antiurban and prorural bias of the Chinese leadership, it was the strong motivation to drive industrialization for maximum accumulation that resulted in the urban retreat during the planned economy period (Kirkby, 1985). China’s economic reform since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 has brought profound changes to urban life in China. Cities and towns, which had undergone a long period of hibernation during the period of Cultural Revolution that lasted about a decade since 1966, have been given the impetus to thrive again under the reform experiments that steer the nation to follow the path of so-called ‘socialist market economy.’ After a somewhat hibernating status of ‘zero urban growth’ during the 1960s and 1970s that saw no real growth of urbanization rate, China’s urban share of its national population reached 32% in 1997, reflecting the rapid expansion of urban areas and high levels of urban in-migration lured by the new business and employment opportunities. It is however necessary to highlight the fact that the initial emphasis of economic reforms on the growth of township and village enterprises (TVEs) absorbed a substantial number of rural reserve labor, facilitating the transformation of rural farmers into industrial workers, and in doing so, achieving an economic expansion through what can be termed as ‘urbanization from below’ (Ma and Fan, 1994). From the mid-1990s, these TVEs gave way to large enterprises and foreign firms, which were increasingly concentrated in cities of the eastern and coastal provinces.
‘Urban’ as the Unit of Accumulation From the early 1990s, after a brief spell of stagnation immediately after the Tian’anmen uprising, Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour reignited China’s drive for the economic reform. This time, its focus was more on prioritizing the eastern coastal region and special economic zones for resource concentration including the attraction of foreign direct investments and rural surplus labor for low production costs. These measures were epitomized in the widely publicized policy of ‘Get Rich First,’ which hoped for the eventual trickle-down of eastern coastal region’s economic success to its hinterlands. The core and distinctive nature of China’s urbanization during this period
could be the rise of the ‘urban’ as the unit of accumulation. Three key characteristics are examined here: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; and (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism.
Rise of Industrial Production and Uneven Development Through the official endorsement of promoting a ‘socialist market economy’ by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1992, a full economic reform thrust was put in place, and major cities in the eastern coastal region received various preferential treatments to lead China to become the ‘factory of the world.’ While the exogenous factors of foreign direct investments and the formation of the global value chains have all facilitated China’s transformation, the core domestic thrust in relation to urbanization could be the production and exploitation of the country’s cheap labor force (Buck, 2007). This was facilitated by the household responsibility system in People’s Communes in rural areas, which not only increased the agricultural productivity but also freed farmers from being tied to the collective commune system. This accompanied decollectivization, which allowed household members to engage in nonfarming activities as long as they fulfilled their obligation to the village collectives in terms of meeting the grain quota imposed upon each household (Zou, 2003). The ‘Scissors’ gap’ between the agricultural and industrial products was abolished, and the control of household and employment registration had been considerably lessened throughout the 1990s, prompting the influx of migrants into cities. The production of cheap labor force is further aided by the household registration system that prevents migrant workers and their families from accessing full services in cities, resulting in what Kam Wing Chan (2014) refers to as hukou-based urbanization. China’s rise as the factory of the world was also facilitated by the rapid development of the private sector and the restructuring of the state sector. Industrial outputs increased to an unprecedented level. The scale of foreign direct investment escalated exponentially, helping China to address its earlier resource constraints for financing investment in fixed assets. The FDIs largely focused on eastern coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, which saw a number of special economic zones emerging to accommodate production facilities for goods manufacturing for overseas market. The economic reform and the prioritization of selected provinces and cities have resulted in uneven development with aggravating regional disparities, which became particularly prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s (Dunford and Li, 2010). Intraregional disparities have shown some signs of improvement over the years especially since the mid-2000s, but interregional disparities are yet to exhibit amelioration (Kanbur and Zhang, 2005). Such aggravation of regional disparities has led to the state implementation of regional policies that aim to redirecting resources to poorer regions. One of such policies includes the ‘Go West’ policy that aimed at diverting resources for investment in central and western regions (Tian, 2004). The attention of the central state to poorer and less-performing regions and provinces also owes its greater awareness of the need to boost the domestic consumption in order for the economy to sustain its current growth momentum. Some critics have noted China’s vast territorial size as a safeguard for
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China’s interaction with the world economy on its own terms, and for the country’s economy to take the advantage of the economy of scale (see for instance Liew, 2005). The expansion toward the western region in this regard has a great significance in terms of sustaining economic development as well as addressing political needs of addressing regional disparities (Shin, 2012). In this regard, cities such as Chongqing have grown to become a major regional hub, serving the domestic market in particular. With the increase in labor costs in eastern coastal provinces such as Guangdong, factories are also migrating further inland, relocating themselves to inland places that offer more preferential conditions in terms of lower wages and incentives for attracting these firms. These efforts by inland cities and provinces may involve the surge of state-led investments in fixed assets to provide the required infrastructure and facilities, reproducing in this process the speculative urbanization that characterized the cities in eastern coastal provinces (Shin, 2014a).
Land-Based Accumulation Urbanization entails urban population increase but it also gets facilitated by the horizontal expansion of cities. In China, this equates to the territorial expansion that brings more land resources under the control of urban governments. For critics such as You-tien Hsing (2010), urbanization is synonymous with local state’s territorial expansion, the process of which is summarized as ‘urbanization of the local state’:
Local state leaders seek to legitimize themselves as urban promoters and builders, and urban agendas dominate local development policy, while local politics predominantly revolves around farmland conversion and industrial or commercial development projects. Urban construction has therefore expanded from an accumulation project to a territorial project of local state building. Urban modernity, now captures the political imagination of local state leaders. I call this dynamic the ‘urbanization of the local state.’ Hsing, 2010: p. 6
The control of urban land resources has become vital for Chinese cities’ development, as the land reserves are the major sources of financing investments. Chinese local governments are known for their pursuit of land-based revenues, a practice that has gained importance throughout the 2000s in particular along with increased land commodification (Lin et al., 2014). With the reform of taxation system and decentralization, local governments are to retain a certain share of budgetary revenues, while extrabudgetary revenues raised locally are kept in the hands of local governments without having to be transferred to the central government. Land-related revenues such as land use premium and administrative fees upon land-use transaction constitute a substantial share of extrabudgetary revenues. Landrelated revenues may also include loans borrowed by local government investment arms with the use of land as collateral (Ding, 2005). It is estimated that “These loans plus the revenue generated from conveyance fees accounted for 40 to 50 percent of the Hangzhou municipal government budget in 2002. In turn these revenues were used to fund more than two-thirds of the city’s investments in infrastructure and urban services” (Ding, 2005). A recent study on Guangzhou suggests that the
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municipality’s land conveyance income accounted for “about 20–25% of the total fiscal revenue” (Lin et al., 2014: p. 13) in the 2000s and “contributed 40–60% of the total urban fixed capital construction fund” (Lin et al., 2014: p. 14). China’s dualist structure of land-ownership places the ownership of urban lands in the hands of the state (hence state-ownership of urban lands), while rural lands are owned by rural collectives. This provides monopoly control of land resources for local governments as de facto landlords (Shin, 2009), whose power of land administration has been delegated by the central government. The utilization of land resources therefore becomes an important avenue of revenue maximization for local governments that strive to address the need of development, especially in the context of China’s macroeconomic growth that depends heavily on investment in fixed assets (Shin, 2014a: pp. 505–507). The utilization of land resources may happen in four ways. First, urban governments may strive to gain their control over existing urban space that used to be occupied and controlled by what You-tien Hsing (2010) referred to as ‘socialist landmasters,’ that is, government institutions, stateowned enterprises, and militaries, which often make claims on the use rights of lands they occupied for years. They would do so in order to generate land revenues for their own benefits. Second, rural lands that used to lie outside the urban government control are subject to reclassification as urban lands through administrative boundary adjustments so that rural counties merge with neighboring municipalities. Third, the designation of development zones in rural counties bring greater opportunities for urban governments to raise more land-related revenues, as the strategic insertion of excluded landscapes boost the exchange value of land use rights (Wu and Phelps, 2011). Fourth and finally, existing urban spaces may be subject to revalorization through redevelopment in order to put them into a higher and better use (Shin, 2009). This process will involve expropriation of various fragmented property rights as well as the sorting of existing residents and businesses.
Local State Building and State Entrepreneurialism China’s urbanization therefore can be understood as the territorial consolidation of the power in the hands of urban governments. However, the pursuit of economic gains extends beyond land-related revenues. The rise of Chinese local states has been accompanied by their greater power to gain control on regulating local development initiatives (e.g., urban planning and land administration). The rising importance of land as commodity in financing local development has also led to the transformation of land governance into an entrepreneurial one. Land release or administering the transfer of land use rights has become a means for local governments to channel investment into the city. Having been granted with the power to use land as resources to bring money to their cities, municipalities have effectively become “the actual manager of state property” (Haila, 1999: p. 585). In this process, the city itself has become an entrepreneurial entity. In addition to the local state’s role as the manager of state land assets, the rise of local states has been facilitated further by the proactive intervention of local states in the process of
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economic transition as well as in the formation of the market. The state intervention in the market has been carried out to such an extent that the local state itself has become an active participant in the market rather than remaining only as the embodiment of the regulatory practices. Branches of administrative bodies have often transformed itself into state companies or joint ventures in order to participate in the markets such as real estate. Critics have been referring to these as the rise of ‘local state corporatism,’ ‘local state entrepreneurialism,’ and so on (Duckett, 1998; Oi, 1995; Shin, 2009). Nevertheless, the rise of local states and their entrepreneurial turn are to be treated with caution especially in consideration of their relationship with the central state. As China experiences city-based accumulation, local states have also increased its territorial power. The key question is the extent to which this enhanced local autonomy reconciles with China’s ongoing centralization of political power. From the perspective of intercity competition and economic decentralization, it may be possible to argue that local states seek ways in which they can be free of central state intervention. Local political elites may embark on strategies including strategic plan-making and the promotion of special economic zones to facilitate more inward foreign direct investment and the expansion of their accumulation capacities (Wu and Zhang, 2007). However, it is equally possible to envisage that the central state has strived to make sure their presence is felt in local policy making (Chen, 2009; Xu and Yeh, 2009). Alternatively, local states may aspire to their territorial ambition, both domestic and international, under the auspices of the central state (Shin, 2014b). It has been argued by various critics that the rise of key cities such as Shanghai as the world city has been supported by the central state (Wu, 2009). For instance, Xu et al. (2009) examine the process of land commodification and developmental politics, arguing that both local and central states engage in scalar politics to exert greater power in their own rights. In particular, they remind the attempts by the central state “to control the articulation of scales through which a more centrally consolidated power can be achieved” (p. 910). The territorial politics become ever more sensitive and complex as China sees the rise of various regional scales including city regions. Disposition of land as resources is often at the center of this politics, for the reasons as discussed above.
Remaking Chinese Urban Landscape Spatial restructuring in Chinese cities has become the cause and outcome of China’s rapid urbanization. It is a well-known fact that investment (that is, fixed capital formation) has been the most influential contributor to the macroeconomic development. Real estate investment in particular has been influential in the formation of gross domestic capital in cities at all levels. With the commodification of land and housing, major commercial housing projects have been carried out initially near suburban areas where land mobilization was relatively easier, and eventually in inner city areas in the form of urban redevelopment projects. The rise of household income as a result of China’s economic development also provided a huge demand for improved housing conditions. The speculative
environment in the real estate housing sector further prompted the notion of housing as an asset. It is often discussed that work-unit compounds characterized the urban landscape of most Chinese cities. These work-unit compounds were the spatial representation of production and consumption spaces, and were the loci of microlevel politics that filtered the exercise of state power through the unique institutional forms of managers–workers relations (Bray, 2005; Walder, 1986). Spatially, work-unit compounds were effectively gated compounds that provided all daily necessities and family needs including nursery, schooling, medical care, and old age care. The quality of these provisions depended largely on the political strength and affluence of work-units. The administrative allocation of urban lands and the subordination of land use to production needs led to the homogenization of urban landscapes, minimizing the chances of spatial and social diversities. Urbanization during the reform era brought about fundamental changes to the ways in which spatial production and consumption were organized. New spaces have emerged, catering for the needs of diverse urban interests including those of increasingly affluent urban residents, of local elites who often aspire to transforming their cities into ‘world class cities,’ and of migrants who struggle to settle down in cities. These new spaces may include art districts, central business districts (CBDs), gated commercial estates, heritage neighborhoods, monumental spectacles, and so on (Broudehoux, 2010; Pow, 2009; Ren and Sun, 2012; Shin, 2010, 2012). One of the major spatial manifestation that has captured the attention of urban critics is the presence of what is often referred to as ‘urbanized villages,’ ‘villages-in-the-city,’ or ‘villages within a city.’ These are former rural villages that have become urbanized in times of rapid expansion of neighboring urban areas. Having succumbed to the power of urbanization, these former rural villages come to exhibit a unique spatial expression of China’s urbanization and informality particularly in southern China, where a huge influx of migrant population has been witnessed for many decades (Tang and Chung, 2002). Migrants’ need of affordable rental housing is seen to have propelled the rise of such settlements, further fueled by the emergence of informal landlordism on the part of former villagers whose income generation opportunities were severely undermined due to the loss of agricultural income after farmland expropriation resulting from urban expansion. Critics often question the absence of urban sprawl in the manner as seen in other developing countries with rapid urbanization. Latin American cities have also seen the prevalence of informal settlements through land invasion, illegal subdivision, and informal extension. A close examination of the urbanized former rural villages and their emergence indicate a unique process of China’s urbanization that involves a historic compromise between local states and village collectives, resulting in a less conflictual process of urban expansion. The process of Chinese cities’ remaking in recent decades has come with some huge costs especially in the form of local residents’ displacement. Land assembly for the provision of various urban infrastructure and facilities or urban redevelopment projects targeting densely populated inner city districts have led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of local citizens. For instance, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing
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Rights and Eviction estimated on the basis of official records that about 1.5 million Beijing citizens would have been affected by various developmental projects between 2000 and 2008. This estimation does not take migrants into consideration and, therefore, the actual scale of displacement would far outweigh the official estimation (COHRE, 2007). In Shanghai, official data also suggest that about half a million households were affected by redevelopment between 2003 and 2010 (Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau, 2011). The scale of relocation and permanent displacement of local residents become particularly pronounced when cities embark on major developmental projects to address the aspiration to become ‘world class cities,’ a strategy that often accompanies the hosting of megaevents such as the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (Shin, 2012).
Urbanization, Citizenship, and Rights Awareness As the natural population growth in cities has been under control especially with the implementation of the One Child Policy since the early 1980s, China’s urbanization is primarily driven by people’s migration from rural counties to cities. This further raises questions about the usefulness of the household registration system that has been in place for decades since the late 1950s. Household registration was initially designed as a means to devise the ways in which place-based entitlements could be distributed. Rural residents were to have access to welfare entitlements provided by village collectives on the basis of their membership in the village collectives, while urban residents were to benefit from welfare provisions by their employers. Local governments intervened in the case of those few residents who failed to receive any kind of support from employers. Over time, the hukou system has become a tenacious measure to dissociate migrants with no permanent local hukou from accessing urban-based social services (Solinger, 1999), hence playing the role of invisible barrier to rural-to-urban migration. Migrants in cities were “still officially classified as temporary residents in the city and treated as noncitizens” (Zhang, 2002: pp. 317–318). With the growing concern of inequalities and of more just distribution of economic benefits in urban areas, various localities are increasingly enacting urban and social policies in the manner that could be described as ‘local citizenship’. That is, instead of making a strict distinction between urban and rural residents, the hukou system seems to transform itself into strengthening the division between local and nonlocal residents, emphasizing economic securities for local residents while minimizing benefits for nonlocal migrants (Smart and Lin, 2007). The shaping of local citizenship will see geographical unevenness. For those less affluent provinces and cities that aim to attract industries as well as compete for migrant workers, the hukou-related barriers are expected to be incrementally removed. More affluent cities may further raise the bar to selectively recruit qualified skilled migrant workers. The extent to which these uneven processes will reproduce dualism with regard to local and nonlocal citizens’ access to urban services will require close examination in the future. This will also raise some important questions about the nature of
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citizenship in mainland China, especially with regard to the ways in which collective membership becomes the precondition for rights entitlement, and also with regard to the relationship between state citizenship, urban citizenship, and collective citizenship in rural areas. Another important dimension is the issue of rights awareness and how the growing degree of rights claims communicate with the traditional notions of rights awareness in China. In particular, an increasing emphasis has been placed on building the middle class in China (Tomba, 2004; Zhang, 2010). This attracted attention not only from the scholars studying China’s economic development and social progress but also from policy-makers and international consultancies. For domestic and global businesses, the expansion of middle class populations means greater buying power, creating opportunities to market high-end products including luxury goods. For policy-makers, their recent emphasis on boosting consumption is designed to supplement investment and sustain economic growth in times to come. For critics on China’s societal progress, the middle class expansion raises the question of whether or not the expansion of China’s middle class will bring about the rise of civil society and greater awareness and call for social, economic, and political rights. It is however unclear if the middle class populace will exert pressure on the state for more political reform. A recent study suggests that China’s new middle class is keen to protect their individual rights but reluctant to exercise collective rights to challenge the state (Chen, 2013). Critics also point out that China’s rights claims have been largely on economic subsistence (e.g., pay arrears), and there are signs that the middle class protests on various social and environmental issues are on the rise but rarely to the level of making claims against the state (Perry, 2008; Shin, 2013). Furthermore, the growth of the middle class populace in China is part of a dual process of middle class making and proletarianization of rural farmers in the urban contexts of exacerbating inequalities. For middle classes to be acting as the social agent of changes there is a need for them to find a common ground to form a broader cross-class alliance. This also requires a greater attention to what the position of working classes and farmers is going to be in a country that is arguably witnessing the “loss of a socialist state” (Lin, 2014: 43; see also Shin, 2014a).
Conclusion: Uneven Geography of China’s Urbanization This article has examined the contemporary trend of China’s urbanization, the key drivers of this urbanization, and the major sociospatial outcomes and concerns. China’s reintegration with the world economy during the post-1978 period has branded China as the ‘factory of the world.’ This was made possible by the presence of a rapidly growing number of migrant workers, central and local state policies to provide incentives and preferential treatments for inward investment, and China’s geographical scale that enabled an economy of scale for domestic production and consumption. From the perspective of local states, the urbanization has increasingly become synonymous with the process of local state building.
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As local governments are delegated with the power to administer the transaction of urban land use rights on the basis of state-ownership of urban lands, territorial politics have become prevalent especially with regard to gaining control on land resources, which are nowadays prominent sources of financing investment in fixed assets. The article has also discussed some of the major sociospatial outcomes of China’s urbanization, focusing on the remaking of Chinese cities that accompanied the rise of CBDs to bring the urban landscape to meet the urban aspiration to become global in appearance. While Chinese cities used to share the key characteristics of ‘socialist cities’ during the era of planned economy, they have trodden the path of diversity and heterogeneity, seeing the emergence of various cityscapes that range from commercial gated communities and heritage neighborhoods to art districts, and the CBDs. Together with heavy investment in urban infrastructure and facilities, these developmental projects nevertheless produce heavy costs for on-site residents. Official aggregate estimations often report millions of local citizens being affected by these projects, and these numbers are largely underestimated as migrant tenants are largely excluded from the counting. Major cities often produce explicit policies to depopulate city centers, and transform the area to meet the demands of domestic and foreign professionals and investors, thus paving the way for the class remake of urban space. As China’s ‘urban age’ is expected to intensify under the Party State, the remaining question is its long-term stability of current development models. Discussions on this topic propel China observers to think of the value of China studies and its contribution to the general scholarship. For instance, while China’s development thus far has focused on major sites of accumulation along the eastern coastal region, more attention is now being paid to its hinterlands, that is, central and western regions. In order to further boost both investment and consumption, cities in central and western regions may hold the key to the future of China’s sustainable economic development to similar rates as experienced during the post-1978 reform period. This requires the decentering of urban China studies away from major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. It is no unknown secret that urban China studies have been concentrated on a selected few number of cities (or on a so-called ‘first-tier’ cities). China’s urbanism is expanding to influence lower-tier cities in China, and the new leadership’s drive for further urbanization will require the growth of smaller towns and counties where there are more rooms for expansion. It will be necessary for China scholars to closely examine the conditions of urban accumulation and city-remaking therein. The other major issue will be the extent to which political stability at all geographical scales (i.e., urban, regional, and national) will be maintained. The CCP has been reinventing itself to adopt to the changing social, economic, and political contexts (the best known example being the admittance of entrepreneurs as Party members since 2003), but it has also proven its strict, brutal approach when social protests have made attempts to make cross-class or cross-regional alliances. The rise of middle classes and their increasing demands for better living conditions and the security of their household assets have the potential to be turned against the state itself. The aggravating
inequalities and the continued pursuit of proletarianization of rural surplus labor will exert pressure on the state, while growing gaps between the new middle class and the new urban poor also become a major source of concern. To this extent, the long-term prospect of China’s urbanization hinges upon the way in which political stability can be maintained by the state, especially in times of cyclical economic difficulties generated domestically as well as globally. This also makes it important for China observers to closely follow the rise of discontents and rights claims, and scrutinize the ways in which Chinese Party State responds to these.
See also: Asia, Sociocultural Aspects: China; Cities Under Postsocialism; Development and Urbanization; Development and the State; Urban Planning in China; Urbanization.
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Oi, J.C., 1995. The role of the local state in China’s transitional economy. The China Quarterly 144, 1132–1149. Perry, E.J., 2008. Chinese conceptions of “rights”: from Mencius to Mao – and Now. Perspectives on Politics 6, 37–50. Pow, C.-P., 2009. Neoliberalism and the aestheticization of new middle-class landscapes. Antipode 41 (2), 371–390. Ren, X., Sun, M., 2012. Artistic urbanization: creative industries and creative control in Beijing. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (3), 504–521. Shanghai Daily, March 07, 2013. Expanding Cities to Drive the Economy. URL: http:// www.shanghaidaily.com/article/print.asp?id¼525399 (accessed 17.03.13.). Shanghai Municipal Statistics Bureau, 2011. Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2011. China Statistics Press. Shin, H.B., 2014a. Contesting speculative urbanization and strategizing discontents. City 18 (4–5), 509–516. Shin, H.B., 2014b. Urban spatial restructuring, event-led development and scalar politics. Urban Studies 51 (14), 2961–2978. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 0042098013515031. Shin, H.B., 2013. The right to the city and critical reflections on China’s property rights activism. Antipode 45 (5), 1167–1189. Shin, H.B., 2012. Unequal cities of spectacle and megaevents in China. City 16 (6), 728–744. Shin, H.B., 2010. Urban conservation and revalorization of dilapidated historic quarters: the case of Nanluoguxiang in Beijing. Cities 27 (Suppl. 1), S43–S54. Shin, H.B., 2009. Residential redevelopment and the entrepreneurial local state: the implications of Beijing’s shifting emphasis on urban redevelopment policies. Urban Studies 46 (13), 2815–2839. Smart, A., Lin, G.C.S., 2007. Local capitalism, local citizenship and translocality: rescaling from below in the Pearl River Delta Region, China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, 280–302. Solinger, D.J., 1999. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. University of California Press, Berkeley.
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Song, F., Timberlake, M., 1996. China’s urbanization, state policy and the world economy. Journal of Urban Affairs 18 (3), 285–306. Tang, W.-S., Chung, H., 2002. Rural-urban transition in China: illegal land use and construction. Asia Pacific Viewpoint 43 (1), 43–62. Tian, Q., 2004. China develops its west: motivation, strategy and prospect. Journal of Contemporary China 13 (41), 611–636. Tomba, L., 2004. Creating an urban middle class: social engineering in Beijing. The China Journal 51, 1–26. United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs/Population Division, 2012. World Urbanization Prospects: The 2011 Revision. United Nations, New York. Walder, A.G., 1986. Communist Neotraditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wu, F., 2009. Globalization, the changing state, and local governance in Shanghai. In: Chen, X. (Ed.), Rising Shanghai: State Power and Local Transformations in a Global Megacity. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis; London, pp. 125–144. Wu, F., Phelps, N.A., 2011. (Post)suburban development and state entrepreneurialism in Beijing’s outer suburbs. Environment and Planning A 43 (2), 410–430. Wu, F., Zhang, J., 2007. Planning the competitive city-region. Urban Affairs Review 42 (5), 714–740. Xu, J., Yeh, A.G.O., 2009. Decoding urban land governance: state reconstruction in contemporary Chinese cities. Urban Studies 46 (3), 559–581. Xu, J., Yeh, A., Wu, F., 2009. Land commodification: new land development and politics in China since the late 1990s. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 33 (4), 890–913. Zhang, L., 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Cornell University Press, Ithaca. Zhang, L., 2002. Spatiality and urban citizenship in late socialist China. Public Culture 14 (2), 311–334. Zou, W., 2003. The Changing Face of Rural Enterprise. China Perspectives. http:// chinaperspectives.revues.org/773.
Abstract This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society, and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China’s urbanization focusing on the post-Liberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people’s migration and urban physical expansion. Three key characteristics are paid particular attention: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism. The article further examines some of the important sociospatial outcomes and challenges that China’s urbanization poses.
Introduction Viewed from a demographic perspective, urbanization refers to the growth of the urban share of the national population. This growth can be achieved by a number of ways: the natural growth of the existing urban population, the migration of rural residents to urban areas, the physical expansion of extant urban administrative boundaries, and the emergence of new towns as beachheads of further urban growth in neighboring areas. For China, while the fertility control through the implementation of the One Child Policy since 1979 has been a constraint upon urban population growth to some extent, migration as well as the territorial expansion of urban areas has substantially increased the rate of urbanization in recent decades (Song and Timberlake, 1996; Hsing, 2010). While China’s urbanization rate reached just under 20% in the late 1970s at the time of embarking on its economic reforms, China’s 2010 Population Census revealed that almost 50% of its national population was now classified as urban. The subsequent year 2011 was the landmark point for China, seeing the majority of the national population marked as urban for the first time in its history. The United Nations Population Division has predicted that China will add another 10% by 2020 (United Nations Population Division, 2012: Table A.2). China’s new leadership from 2012 has also expressed explicitly their eagerness to make sure China’s urbanization reaches 60% by 2020, which will help boost the country’s consumption basis to create domestic demand and therefore sustain economic development in the next decade or so (Shanghai Daily, 2013; see also Chan, 2014). While the reliability of these official statistics may be subject to scrutiny and proper interpretation (Brenner and Schmid, 2014), it is important to understand what the state aspiration of urbanization aims to achieve. The recent emphasis on ‘urban’ is not a surprise. Increasingly, an urban way of life has been regarded as ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ while the rural has been associated with backwardness (Anagnost, 2004). The theme of the Shanghai World Expo 2010 written in English was ‘Better City, Better Life.’ To many spectators and visitors from outside China, the English slogan was reflecting a common sense understanding. Improved urban conditions including infrastructure, services, and environment would result in a better life for citizens. However, the
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 24
Chinese version of the Shanghai World Expo meant entirely something else. In Chinese, the slogan reads ‘Chengshi, Rang Shenghuo Geng Meihao,’ which can be literally translated as ‘City makes life happier.’ The emphasis was no longer on a ‘better city’ but on the ‘city’ itself. Constructing “urbanization as a political and ideological project” (see Shin, 2014a), the Chinese Party State was sending out a clear signal to its domestic population that an urban way of living was the way forward for the nation. This article on China’s urbanization examines the main drivers behind China’s urban transformation, its impact on the society, and how the impact is unevenly spread across populations and geography. It begins with a brief historical summary of China’s urbanization focusing on the postLiberation period, that is 1949 onward, and moves on to discuss some of the major factors that have contributed to people’s migration and urban physical expansion. Industrial production and uneven development, land-based accumulation, and local state building are the three theses that are given particular attention.
Urbanization Trend China’s rates of urbanization have been very much influenced and shaped by the national policies that alternated between strict control and relaxation (Song and Timberlake, 1996). Since the Liberation in 1949, China has gone through dramatic changes in terms of urbanization and industrialization. The 10-year period between 1950 and 1960 was devoted to raising the industrial output through the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan (1953–57) and the political campaign known as the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in high rates of urban in-migration. The following 5 years (1961–65) were marked by the sharp decline of urban population, which resulted from the return of migrants to their origin places in order to supplement labor shortage in rural areas due to the nationwide famine at the time (Chan, 1994). It was this period that witnessed the strict control of the grain ration distribution in cities and the tightening of population move through the implementation of the household registration system known as hukou in Chinese. The 1960s and the 1970s also saw a major sociopolitical
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uprooting due to the reign of the Cultural Revolution that lasted almost a decade. Some of the most notorious campaigns and policies exercised in this period were resettlement campaigns, known as ‘shangshan xiaxiang’ (up to the mountain and down to the villages) and ‘xiafang’ (sending down). These sent hundreds of thousands of urban cadres, youths, and intellectuals to the countryside, and the number of these youths reached about 20 million (Naughton, 1995; Chan, 1994). A famous statement by Mao Zedong may express one of his main concerns during this period: ‘Chengshi taidale, buhao’ (It is no good if cities are too big). Based on the apparent restraints of urban growth in the 1960s and 1970s, Barry Naughton states that economic planners in China “consistently made choices about the role and function of cities that tended to undervalue the contribution of cities” (Naughton, 1995: p. 61). On the one hand, the stagnant growth of urban areas during Maoist era has been evaluated by many scholars as a result of strong antiurban bias. However, it must be reminded that rather than ideological antiurban and prorural bias of the Chinese leadership, it was the strong motivation to drive industrialization for maximum accumulation that resulted in the urban retreat during the planned economy period (Kirkby, 1985). China’s economic reform since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 has brought profound changes to urban life in China. Cities and towns, which had undergone a long period of hibernation during the period of Cultural Revolution that lasted about a decade since 1966, have been given the impetus to thrive again under the reform experiments that steer the nation to follow the path of so-called ‘socialist market economy.’ After a somewhat hibernating status of ‘zero urban growth’ during the 1960s and 1970s that saw no real growth of urbanization rate, China’s urban share of its national population reached 32% in 1997, reflecting the rapid expansion of urban areas and high levels of urban in-migration lured by the new business and employment opportunities. It is however necessary to highlight the fact that the initial emphasis of economic reforms on the growth of township and village enterprises (TVEs) absorbed a substantial number of rural reserve labor, facilitating the transformation of rural farmers into industrial workers, and in doing so, achieving an economic expansion through what can be termed as ‘urbanization from below’ (Ma and Fan, 1994). From the mid-1990s, these TVEs gave way to large enterprises and foreign firms, which were increasingly concentrated in cities of the eastern and coastal provinces.
‘Urban’ as the Unit of Accumulation From the early 1990s, after a brief spell of stagnation immediately after the Tian’anmen uprising, Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour reignited China’s drive for the economic reform. This time, its focus was more on prioritizing the eastern coastal region and special economic zones for resource concentration including the attraction of foreign direct investments and rural surplus labor for low production costs. These measures were epitomized in the widely publicized policy of ‘Get Rich First,’ which hoped for the eventual trickle-down of eastern coastal region’s economic success to its hinterlands. The core and distinctive nature of China’s urbanization during this period
could be the rise of the ‘urban’ as the unit of accumulation. Three key characteristics are examined here: (1) industrial production and uneven development; (2) land-based accumulation; and (3) local state building and state entrepreneurialism.
Rise of Industrial Production and Uneven Development Through the official endorsement of promoting a ‘socialist market economy’ by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1992, a full economic reform thrust was put in place, and major cities in the eastern coastal region received various preferential treatments to lead China to become the ‘factory of the world.’ While the exogenous factors of foreign direct investments and the formation of the global value chains have all facilitated China’s transformation, the core domestic thrust in relation to urbanization could be the production and exploitation of the country’s cheap labor force (Buck, 2007). This was facilitated by the household responsibility system in People’s Communes in rural areas, which not only increased the agricultural productivity but also freed farmers from being tied to the collective commune system. This accompanied decollectivization, which allowed household members to engage in nonfarming activities as long as they fulfilled their obligation to the village collectives in terms of meeting the grain quota imposed upon each household (Zou, 2003). The ‘Scissors’ gap’ between the agricultural and industrial products was abolished, and the control of household and employment registration had been considerably lessened throughout the 1990s, prompting the influx of migrants into cities. The production of cheap labor force is further aided by the household registration system that prevents migrant workers and their families from accessing full services in cities, resulting in what Kam Wing Chan (2014) refers to as hukou-based urbanization. China’s rise as the factory of the world was also facilitated by the rapid development of the private sector and the restructuring of the state sector. Industrial outputs increased to an unprecedented level. The scale of foreign direct investment escalated exponentially, helping China to address its earlier resource constraints for financing investment in fixed assets. The FDIs largely focused on eastern coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang, which saw a number of special economic zones emerging to accommodate production facilities for goods manufacturing for overseas market. The economic reform and the prioritization of selected provinces and cities have resulted in uneven development with aggravating regional disparities, which became particularly prominent in the 1990s and early 2000s (Dunford and Li, 2010). Intraregional disparities have shown some signs of improvement over the years especially since the mid-2000s, but interregional disparities are yet to exhibit amelioration (Kanbur and Zhang, 2005). Such aggravation of regional disparities has led to the state implementation of regional policies that aim to redirecting resources to poorer regions. One of such policies includes the ‘Go West’ policy that aimed at diverting resources for investment in central and western regions (Tian, 2004). The attention of the central state to poorer and less-performing regions and provinces also owes its greater awareness of the need to boost the domestic consumption in order for the economy to sustain its current growth momentum. Some critics have noted China’s vast territorial size as a safeguard for
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China’s interaction with the world economy on its own terms, and for the country’s economy to take the advantage of the economy of scale (see for instance Liew, 2005). The expansion toward the western region in this regard has a great significance in terms of sustaining economic development as well as addressing political needs of addressing regional disparities (Shin, 2012). In this regard, cities such as Chongqing have grown to become a major regional hub, serving the domestic market in particular. With the increase in labor costs in eastern coastal provinces such as Guangdong, factories are also migrating further inland, relocating themselves to inland places that offer more preferential conditions in terms of lower wages and incentives for attracting these firms. These efforts by inland cities and provinces may involve the surge of state-led investments in fixed assets to provide the required infrastructure and facilities, reproducing in this process the speculative urbanization that characterized the cities in eastern coastal provinces (Shin, 2014a).
Land-Based Accumulation Urbanization entails urban population increase but it also gets facilitated by the horizontal expansion of cities. In China, this equates to the territorial expansion that brings more land resources under the control of urban governments. For critics such as You-tien Hsing (2010), urbanization is synonymous with local state’s territorial expansion, the process of which is summarized as ‘urbanization of the local state’:
Local state leaders seek to legitimize themselves as urban promoters and builders, and urban agendas dominate local development policy, while local politics predominantly revolves around farmland conversion and industrial or commercial development projects. Urban construction has therefore expanded from an accumulation project to a territorial project of local state building. Urban modernity, now captures the political imagination of local state leaders. I call this dynamic the ‘urbanization of the local state.’ Hsing, 2010: p. 6
The control of urban land resources has become vital for Chinese cities’ development, as the land reserves are the major sources of financing investments. Chinese local governments are known for their pursuit of land-based revenues, a practice that has gained importance throughout the 2000s in particular along with increased land commodification (Lin et al., 2014). With the reform of taxation system and decentralization, local governments are to retain a certain share of budgetary revenues, while extrabudgetary revenues raised locally are kept in the hands of local governments without having to be transferred to the central government. Land-related revenues such as land use premium and administrative fees upon land-use transaction constitute a substantial share of extrabudgetary revenues. Landrelated revenues may also include loans borrowed by local government investment arms with the use of land as collateral (Ding, 2005). It is estimated that “These loans plus the revenue generated from conveyance fees accounted for 40 to 50 percent of the Hangzhou municipal government budget in 2002. In turn these revenues were used to fund more than two-thirds of the city’s investments in infrastructure and urban services” (Ding, 2005). A recent study on Guangzhou suggests that the
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municipality’s land conveyance income accounted for “about 20–25% of the total fiscal revenue” (Lin et al., 2014: p. 13) in the 2000s and “contributed 40–60% of the total urban fixed capital construction fund” (Lin et al., 2014: p. 14). China’s dualist structure of land-ownership places the ownership of urban lands in the hands of the state (hence state-ownership of urban lands), while rural lands are owned by rural collectives. This provides monopoly control of land resources for local governments as de facto landlords (Shin, 2009), whose power of land administration has been delegated by the central government. The utilization of land resources therefore becomes an important avenue of revenue maximization for local governments that strive to address the need of development, especially in the context of China’s macroeconomic growth that depends heavily on investment in fixed assets (Shin, 2014a: pp. 505–507). The utilization of land resources may happen in four ways. First, urban governments may strive to gain their control over existing urban space that used to be occupied and controlled by what You-tien Hsing (2010) referred to as ‘socialist landmasters,’ that is, government institutions, stateowned enterprises, and militaries, which often make claims on the use rights of lands they occupied for years. They would do so in order to generate land revenues for their own benefits. Second, rural lands that used to lie outside the urban government control are subject to reclassification as urban lands through administrative boundary adjustments so that rural counties merge with neighboring municipalities. Third, the designation of development zones in rural counties bring greater opportunities for urban governments to raise more land-related revenues, as the strategic insertion of excluded landscapes boost the exchange value of land use rights (Wu and Phelps, 2011). Fourth and finally, existing urban spaces may be subject to revalorization through redevelopment in order to put them into a higher and better use (Shin, 2009). This process will involve expropriation of various fragmented property rights as well as the sorting of existing residents and businesses.
Local State Building and State Entrepreneurialism China’s urbanization therefore can be understood as the territorial consolidation of the power in the hands of urban governments. However, the pursuit of economic gains extends beyond land-related revenues. The rise of Chinese local states has been accompanied by their greater power to gain control on regulating local development initiatives (e.g., urban planning and land administration). The rising importance of land as commodity in financing local development has also led to the transformation of land governance into an entrepreneurial one. Land release or administering the transfer of land use rights has become a means for local governments to channel investment into the city. Having been granted with the power to use land as resources to bring money to their cities, municipalities have effectively become “the actual manager of state property” (Haila, 1999: p. 585). In this process, the city itself has become an entrepreneurial entity. In addition to the local state’s role as the manager of state land assets, the rise of local states has been facilitated further by the proactive intervention of local states in the process of
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economic transition as well as in the formation of the market. The state intervention in the market has been carried out to such an extent that the local state itself has become an active participant in the market rather than remaining only as the embodiment of the regulatory practices. Branches of administrative bodies have often transformed itself into state companies or joint ventures in order to participate in the markets such as real estate. Critics have been referring to these as the rise of ‘local state corporatism,’ ‘local state entrepreneurialism,’ and so on (Duckett, 1998; Oi, 1995; Shin, 2009). Nevertheless, the rise of local states and their entrepreneurial turn are to be treated with caution especially in consideration of their relationship with the central state. As China experiences city-based accumulation, local states have also increased its territorial power. The key question is the extent to which this enhanced local autonomy reconciles with China’s ongoing centralization of political power. From the perspective of intercity competition and economic decentralization, it may be possible to argue that local states seek ways in which they can be free of central state intervention. Local political elites may embark on strategies including strategic plan-making and the promotion of special economic zones to facilitate more inward foreign direct investment and the expansion of their accumulation capacities (Wu and Zhang, 2007). However, it is equally possible to envisage that the central state has strived to make sure their presence is felt in local policy making (Chen, 2009; Xu and Yeh, 2009). Alternatively, local states may aspire to their territorial ambition, both domestic and international, under the auspices of the central state (Shin, 2014b). It has been argued by various critics that the rise of key cities such as Shanghai as the world city has been supported by the central state (Wu, 2009). For instance, Xu et al. (2009) examine the process of land commodification and developmental politics, arguing that both local and central states engage in scalar politics to exert greater power in their own rights. In particular, they remind the attempts by the central state “to control the articulation of scales through which a more centrally consolidated power can be achieved” (p. 910). The territorial politics become ever more sensitive and complex as China sees the rise of various regional scales including city regions. Disposition of land as resources is often at the center of this politics, for the reasons as discussed above.
Remaking Chinese Urban Landscape Spatial restructuring in Chinese cities has become the cause and outcome of China’s rapid urbanization. It is a well-known fact that investment (that is, fixed capital formation) has been the most influential contributor to the macroeconomic development. Real estate investment in particular has been influential in the formation of gross domestic capital in cities at all levels. With the commodification of land and housing, major commercial housing projects have been carried out initially near suburban areas where land mobilization was relatively easier, and eventually in inner city areas in the form of urban redevelopment projects. The rise of household income as a result of China’s economic development also provided a huge demand for improved housing conditions. The speculative
environment in the real estate housing sector further prompted the notion of housing as an asset. It is often discussed that work-unit compounds characterized the urban landscape of most Chinese cities. These work-unit compounds were the spatial representation of production and consumption spaces, and were the loci of microlevel politics that filtered the exercise of state power through the unique institutional forms of managers–workers relations (Bray, 2005; Walder, 1986). Spatially, work-unit compounds were effectively gated compounds that provided all daily necessities and family needs including nursery, schooling, medical care, and old age care. The quality of these provisions depended largely on the political strength and affluence of work-units. The administrative allocation of urban lands and the subordination of land use to production needs led to the homogenization of urban landscapes, minimizing the chances of spatial and social diversities. Urbanization during the reform era brought about fundamental changes to the ways in which spatial production and consumption were organized. New spaces have emerged, catering for the needs of diverse urban interests including those of increasingly affluent urban residents, of local elites who often aspire to transforming their cities into ‘world class cities,’ and of migrants who struggle to settle down in cities. These new spaces may include art districts, central business districts (CBDs), gated commercial estates, heritage neighborhoods, monumental spectacles, and so on (Broudehoux, 2010; Pow, 2009; Ren and Sun, 2012; Shin, 2010, 2012). One of the major spatial manifestation that has captured the attention of urban critics is the presence of what is often referred to as ‘urbanized villages,’ ‘villages-in-the-city,’ or ‘villages within a city.’ These are former rural villages that have become urbanized in times of rapid expansion of neighboring urban areas. Having succumbed to the power of urbanization, these former rural villages come to exhibit a unique spatial expression of China’s urbanization and informality particularly in southern China, where a huge influx of migrant population has been witnessed for many decades (Tang and Chung, 2002). Migrants’ need of affordable rental housing is seen to have propelled the rise of such settlements, further fueled by the emergence of informal landlordism on the part of former villagers whose income generation opportunities were severely undermined due to the loss of agricultural income after farmland expropriation resulting from urban expansion. Critics often question the absence of urban sprawl in the manner as seen in other developing countries with rapid urbanization. Latin American cities have also seen the prevalence of informal settlements through land invasion, illegal subdivision, and informal extension. A close examination of the urbanized former rural villages and their emergence indicate a unique process of China’s urbanization that involves a historic compromise between local states and village collectives, resulting in a less conflictual process of urban expansion. The process of Chinese cities’ remaking in recent decades has come with some huge costs especially in the form of local residents’ displacement. Land assembly for the provision of various urban infrastructure and facilities or urban redevelopment projects targeting densely populated inner city districts have led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of local citizens. For instance, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing
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Rights and Eviction estimated on the basis of official records that about 1.5 million Beijing citizens would have been affected by various developmental projects between 2000 and 2008. This estimation does not take migrants into consideration and, therefore, the actual scale of displacement would far outweigh the official estimation (COHRE, 2007). In Shanghai, official data also suggest that about half a million households were affected by redevelopment between 2003 and 2010 (Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau, 2011). The scale of relocation and permanent displacement of local residents become particularly pronounced when cities embark on major developmental projects to address the aspiration to become ‘world class cities,’ a strategy that often accompanies the hosting of megaevents such as the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo (Shin, 2012).
Urbanization, Citizenship, and Rights Awareness As the natural population growth in cities has been under control especially with the implementation of the One Child Policy since the early 1980s, China’s urbanization is primarily driven by people’s migration from rural counties to cities. This further raises questions about the usefulness of the household registration system that has been in place for decades since the late 1950s. Household registration was initially designed as a means to devise the ways in which place-based entitlements could be distributed. Rural residents were to have access to welfare entitlements provided by village collectives on the basis of their membership in the village collectives, while urban residents were to benefit from welfare provisions by their employers. Local governments intervened in the case of those few residents who failed to receive any kind of support from employers. Over time, the hukou system has become a tenacious measure to dissociate migrants with no permanent local hukou from accessing urban-based social services (Solinger, 1999), hence playing the role of invisible barrier to rural-to-urban migration. Migrants in cities were “still officially classified as temporary residents in the city and treated as noncitizens” (Zhang, 2002: pp. 317–318). With the growing concern of inequalities and of more just distribution of economic benefits in urban areas, various localities are increasingly enacting urban and social policies in the manner that could be described as ‘local citizenship’. That is, instead of making a strict distinction between urban and rural residents, the hukou system seems to transform itself into strengthening the division between local and nonlocal residents, emphasizing economic securities for local residents while minimizing benefits for nonlocal migrants (Smart and Lin, 2007). The shaping of local citizenship will see geographical unevenness. For those less affluent provinces and cities that aim to attract industries as well as compete for migrant workers, the hukou-related barriers are expected to be incrementally removed. More affluent cities may further raise the bar to selectively recruit qualified skilled migrant workers. The extent to which these uneven processes will reproduce dualism with regard to local and nonlocal citizens’ access to urban services will require close examination in the future. This will also raise some important questions about the nature of
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citizenship in mainland China, especially with regard to the ways in which collective membership becomes the precondition for rights entitlement, and also with regard to the relationship between state citizenship, urban citizenship, and collective citizenship in rural areas. Another important dimension is the issue of rights awareness and how the growing degree of rights claims communicate with the traditional notions of rights awareness in China. In particular, an increasing emphasis has been placed on building the middle class in China (Tomba, 2004; Zhang, 2010). This attracted attention not only from the scholars studying China’s economic development and social progress but also from policy-makers and international consultancies. For domestic and global businesses, the expansion of middle class populations means greater buying power, creating opportunities to market high-end products including luxury goods. For policy-makers, their recent emphasis on boosting consumption is designed to supplement investment and sustain economic growth in times to come. For critics on China’s societal progress, the middle class expansion raises the question of whether or not the expansion of China’s middle class will bring about the rise of civil society and greater awareness and call for social, economic, and political rights. It is however unclear if the middle class populace will exert pressure on the state for more political reform. A recent study suggests that China’s new middle class is keen to protect their individual rights but reluctant to exercise collective rights to challenge the state (Chen, 2013). Critics also point out that China’s rights claims have been largely on economic subsistence (e.g., pay arrears), and there are signs that the middle class protests on various social and environmental issues are on the rise but rarely to the level of making claims against the state (Perry, 2008; Shin, 2013). Furthermore, the growth of the middle class populace in China is part of a dual process of middle class making and proletarianization of rural farmers in the urban contexts of exacerbating inequalities. For middle classes to be acting as the social agent of changes there is a need for them to find a common ground to form a broader cross-class alliance. This also requires a greater attention to what the position of working classes and farmers is going to be in a country that is arguably witnessing the “loss of a socialist state” (Lin, 2014: 43; see also Shin, 2014a).
Conclusion: Uneven Geography of China’s Urbanization This article has examined the contemporary trend of China’s urbanization, the key drivers of this urbanization, and the major sociospatial outcomes and concerns. China’s reintegration with the world economy during the post-1978 period has branded China as the ‘factory of the world.’ This was made possible by the presence of a rapidly growing number of migrant workers, central and local state policies to provide incentives and preferential treatments for inward investment, and China’s geographical scale that enabled an economy of scale for domestic production and consumption. From the perspective of local states, the urbanization has increasingly become synonymous with the process of local state building.
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As local governments are delegated with the power to administer the transaction of urban land use rights on the basis of state-ownership of urban lands, territorial politics have become prevalent especially with regard to gaining control on land resources, which are nowadays prominent sources of financing investment in fixed assets. The article has also discussed some of the major sociospatial outcomes of China’s urbanization, focusing on the remaking of Chinese cities that accompanied the rise of CBDs to bring the urban landscape to meet the urban aspiration to become global in appearance. While Chinese cities used to share the key characteristics of ‘socialist cities’ during the era of planned economy, they have trodden the path of diversity and heterogeneity, seeing the emergence of various cityscapes that range from commercial gated communities and heritage neighborhoods to art districts, and the CBDs. Together with heavy investment in urban infrastructure and facilities, these developmental projects nevertheless produce heavy costs for on-site residents. Official aggregate estimations often report millions of local citizens being affected by these projects, and these numbers are largely underestimated as migrant tenants are largely excluded from the counting. Major cities often produce explicit policies to depopulate city centers, and transform the area to meet the demands of domestic and foreign professionals and investors, thus paving the way for the class remake of urban space. As China’s ‘urban age’ is expected to intensify under the Party State, the remaining question is its long-term stability of current development models. Discussions on this topic propel China observers to think of the value of China studies and its contribution to the general scholarship. For instance, while China’s development thus far has focused on major sites of accumulation along the eastern coastal region, more attention is now being paid to its hinterlands, that is, central and western regions. In order to further boost both investment and consumption, cities in central and western regions may hold the key to the future of China’s sustainable economic development to similar rates as experienced during the post-1978 reform period. This requires the decentering of urban China studies away from major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. It is no unknown secret that urban China studies have been concentrated on a selected few number of cities (or on a so-called ‘first-tier’ cities). China’s urbanism is expanding to influence lower-tier cities in China, and the new leadership’s drive for further urbanization will require the growth of smaller towns and counties where there are more rooms for expansion. It will be necessary for China scholars to closely examine the conditions of urban accumulation and city-remaking therein. The other major issue will be the extent to which political stability at all geographical scales (i.e., urban, regional, and national) will be maintained. The CCP has been reinventing itself to adopt to the changing social, economic, and political contexts (the best known example being the admittance of entrepreneurs as Party members since 2003), but it has also proven its strict, brutal approach when social protests have made attempts to make cross-class or cross-regional alliances. The rise of middle classes and their increasing demands for better living conditions and the security of their household assets have the potential to be turned against the state itself. The aggravating
inequalities and the continued pursuit of proletarianization of rural surplus labor will exert pressure on the state, while growing gaps between the new middle class and the new urban poor also become a major source of concern. To this extent, the long-term prospect of China’s urbanization hinges upon the way in which political stability can be maintained by the state, especially in times of cyclical economic difficulties generated domestically as well as globally. This also makes it important for China observers to closely follow the rise of discontents and rights claims, and scrutinize the ways in which Chinese Party State responds to these.
See also: Asia, Sociocultural Aspects: China; Cities Under Postsocialism; Development and Urbanization; Development and the State; Urban Planning in China; Urbanization.
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