Chinese cities

Key references

Abstract: Despite controversy over the meaning of financialization, there are two major dimensions to understanding whether the city is financialized. This paper explores these dimensions in China, namely whether the Chinese city (increasingly) uses financial instruments to carry out its urban development tasks and whether the utilization of financial instruments imposes a financial logic on urban governance. Financing the Chinese city involves creating land collateral and financial vehicles, extending shadow banking, formalizing and securitizing local government debts, and “deleveraging” developers’ debts through urban redevelopment. Applying land instruments leads to financial securitization, showing a financial logic in operation. However, financializing the Chinese city is engineered by the state through its credit expansion to cope with the Global Financial Crisis and the ramifications of the entrepreneurial model of the “export-oriented world factory.” It is a state-led financial turn, in which the financial logic is imperative but may not occupy a central position.

Financial conduits in the aftermath of financialization in Chinese cities. From the paper above.

Abstract: Rapid urban development in China provides rich cases for urban research. Current urban studies in China are heavily influenced by an urban imagination embedded in the West. Using the cases of land management and environmental governance, social transformation and the spatial and regional dimensions of urbanisation, this article attempts to rethink some surprising findings from empirical research in Chinese cities and to contribute to theoretical understandings of urbanisation beyond contextual particularities. Following the narrative of ‘planning centrality, market instruments’ in China, this article highlights the political logic behind managing growth and environmental governance, social differentiation produced by interwoven state and market forces and new geographies of Chinese cities beyond the economic-centred imagination.

Abstract: The seminal works by Park and the Chicago school of sociology are of great value for studying a rapidly urbanising China characterised by the decline of the formerly socialist structure and the increasing commodification of services and housing. Their assertion that the industrial organisation of cities has substituted primary and neighbourhood relations with secondary relations characterised by anonymity and utilitarianism also resonates with the rising middle-class population in China. However, our chapter contends that certain population groups have not followed the trajectory of change described by Park but instead continue to rely on primary and local social relations due to interventions of the Chinese state. Our argument is supported by a discussion on the varying social relations in Chinese urban neighbourhoods and specifically on the social life of rural migrants in the urban Chinese society.

The key differences between the moral order in the traditional rural society and the city. From the chapter above.

Abstract: Chinese cities are emerging in multiple senses: They have created new physical spaces to accommodate the fast urbanization of the country but have also developed new properties and characteristics along with urban transformation. The novelty created by emerging cities in China is not easily covered by Western urban theory. This article examines the dynamism of Chinese urban transformation, especially political economic changes vis-à-vis so-called neoliberalism, and spatial outcomes as diverse and contrasting spaces of formality and informality. Finally, this article speculates on implications for global urban studies.

Comparison of prevailing concepts about the process of urban development and spatial forms and the Chinese cases. From the paper above.
  • Fulong Wu, 2012. Urbanization. In Handbook of Contemporary China, edited by William S Tay and Alvin Y So, pp. 237-262. World Scientific: New Jersey.

Abstract: This paper examines urban development in China through the perspective of economic restructuring. First a review of the establishment of an export- oriented economy and its institutional foundation vis-à-vis fiscal and land policies. Then an examination of the basic characteristics of the world’s factory model and how it defines the process of urbanization and urban development. Comparisons of contrasting spatial forms of upper market commodity housing estates and migrants’ villages point toward a hybrid urban form that essentially reflects the contradiction of the world’s factory regime. Finally some specula- tions about the transition of the world’s factory regime and the impact of recent global economic crisis on China’s urban development.

Abstract: I begin my speculation by asking whether there is a transition of urban process’ and whether this transition is qualitatively different from what we have seen in the mainstream urban transition. By the urban process’, I am referring to a fundamental political^economic process rather than simply the concrete manifestations of land development or housing provision. The question is about the fundamental conception of the city and, in this case, I aim to show that the transitional cities become the material, functional, and symbolic means of accumulation — the ‘growth machine’ as conceived by Logan and Molotch (1987).

Abstract: The objective of this article is to speculate on the urban restructuring process in China’s transition to a market economy. Previous studies suggest that a broad theoretical framework is much needed to develop hypotheses for further empirical studies. This paper draws its insights from relevant studies on contemporary capitalist cities, in particular, political economy analysis of the urban process and capital switching, the structure of building provision and the creation of a rent gap, and institutional analysis of property rights. Summarily, it suggests that the basic logic of production in the context of a socialist city requires a specific way of coordinating — through economic planning and a specific configuration — the state work‐unit system. Manifested in the production of the built environment was project‐specific development. The structural tendency to disinvest in developed land has engendered a rent gap, which has laid the foundation for the phase of redevelopment in reforming socialist economies. Urban restructuring in the recent emerging market economy, which mainly involves decentralization, reorganizing the production of the built environment, and an increasing local‐global link through overseas capital, is understood through this perspective. The post‐reform built environment is characterized by land‐use restructuring and polycentric development. It is argued that the physical reshaping of Chinese cities can be understood with respect to the redefinition of property rights, hence, capturing the rent gap by the main actors — state work‐units, municipalities, the central state, real‐estate investors, original residents and farmers. By its nature, the process favours big builders who have either de facto rights over existing urban land property or huge capital that enables them to ‘wipe out’ small owners. Western experience of gentrification reminds us that social problems may be created during the process, which calls for continuing insights to shed light on urban restructuring in post‐reform China.

Abstract: In this paper the urban process in the face of China’s transition to a market economy is examined from the perspective of political economy. Before economic reform, China operated a centrally planned economy. Production activities were organized on the basis of sectoral departments of the central government, and the reproduction of labour was carried out through self-contained development. The dominance of the state stemmed from its role in resource allocation. Economic reform, launched in 1978, introduced market mechanisms to urban processes in China. Through fiscal, housing, and land reforms decisionmaking was decentralized. Under so-called ‘comprehensive development’, municipalities are now required to organize urban development. The state has lost its dominant status in budgetary investment. Self-raised, extrabudgetary funds increased rapidly. Work units still extract surplus value efficiently but have had to become the major purchasers in housing markets because workers in the public sector cannot afford housing. The persistence of state ownership in the mode of production makes it unlikely that market forces will play a leading role in urban development in China.