Abstract
China is rising and urban China is rising especially high and fast. Visitors to any Chinese cities today are often dazzled by the rise of endless tall buildings during the day and countless neon lights at night. In fact, urban China today is perhaps the dream place for the most ambitious architects to implement their most creative design ideas, as reflected in the iconic buildings of birds nest (a sports complex) and China Central Television (CCTV) in Beijing. Urban China is also quickly expanding in population and geography. For the first time in Chinese history, urban population has exceeded 50 percent of the total Chinese population thanks to a large part to the monumental flow of internal migration in China. China’s fast urbanization process raises many interesting questions. What are the driving forces of China’s urban transformations? How do the 221 million migrants fare in urban China? What are the emerging patterns of consumption, artistic creation, and cultural facilities such as museums and libraries in urban China. In this book, Xuefei Ren takes us to urban China and digs deep into these questions. The result is a first rate and comprehensive review and synthesis of a rich body of literature on urban China. By my own account, the book draws on recent scholarship from multiple disciplines including sociology, economics, anthropology, urban planning, and geography.
Chapter 1 gives us a quick review of urbanization in China since 1949 and focuses in particular on the post-reform period. Ren notices that during 1978–2000, some coastal provinces such as Guangdong and Zhejiang both experienced sizable population growth, whereas some western provinces (Gansu and Sichuan) surprisingly saw population decline due to out-migration and low fertility. This pattern has persisted even to the 21st century. Chapter 2 discusses how different institutions in urban China have changed over time. First, there has been a power decentralization from the central government to the local government at different levels. However, Ren quickly warns us not to have a simplistic understanding of this decentralization process as zero-sum game and argues that ‘it is more accurate to describe what is occurring in present-day China as a win-win game-both central and local authorizes have strengthened their capacity to govern’. From the local government perspective, this decentralization gives them enormous freedom to boost gross domestic product (GDP). For example, local governments can use land to attract investment from major companies, domestic and international. The opening of factories provides employment opportunities as well as enhanced economic performance. Another area that saw fundamental change in urban China is housing. Since the 1980s, China has gradually moved from a work-unit (danwei) assigned housing system to a market driven housing system. Housing reform is a very complicated story. One outcome is that by 2010, home ownership rate in urban China reached 73 percent and average living space per capita had increased from 6.7 square meters in 1978 to 30 square meters in 2008. There are different winners in this process. Local government is a big winner by selling land to real estate developers who subsequently reap big financial gains when apartments are sold. This clearly benefits some customers. However, as housing price keeps going up, many low-income or mid-income residents, or even newly graduated college students, are priced out of the housing market especially in big cities. Today, with the exception of wealthy residents, many young couples in big cities find purchasing an apartment on their own really beyond their reach in their lifetime. This is especially true for large number of migrants in Chinese cities as they are often at the bottom of the economic hierarchy.
Another noticeable change in urban China is occurring in community governance. Gone are the days of work-unit compound where workers from the same work units or factories live in the same building which promoted a sense of mechanical solidarity among residents. The new community has replaced traditional Residential Committee and delivers services to community members. In addition to community, there are two governing institutions at the neighborhood level: homeowners’ association and property managing companies (wu ye). One important sociological implication of this new type of community governance structure is that a substantial number of residents in the same apartment building (xiao qu) do not know each other and social control and community cohesion are clearly weakened.
Chapter 3 moves to the landscape of urban China and how Chinese cities are built the way they are. Ren’s doctoral dissertation is on transnational architecture production in urban China, and her vast knowledge in this field is clearly on display in this chapter. After detailed discussion of several building projects, Ren aims to deliver two messages. One is that the state has played a pivotal role in this process of making the new Chinese city. Marketization of the Chinese economy has by no means weakened state’s role in this architecture production. In addition, today’s Chinese cities are also result of transnational flows of capital and expertise, as China is determined to build to impress.
It is hard to discuss Chinese cities without discussing migrants. After all, it is the migrants who contributed to the high level of urbanization. In Chapter 4, Ren focuses on low skilled migrant workers, in particular their housing arrangements and conditions and their poor working conditions, and labor rights violations. Given rising housing price in urban China, migrants do not have a lot of choices other than living in villages in the city (VICS) in the urban fringes. VICS is a rich sociological story; as urban China expands geographically, peasants who live nearby find their land all of a sudden becomes very valuable and aggressively build multi-story houses on their land. They then quickly rent out to low-income migrants, and some make a big fortunate doing so. Ren then discusses labor right issues for migrant workers using Foxconn (a Taiwanese-owned electronics manufacturer) as a case study. In 2010, the news from Foxconn shocked the whole world as 18 of its employees jumped from dormitory buildings. Of course, poor working conditions and labor right abuse have been widely observed in Chinese factories. As China matches to the next stage of urbanization, integrating migrants into the urban China is surely to be an important agenda for policy makers.
Chapters 5 and 6 address urban inequality and cultural economy, respectively. Although inequality in China is not news, Ren does expect some new patterns to emerge such as possibly more within group inequality and urban poor may move further away from central city and move toward urban edge (which is already taking place now). Throughout the entire world, artistic creation often takes place in urban places, China is no exception. Ren suggests that three trends in consumption, nightlife, and arts districts are worth noting. There is clearly the penetration of invisible hand: the market and at the same time the visible hand of the state control. The third feature is the influence of the globalization on culture economy more noticeable in places like Shanghai and Beijing.
Overall, Ren has done a superb job synthesizing a large body of literature from multiple disciplines. Ren is also a very talented writer and conveys complex ideas and arguments in simple terms. It should be a required book for anyone who wants to understand urban China in the 21st century.