Abstract
The Great Urbanization of China collects 13 essays that are closely related to the extensive wave of urbanisation in China to decipher this great transformation by analysing urban expansion and spatial growth patterns, city-size distribution, urban development strategies and institution evolution, urban planning, land use reform, land market and migration. Not only does this book uncover facts about the changes that have taken place in Chinese cities over the past 30 years, it also seeks to investigate their causes. Through quantitative and qualitative analyses the essays explore the factors and forces that define and affect the urbanisation process.
The book contributes in three ways to existing knowledge in understanding China’s urbanisation. First, it illustrates the historical evolution of China’s urbanisation based on time-series data such as the urbanisation rate, migration, land use, economic growth and industrialisation, highlighting key government policies and significant phenomena. Second, by drawing on detailed analysis and models, the book discusses causality such as the factors that contribute to land use change, the determinants for migration boom, the influence of economic and institutional factors on the urban system, how urban land markets affect land use patterns. Third, unlike papers that emphasise facts such as performance and patterns of urbanisation, many essays in this book attempt to investigate whether government strategy and policies have brought about more efficient performance and thus whether institutional factors are involved in explaining the changes. Given that China’s dramatic urbanisation is embedded in the transition from a centrally planned economy to a more market-oriented economy, the evolution of governmental strategies and policies is crucial for interpreting the process.
Some critical readers may argue that the analysis and results based on year book data may not be reliable enough to tell the true story about China’s urbanisation. To counter such suspicion, the book contains much first-hand data and in-depth surveys as valuable supplements to illustrate the changes. Most of the essays draw on the authors’ experience and deep understanding of China. For instance, the book summarises well the major events of China’s urban development from 1949 to 2010.
Detailed analyses emphasise labour force, land and capital – three of the most important means of production; now that Chinese cities have become sites for spatially concentrated production and consumption. The growth of cities in China can be attributed to both their economic and institutional environments. In Chapter 2, based on city-level data from 1991 to 1998, Song and Zhang examine the city-size distribution and how economic and institutional factors shape the urban system and urban growth pattern. In Chapter 3, Ding Lu traces the evolution of China’s urban development strategy and institutional changes. The governmental strategy for cities has shifted from promoting small towns and strictly controlling the size of large cities towards valuing megacities as core for local and regional development. And the most significant institutional changes shaping the process of urbanisation, as argued by Lu, include the gradual establishment of an urban real estate market, changing central–local fiscal relationships and new residential administration systems for migrants. In Chapter 4, Zhu Jieming investigates the transition role of urban planning from a distribution instrument to a useful tool in promoting local development. Land use plans are used to control land use and establish order in the land market. Although the general goals of urban planning include economic efficiency, social equity and sustainability, economic efficiency becomes local governments’ first priority. Long-term growth has become the motivation for a further transition of urban planning paradigm.
Land use change and emerging land market pose core questions for urbanisation. In Chapter 5, Zhang, Mount and Boisvert explore the factors that account for land use change and land use intensity by modelling arable land and sown area separately through 33 years of provincial-level panel data. The essay demonstrates the inverse u-shaped relationship between land use intensity and industrialisation. As implication, the state industrialisation policy and the grain self-sufficiency policy conflict with each other in how they affect land use. In Chapter 6, Ding and Zhao assess three popular and ‘quick’ urban spatial growth instruments – special economic zones, university towns and central business districts. The authors underline the potential low efficiency of these three planning-oriented spatial growth models when compared with mixed land use. Chapter 7 introduces the historical evolution of land policies. Using land transaction survey data for Beijing, Ding measures the effect of the urban land market on land use patterns after the public leasing system was adopted in a modern urban land market. The result suggests the significant effects of market power on urban land development. Land value affects the grade of land, land use type and accessibility to transportation. The divergence of how spatial land prices are spatially distributed for residential and non-residential uses implies the degree of uneven development of the Chinese urban land market.
In Chapter 8 Zhu outlines the introduction of one new institution – land development rights for urban redevelopment as institutional reform compared with previous socialist institutional form. Despite a newly established land leasing system contributing to land market growth, socialist land use rights, derived from the central planning system, still impede urban renewal processes. Based on a strong case study of a particular district in Shanghai and the first-hand survey, Zhu asserts the creation of land development rights as a new institutional form to facilitate the redevelopment process through institutional analysis. In Chapter 9 the ambiguous property rights over state-owned urban land, pursued by local developmental state and danwei-enterprises have been examined. Local governments are motivated to lease land to developers to collect extra-budgetary revenue. Growth coalitions were formed between the local developmental state and danwei-enterprises in the pursuit of localities advantage and economic profits. But the cost and benefit of these institutions for long-term development still needs to be explored. In Chapter 10, applying the neoclassical growth accounting model for 31 provincial economies data from 1996 to 2007, Lu demonstrates the strangely low contribution rate of urban land expansion to economic growth. The result suggests a low efficiency in urban land uses that may be explained further by institutional weaknesses of the land market.
Migration is the traditional measurement for urbanisation processes. The rural–urban duality in China and the hukou system makes Chinese rural–urban migration a more complicated social question than migration within other countries. In Chapter 11, Zhang and Song prove the dominant role of rural–urban migration for China’s urban population growth by estimating the time-series and cross-sectional data during 1978–1999. The authors also found that economic growth caused the migration rather than the reverse and that the income gap between the rural and urban has positive effects on both inter- and intra-provincial migrants. In Chapter 12, Lu links interregional migration to regional income disparity. Although migration improves the interregional resource allocation efficiency, the region-wide demographics redistribution raises the challenges about regional uneven development.
In the epilogue, Lu summarises the most serious challenges on environment, urban governance and migration that require more attention in the future. The whole book is informative for outsiders with interest in China’s urbanisation on the basis of public policy as well as sophisticated quantitative analyses. For researchers who work in similar fields, the book serves as a useful and detailed reference. Since most of the essays are based on statistical analysis, little attention has been paid to the real life of the urban residents. The links between such social studies and the ones of this book deserve further study.