Abstract
Urban development in China is strongly influenced by state policy in a context where even the emerging market actors are closely tied to government. The state role is reinforced by the absence of formal mechanisms for community participation in urban decision making and the limited citizenship rights of the large minority of urban residents who migrated from rural areas. Increasingly, however, scholars are becoming aware of the complexities of a political system that involves many vertical layers of governance, competition between localities and an ever-changing balance between centralisation and decentralisation. In addition, scholars are looking more closely at how urban residents adapt to the constraints and opportunities of a situation that is imposed on them, and how they develop strategies for their own advancement within it. In these ways, research on urban China offers a reconceptualisation of state-centred theories of urbanism and urbanisation in the global South.
This special issue of Urban Studies is the result of several collective efforts. Most of the articles were originally prepared for a conference at Brown University in 2015 that was organised by the Urban China Research Network (UCRN). Like other UCRN activities, it was mainly intended to promote work by a new generation of scholars, in this case doctoral students. Senior scholars on the UCRN advisory board, some of whom were the students’ advisers and eventually co-authors of this work, offered a steady stream of advice and critique. The editorial board of Urban Studies, which has also invested actively to support scholarly voices from East Asia, helped to motivate the authors through the long process of revisions by agreeing to publish the best papers together in a special issue. To my delight, every one of them is now included here. Sustained mentorship works. The result is a set of new voices, familiar with past work but pushing forward in some different directions. New voices are vital to progress in any research area, because old hands too easily and naturally become content with their own hard-earned understanding of their field.
To make this point more concretely, I will use this introductory article to suggest ways in which these papers as a set do take a new tack on longstanding questions about urban China. Let me start by describing a way of thinking about urbanisation in China that might be seen as a straw man but has enough truth to set up a useful contrast. Indeed it reflects some of my own views. From this perspective, what is distinctive about China is the extent to which in a global system China’s development processes are state-led, and major decisions about the pattern of growth are made by government at the national and municipal level. This is a top-down system that reflects the persistence of the previous regime of central planning, although market reform has created openings for private sector investors to collaborate with government to carry out large-scale real estate and infrastructure projects. Residents have no direct influence in this regime, and without a political voice several categories of people are routinely disadvantaged – villagers whose lands are taken without due compensation, people living in older inner city neighbourhoods who are displaced by redevelopment projects and above all migrants to the city whose limited citizenship rights deprive them of a chance to get ahead.
This depiction is certainly recognisable in urban China studies, and it provides the framework for much recent research. Nevertheless, there are undercurrents in the literature that offer a different conceptualisation.
On the planning and policy side, the state system could alternatively be described in terms of fragmentation, which is manifested in such forms as contestation for authority between different levels of government (national, provincial, local), competition between different jurisdictions at the same level (e.g. even among districts within cities), alternation between periods of centralisation and decentralisation, and decisions in Beijing that are obstructed by city officials. The boundary between the state and private sector is hard to define, since ‘private’ investors are often dependent on borrowing from state institutions, and many real estate and construction companies are subsidiaries of state work units or government agencies.
On the people side, rather than seeing residents as the passive victims of larger political and market forces, an alternative vision understands them as actively adapting, strategising and manipulating the conditions of their lives, certainly not in control of their futures but both knowledgeable and active.
The contributions to this special issue tend to take the latter perspective. Some focus more on people and some more on plans, but I encourage thinking of all of them as dealing with the dynamic interplay between the two. That is their main innovation. It stems partly from the disciplinary background of the authors, several of whom are anthropologists or other social scientists whose research has a strong basis in hands-on fieldwork. If one is interacting on a daily basis in the one-on-one study of real people, it is easier to notice their complexity and to discover their motivations. Naturally one gets a sense of what they see as obstacles, what they are striving for, how they are succeeding and failing, how they interpret their successes and failures. This perspective also is rooted in doing case studies at close to a grassroots level, dealing with the details of how relatively small-scale plans and projects come to fruition or fall aside. I suspect that the context of China also makes a difference in orientation. China is changing quickly. Much is unsettled and in the midst of being remade. It isn’t obvious what things will be like when the dust settles. In this sense, China as a whole is more like an urban frontier (which it is) than an established society with centuries-old traditions (which it also is).
These studies offer new insights in three major ways. The most important is the emphasis on agency by ordinary people who are confronted with plans and conditions that they did not participate in formulating. This involves people’s ability to understand and deal with their situations, but also a recognition that doing so may result in subtle or greater changes in the plans or their outcomes. Several of the articles here adopt an ethnographic approach or draw on systematic sociological data about people’s perceptions. They reveal people in action and reaction rather than as pawns on someone else’s chessboard. In studies informed by postcolonial urban theory, the reference would be to the subaltern population. However, in the Chinese case studied here the subaltern are not a marginal population but rather a combination of locals and migrants, urban and rural people and even lower-level local officials who represent a cross-section of the population affected by urban development.
Another distinction is that several of the articles highlight processes occurring on the cutting edge of urbanisation, in fact the actual physical edge of the expanding city, where the action is not so much in big-city politicking as in village and township interactions. Much urban social science is framed at the level of whole cities and urban regions and of broad categories of people within them. Less seeks to understand the variations across communities within these areas, and even fewer studies venture beyond the urban core and inner ring suburbs. Yet China’s towns and villages are the nexus of much urban development, and in many metropolitan areas the major areas of growth are in recently rural settings. The political environment is perhaps more unsettled in these fringe areas, and perhaps there is in fact more space for manoeuvring and negotiating. This research adds new detail on how these areas become urban, at the level both of people adapting to change and of small town governments dealing with larger systems.
The third theoretical insight is related to this last point: the multi-scalar nature of development planning. Geographers have long emphasised that urbanisation involves processes at multiple geographic scales, and political scientists have equally paid attention to vertical connections between higher and lower levels of government. Although it is possible to understand China as a highly centralised and coordinated political system, it is at the same time – particularly for local development issues on the urban periphery – highly decentralised. It is what some have called a system of fragmented authoritarianism. The studies of planning processes in this collection draw attention to the conflicts and coordination among various public and quasi-public actors, ranging from efforts by one town to exert control over its growth potential, to strategies of the central state to mould local behaviour. A common way of thinking about people and plans, particularly in cities of the global South, is in terms of the ‘informal practices’ of people and the ‘formal documents and processes’ of the plan. These articles demonstrate that informality clearly operates among the multiple agencies involved in planning, perhaps especially in the current market reform period when the stakes are high, property rights are in flux and many public authorities have legitimate standing to participate in decisions.
The articles in this special issue are organised into two simple categories: five studies that are mainly about ‘plans’ and seven mainly about ‘people’.
Planning and policy choices
A distinguishing feature of the articles in the first section is how processes of urban change at the regional, city and neighbourhood level are so closely tied up with planning and public policy. The politicisation of urban growth was an assumption of critical urban sociology as early as the 1960s, and it developed into a more general political economy of place. In the Chinese case, as many have argued, the developmentalist state is at the heart of the current rapid urban development, so many processes are plainly political.
Wu (2018) approaches the discussion at a broad theoretical level. He argues that the indeterminacy and tensions that many see in the Chinese political system stem from a contradiction between ‘planning centrality’ (where the state has authority over development decisions) and reliance on market instruments to carry out actual development projects. He acknowledges that many aspects of land development at the local level are motivated by potential profitability, both to investors and to local governments who rely on revenues from sale of land use rights. But the over-riding priority of what he calls ‘state entrepreneurialism’ is not speculative profit but maintenance of state power. In many instances this means mobilising participation and consent from lower-level authorities and residents, creating openings for them to pursue their own interests. In this respect his framework is closer to what urbanists refer to as regime theory, rather than a theory of growth machines.
One example that Wu invokes is the ‘Three Old Redevelopment’ in Guangzhou, which is the case studied by two articles in this special issue. ‘Three Old’ refers to potential redevelopment activities in three different kinds of settings: old towns, old villages and old factories. Li and Liu (2018) study all three. In each context they find a different constellation of stakeholders and interests. In each, they find an array of public and non-public actors, none of which have sufficient authority to act decisively on their own, which creates a situation in which bargaining, exchange and negotiations are paramount. In their view, a successful conclusion is possible only through the intervention of central state authorities who have arranged the incentive structure in a way that can potentially satisfy all major claimants at the local level. This interpretation reinforces Wu’s position in the sense that the implementation of ‘Three Old’ results not only in economic expansion but also in mechanisms of conflict resolution at the local level.
Another analysis of Guangzhou’s ‘Three Old’ policy looks specifically at redevelopment in urban villages. The urban village is a community entity that is unique to China. Many rural settlements, complete with village housing, collective land rights and a degree of self-administration, have been surrounded by urbanisation but only partly absorbed into the city. Guo and colleagues study the case of one of these, Liede Village, located near the city centre and in proximity to the planned location of the Asian Games that would be held in 2010 (Guo et al., 2018). They describe a version of a local growth machine centred on the villagers themselves – a small minority of residents who had residence rights, and who therefore could share in the potential revenues from more intensive land development. They partnered with financial investors to profit from more intensive land use. The third pillar of this coalition was the Guangzhou city government, whose short-term interest was to facilitate the upgrading and beautification of the built environment as a showcase for the Games. In the longer run, though, the city government had a stronger interest in limiting residential densities and balancing growth in different sectors of the city, so its post-Games policy was to de-activate such village-level growth machines.
Shen and Shen (2018) also focus on the central state role in dealing with growth processes at the local level, but in rural areas rather than in the urban core. Like Li and Liu, they emphasise the positive impacts of the state action. They distinguish top-level (national and provincial), municipal and town-level governments. The problem from the state perspective is how to facilitate economic development in the countryside despite the lack of governance capacity at the lowest level where programmes have to be implemented. The problem is being solved by a system that relies on the intermediate level (municipal and district) to mobilise local actors and town governments. This is accomplished by: 1) providing seed funding; 2) offering legitimation and rhetorical support from the national level; and 3) relying on municipal government to devise its own specific development projects in line with local interests. The result in their view has been promising, both in terms of accomplishing development objectives and in deepening the central state’s influence in the countryside.
The final study in this section is Sum’s (2018) investigation of university cities, which sprang from a central government initiative to rapidly expand higher education throughout China. The urban development dimension of this policy has involved establishing large education districts to house multiple universities, their faculty and students, and related activities in a sort of ‘new town’ – often on the edge of the city. In Guangzhou, the new ‘Higher Education Mega Centre’ displaced villagers and constructed new facilities for 10 different existing universities on a 30 km2 parcel of land on a rural island not far from the city centre. Sum draws our attention not to the difficulty of coordinating multiple levels of government and their interests, but to a more classical disconnect between people and plans – the new university and urban form resulted in greatly increased land values, but the students who were intended to be serviced by it found it to be isolated and alienating, and faculty and staff were priced out of the new private housing.
People: Adapting and pushing back
The second section of this special issue is comprised of articles that highlight the impacts of policy decisions and urban change on residents. Of course the state at many levels is implicated in these studies, establishing the context in which people figure out how to pursue their own personal and family fortunes. Smart’s (2018) synthetic article suggests that a degree of discordance between plans (perhaps we should think of this more broadly as ‘governance’) and the various groups of people, users and planners who are involved in their formation and implementation is characteristic of China. And it results in a high degree of what Smart calls ‘informality’. That is, possibly because there are such limited mechanisms for people’s views to influence policy formation, their agency consists more in adapting to, working around or manipulating the formal system.
These articles are rich in examples of how this happens. Liu et al. (2018) remind us of well-known disparities in life chances between local urban residents and new migrants who are based in the formal registration system (hukou) that discriminates against the latter group. The surprise in this study is not that migrants are more likely than locals to recognise such discrimination, but that there is so much variation in how migrants view their social integration. Barely more than half of migrants in their Shanghai survey perceive that they are ‘always excluded by locals’. Further, as Xiao and Bian (2018) in the following article look into the case of migrants with higher levels of education, they show that migrants are making many kinds of choices about their own hukou – in fact, given a chance to become ‘urban’ residents, some prefer not to give up their rights to land in their home village. Others choose to move to a second-tier city with fewer job opportunities but greater chances of transferring their residence status. The point is that we need to understand the apparently rigid hukou system not only as an obstacle to upward mobility but also as defining rules and options in the game of getting ahead.
Two studies examine how people living in urban villages adapt to urban life. Zhan (2018) describes some strategies of both locals and migrants in urban villages in Beijing. Locals have opportunities to earn a profit from turning their homes into rental housing for migrants, typically pyramiding from small initial ventures to larger buildings. Migrants must depend on wage earnings, but often gain extra income from small service businesses, and they often invest in the future by directing savings into private housing in their hometowns. The latter option takes advantage of their land rights as locals back home, just as the small-scale property entrepreneurs in Beijing’s urban villages are doing. Informality is essential to all these strategies – especially evading regulators who would demand business licences and adherence to building codes.
Zhang et al. (2018) describe the case of villagers who have been displaced from the countryside and resettled in the city of Zhenjiang. They have lost their previous rural land use rights (and related rental income) in return for cash compensation and replacement housing. The question for the researchers is how people coped with the new conditions of their lives, and the answer seems to be that over time they informally took control of urban space. Without their own homes with ample outdoor space for social gatherings and ceremonies, they staged events and gathered together with friends in car parks and other public spaces. Without small shops for convenience goods and food, because urban rents and other costs of doing business precluded them, they set up breakfast stalls and relied on street vendors who were not officially allowed. Again, the gap between people’s needs and what was allowed by the formal system was bridged by informality and initiative.
The last two articles deal with the responses of long-time city residents to urban change. Arkaraprasertkul (2018) offers another example of how someone who at first may seem to be a victim of gentrification and displacement is actually promoting it. His case is an old Shanghai neighbourhood with many long-term residents living in poor conditions at low rents, but with underused space. These old-timers, rather than state or private sector redevelopers, were the first to market to younger, better educated and more affluent people whose taste for authenticity meant that they valued this space more than the locals. Yet the strong role of the state is evident here, because public policies can create obstacles while also opening up possibilities for their ventures. Gentrification in this older Shanghai neighbourhood depends ultimately on the changing system of property rights and regulations related to subletting.
Wang’s (2018) study of ‘rigid demand’ for housing raises different issues about people’s reaction to state policy. Clearly in many ways the state has promoted real estate investment as a legitimate wealth accumulation strategy, beginning with the market reform campaign to privatise public housing. Arguably, high-level financial policy has also encouraged speculation in real estate, to the point that much public and private debt is supported by high land valuations. Privatisation and the run-up in housing prices in turn led to the incorporation of home ownership into families’ ambitions for mobility and even into marital choices. This study raises a question that may be faced more widely in China at some point: what happens when the housing price bubble (or the stock market) weakens? Wang anticipates such circumstances in an example of a new housing development where early buyers paid high prices only to see the market weaken and new buyers get lower prices. In another social context, this would simply be a price adjustment with winners and losers. But in the Chinese case, there is a unique issue of the state’s responsibility. How have common people’s cultural expectations been transformed, and how will the state be able to rebuild its legitimacy in the event of a wider and more sustained market crash?
Research in comparative urban sociology is heavily influenced by theories of the relation between the state and civil society. Within that framework, China is a leading example of where a state-centred approach is most relevant. The contributions in this collection do not contradict that point of view. It would be hard to understand anything about China’s development in the last half-century without emphasising the nature and capacity of the Chinese state. What these researchers reveal is that, within a state-centred theory: 1) the Chinese state itself is multi-layered and pluralistic, managing complex dynamics of competition and contestation within itself; and 2) the hundreds of millions of people who are remaking urban China and whose lives are so affected by state policy actually have plans of their own.
