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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: China Today
- Sprache: Englisch
Currently there are more than 125 Chinese cities with a population exceeding one million. The unprecedented urban growth in China presents a crucial development for studies on globalization and urban transformation. This concise and engaging book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese urbanization, by investigating five key themes - governance, migration, landscape, inequality, and cultural economy.
Based on a comprehensive evaluation of the literature and original research materials, Ren offers a critical account of the Chinese urban condition after the first decade of the twenty-first century. She argues that the urban-rural dichotomy that was artificially constructed under socialism is no longer a meaningful lens for analyses and that Chinese cities have become strategic sites for reassembling citizenship rights for both urban residents and rural migrants.
The book is essential reading for students and scholars of urban and development studies with a focus on China, and all interested in understanding the relationship between state, capitalism, and urbanization in the global context.
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Seitenzahl: 334
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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Table of Contents
Cover
China Today series
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Map
Chronology
Preface
1 China Urbanized
THE RISE OF CHINA
THE URBAN TRANSITION
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE URBAN SYSTEM
THE URBAN BOOM: 1980S–PRESENT
CONCLUSIONS
2 Governance
CHONGQING FARMERS
IMPERIAL LEGACIES
FORMAL ADMINISTRATIVE HIERARCHY
SOCIALIST GOVERNING INSTITUTIONS: THE PARTY, DANWEI, AND HUKOU
CITIES SURROUNDING THE COUNTRYSIDE
LAND GOVERNANCE
HOUSING GOVERNANCE
INFRASTRUCTURE AND PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP
GOVERNING MEGA-CITY REGIONS: THE PEARL RIVER DELTA
COMMUNITY GOVERNANCE
CONCLUSIONS
3 Landscape
THE THIRD SPRING OF URBAN PLANNING
UBIQUITOUS CBDS
ART SPACE
HERITAGE SPACE
NEW ARCHITECTURAL ICONS
XIAOQU
THOUSAND-MILE CITIES: LANDSCAPE ON THE PERIPHERY
ECO-CITIES
CONCLUSIONS
4 Migration
TRAVEL AT THE CHINESE NEW YEAR
HOUSING DISPARITY
VILLAGES-IN-THE-CITY (VICS)
LABOR CONDITIONS AND PROTESTS
MIGRANT NGOS
CONCLUSIONS
5 Inequality
THE STORY OF SOHO CHINA
THE MARKET TRANSITION DEBATE
MAJOR TRENDS IN INEQUALITY
SOCIAL INEQUALITY
SPATIAL INEQUALITY
CREATING WEALTH AND POVERTY THROUGH URBAN RENEWAL
POPULAR PERCEPTIONS OF INEQUALITY
CONCLUSIONS
6 Cultural Economy
THE URBAN MIDDLE CLASS
CONSUMPTION: FREEDOM, HIERARCHY, AND INEQUALITY
NIGHTLIFE: FROM ORGANICALLY GROWN AND STATE-PLANNED
ARTS DISTRICTS AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES
CONCLUSIONS
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
China Today series
Michael Keane Creative Industries in China
Xuefei Ren Urban China
Judith Shapiro China’s Environmental Challenges
Copyright © Xuefei Ren 2013
The right of Xuefei Ren to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2013 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5358-7
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6546-7 (Single-user ebook)
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For the migrant workers in China
Figures and Tables
Figures
1.1 Urban population shares in the national population, 1949–2010
1.2 Map of major urban regions
1.3 Map of Special Economic Zones and other cities with special status
2.1 China’s formal administrative hierarchy
2.2 Housing prices in Beijing, 2001–2010
2.3 Map of the Pearl River Delta
Tables
1.1 China’s GDP growth rates, 1978–2010
1.2 Shares of GDP and annual growth rates for primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, 1978–2010
1.3 Number of cities in different size categories, 1995–2009
1.4 15 Largest cities in 1981 and 2010: a comparison
1.5 Changes in the number of Chinese cities, 1981–2009
2.1 20 Largest Chinese companies in 2011
4.1 Housing types and availability for migrants in cities
Chronology
Preface
China was historically an agrarian society with the majority of its population engaged in farming and living in rural areas, and this configuration continued until the last quarter of the twentieth century. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949, only 10 percent of the national population lived in cities and, at the dawn of the market reform in 1978, the figure was still less than 20 percent. However, the country has aggressively urbanized since, adding more than 400 new cities and hundreds of millions of urban residents over the last three decades. In 2010, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, about 50 percent of the national population lived in urban areas, 129 Chinese cities had over 1 million residents, and another 110 cities had a population of between half a million and a million. These shifting demographic trends are certainly striking, but the urgency to study Chinese urbanization comes from a different source, that is, the deeper transformation of Chinese society, as manifested in the changing governing institutions, the redistribution of wealth, and the remaking of citizen rights. This book sets out to understand how China has urbanized over a short period of time and what an urbanized China means for its citizens and for the rest of the world.
Before the market reform, China was a two-class society with its population divided into the urban and rural sectors. This configuration was made possible by the enforcement of the hukou system, which basically locked each Chinese citizen into a single locality and restricted population movement. In the socialist years, the rural sector was organized around People’s Communes, and the urban sector was governed through work units. The rural population was squeezed and exploited to support various industrialization and modernization projects, and the urban population was provided welfare benefits by the state through work units and was better protected from major calamities, such as the Great Famine (1958–61) which caused at least 15 million deaths, mostly in the countryside. This two-class society began to change in the 1980s, as the countryside went through rapid industrialization, and, over the last two decades, the former socialist governing institutions in both the rural and urban sectors have fallen apart or been transformed. The People’s Communes were abandoned, work units faded away with reforms of state-owned enterprises, and the hukou system has also been reformed in order to allow people to move around and to stimulate the economy. Moreover, major decision-making power has shifted from central ministries to territorial authorities at different scales, especially at the city level. City governments have become powerful players in promoting economic growth and engineering social change.
Urbanization in China has also changed the distribution of wealth and benefits and produced new patterns of inequality. The emergence of the first generation of Chinese billionaires and Fortune 500 companies is accompanied by the swelling ranks of people under the Minimum Living Standard Program – the working poor, the laid-off and unemployed, and impoverished peasants. The 2010 census also recorded 221 million migrants, and most of them have followed the rural-to-urban route. While working and living in the city, rural migrants do not have the same entitlements as their urban counterparts, and this disparity is especially felt by the second-generation migrants who grew up in cities, have no experience in farming, and see themselves as urbanites. In recent years, the sharp inequality has triggered widespread protests, with peasants contesting their land being taken away, middle-class homeowners protesting encroachments on their rights, and workers mobilizing for better wages and treatment. Thus, the new Chinese city has become a strategic site where citizen rights are being reformulated.
A critical analysis of China’s urban transition can also bring insights to a number of broader issues, such as the Chinese economy, globalization, and urban theory. First of all, studying China’s cities can help us better understand the origin of the Chinese economic miracle. China’s economic ascent and its urbanization are closely intertwined, and to understand the economic miracle, one needs to recognize the critical role played by its cities in these processes. Chinese cities, especially the large ones, are the engines driving economic growth in the market-reform era. This is not an arbitrary circumstance, but rather the result of particular policy choices made by the country’s top leadership. In the 1990s, the central government began to position large cities at the frontier of economic development by selectively allocating resources and favorable policies to these localities, often at the expense of smaller places and the countryside. The urban bias in policymaking has reshaped the growth trajectory of the Chinese economy since the early 1990s – from rural-centered to urban-centered – and resulted in uneven patterns of development.
China’s urban transition also offers a vantage point for understanding the interconnectivity of the global economy. China’s urbanization did not happen in a vacuum, but was accompanied by close interaction with the larger world economy. From the sleek skyscrapers in Shanghai to the state-of-the-art Olympics facilities in Beijing and iPhone factories in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou, Chinese cities are remade by transnational flows of capital, information, and expertise. The transformation of the urban economy, communities, and landscape tells a larger story of globalization.
The unprecedented urban growth in China also presents an intriguing case with which to reflect on urban theory developed in the context of Western urbanization. Different from London, New York, Chicago, or Detroit, Chinese cities, and also many other cities in the global South, did not experience high Fordism and the post-Fordist transition, which constitute the basis for major theorizations on urban governance in the West. Although contemporary Chinese cities exhibit similar tendencies of entrepreneurialism and neoliberalization, the causes often have to be sought in developments other than deindustrialization and urban decay, which are not happening or at least have not happened yet in China. A thorough understanding of China’s urban transition can open exciting paths for developing new urban theory and vocabularies.
The field of urban China studies has flourished with an extraordinary scholarly output from several disciplines. The main subjects of debate in the field include land and housing reforms, central–local relations, entrepreneurial governance, transformation in the built environment, and rising inequalities. The predominant analytical framework is the institutional approach, which seeks to understand China’s urban transition from the perspective of market and state institutions, and the interactions between the two. After more than two decades of research endeavors, we now have a very good picture of the social-spatial restructuring of Chinese cities.
While major progress has been made, there are still a number of glaring gaps to be addressed with continued research. First of all, we still do not know much about the socio-spatial transformation happening in medium and small-sized cities. Most studies so far have focused on the largest cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chongqing, and Shenzhen. Although there are a moderate number of studies on a handful of second-tier cities, such as Shenyang, Dalian, Xi’an, Kunming, and Wuhan, little is known about the rest of the 600-plus Chinese cities. Readers may find an over-representation of large cities in the case studies in this book, which reflects the current development of the field. During my literature research in both Chinese and English publications, I found that a vast majority of the scholarship focuses on about 10 to 15 of China’s largest cities. Whenever possible, I included examples from smaller cities, towns, and villages to show regional diversities and variations. The bias toward the largest cities is not unique to urban China studies, but can be observed in the whole field of global urban studies. So much has been written about the top-tier global cities such as New York, London, Paris, Chicago, and Los Angeles, but relatively little is known about smaller places that are off the radar of urban researchers. In China, small and medium-sized cities are growing even faster than large cities and they provide new frontiers for future research.
Moreover, although certain topics have been thoroughly examined, such as land and housing reforms, other topics have been largely left out, such as gender and the city, ethnic relations in the city, cultural industries, media and the city, the urban food system, and the particularly pressing issue of urban environmental policies and climate change. As these topics get more research attention, we will gain a much fuller picture of the Chinese city.
Lastly, although urban China studies has made significant progress in documenting empirical developments, the field has not made equal progress in reflecting what the Chinese urban experience tells us about existing urban theory, and what role Chinese urbanization plays in the larger system of global capitalism. In the field’s current state of development, scholars often borrow theoretical tools and concepts from the West, and compare similarities and differences between the Chinese city and the Western city. This is a first step for advancing comparative urban studies, but the necessary next step is to reflect critically on what Chinese urbanization entails and what it can tell us about the larger world-historical juncture at which we are living. As the frontier of urbanization has unmistakably shifted to Asia, we need new theoretical tools and vocabularies to study this urban process, instead of working the other way around – that is, using urbanization in Asia to prove, reject, or revise Western urban theory.
The motivation for writing this book comes from my own experience of teaching about urban China. For use in my courses, I could not find a single sole-authored book that could give a comprehensive treatment of the Chinese urban condition and engage both specialists and non-specialists. So far, the majority of the scholarly output on Chinese cities has been in the format of specialized journal articles, together with a few research monographs and edited volumes. Most of these publications engage exclusively with specialists and require substantial knowledge on the part of readers in order to follow the debates and exchanges. Moreover, as often pointed out, many publications on Chinese cities are overly empirical, and they become outdated only two to three years after publication. With these shortcomings in mind, this book aims to provide a comprehensive yet critical analysis of Chinese urbanization in an accessible manner.
Drawing upon both the secondary literature and some of my own work, this book examines the past trajectories, present conditions, and future prospects of Chinese cities by investigating five interrelated topics – governance, landscape, migration, inequality, and the cultural economy. Chapter 1 introduces the debate on the rise of China, urban demographic shifts, and the historical evolution of China’s urban system. Chapter 2 examines the changing governing structures and institutions, such as the Communist Party, danwei, hukou, community organizations, governments at different levels, and non-state actors. It also discusses in depth land and housing reforms, infrastructure financing, and the governance of mega-urban regions. This chapter lays a foundation for better understanding other topics in the book and, after chapter 2, readers can skip to any other chapters of interest. Chapter 3 examines landscape changes, discussing a variety of settlement types found both at the center and on the periphery of cities. Chapter 4 examines migration, with particular attention paid to the formation of ViCs (Villages-in-the-City, or migrant enclaves), the factory labor regime, labor protests, and state responses. Chapter 5 examines new patterns of social and spatial inequality and highlights the role of urban renewal in producing wealth and poverty. Chapter 6 introduces the cultural industries, with examples of consumption, nightlife, and art districts. It shows how the urban cultural economy brings both freedom and disempowerment, and how cultural industries have given rise to new forms of state control and intervention. The central theme running through all chapters of the book is the changing citizenship entailed in the urban process, and the various examples demonstrate how the Chinese city has become a strategic ground for reassembling citizen rights.
As the academic life has become more mobile than ever before, I have found myself researching and writing this book in different parts of the world. The first half of the book was written in the spring semester of 2010 at Michigan State University and the following summer in Paris. The second half of the book was written when I was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC, from September 2011 to May 2012, while simultaneously working on another book project comparing urban governance and citizen rights in China and India. Reading about Indian cities has certainly given me many new perspectives on the Chinese urban condition. One major observation I want to share with the readers of this book is that India, and probably other developing countries as well, have learned many wrong lessons from China, such as setting up Special Economic Zones, advocating massive investments in infrastructure, hosting mega-events, and pushing urban renewal by displacing the poor. Indian cities face many problems and challenges, to be sure, such as housing shortages, poor infrastructure, and high levels of poverty. But following the Chinese model cannot solve these problems. As the Chinese experience shows, massive investment in infrastructure has put local governments in deep debt, and the shining new infrastructure projects often become profit-making machines for private–public partnerships. Hosting mega-events such as the Beijing Olympics has not brought many benefits to the people living in post-event cities, and the Shanghai style of urban renewal has displaced millions of the poor and turned inner-city neighborhoods into exclusive colonies for transnational elites. One of my goals in writing this book is to demonstrate the consequences of Chinese-style urban development and provide a cautionary tale for other cities aspiring to remake themselves into Shanghai. Contrary to the notion of “fast policy transfers,” the urban development strategies used in China, as this book shows, have to be unlearned.
I would like to thank the reviewers and my editors at Polity Press for their useful comments and suggestions. My copy-editors Rachel Kamins in Washington, DC, and Helen Gray for Polity Press made all the difference to the text. Shenjing He, Guo Chen, Peilei Fan, Jiang Xu, Yasushi Matsumoto, and Anthony Orum read the whole manuscript and provided useful feedback. My students in the undergraduate seminar “China and Globalization” – from 11 majors across the campus – gave me many ideas on how to make the book accessible to non-specialists. I would like to thank Michigan State University for providing generous research support, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for providing a comfortable yet stimulating environment that made concentrated research and writing not only possible, but also enjoyable.
1
China Urbanized
THE RISE OF CHINA
In 1978, when Deng Xiaoping, the chief architect of China’s market reform, returned to leadership after the Cultural Revolution, China was still a backwater – a developing society with a large rural population, an outdated manufacturing sector, and dilapidated housing stock and infrastructure in urban areas. After three decades of market reform, China surpassed France in 2005 and Germany in 2007 to become the third largest economy in the world. And merely three years later, in 2010, China finally overtook the economic powerhouse of Japan, and became the second largest economy next to the United States. From 1978 to 2010, China’s GDP grew at 9.99 percent per year on average, which was the highest continuous growth rate among the world’s nations (tables 1.1 and 1.2). Its per capita GDP in 2010 was 29,992 RMB (about 4,837 USD), 79 times higher than in 1978 (about 61 USD) when the reform began.1 Although the benefits of the market reform are unevenly distributed, the continued economic growth has nevertheless lifted hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty, and China has finally joined the league of middle-income countries.
Table 1.1: China’s GDP growth rates, 1978–2010
Source:China Statistical Yearbook 2011, www.stats.gov.cn
GDP GROWTH RATES (IN %)PER CAPITA GDP (IN RMB)197811.738119797.641919807.846319815.249219829.1528198310.9583198415.2695198513.585819868.8963198711.61,112198811.31,36619894.11,51919903.81,64419919.21,893199214.22,311199314.02,998199413.14,044199510.95,0461996105,84619979.36,42019987.86,79619997.67,15920008.47,85820018.38,62220029.19,398200310.010,542200410.112,336200511.314,185200612.716,500200714.220,16920089.623,70820099.225,608201010.329,992Table 1.2: Shares of GDP and annual growth rates for primary, secondary, and tertiary industries, 1978–2010
Source:China Statistical Yearbook 2011
Note: Data are calculated at current prices.
China’s economic rise has presented an interesting puzzle for social scientists, and scholars have been debating why the country has grown so fast in a relatively short period of time. Two different, but complementary, perspectives can be observed in the debate on China’s rise. The first views China’s extraordinary growth as part of the worldwide trend of neoliberalization that began in the late 1970s. It relates China’s reform measures to marketization and privatization processes taking place in other parts of the world, and sees China’s rise as a part, but also a result, of the neoliberal economic restructuring globally (Harvey, 2005). The second view is more attuned to the Chinese historical-local context, and takes China’s socialist legacies and post-socialist institutional arrangements as the foundation of the country’s spectacular growth (Arrighi, 2007; Huang, 2008).
The first perspective, which explains the rise of China in relation to worldwide neoliberalization, can be further divided into two camps – the promoters and the critics of neoliberalism. According to David Harvey, neoliberalism refers to the political economic proposition that individual freedom and well-being can be best achieved by free markets, free trade, and private property rights, and that the role of the state is to provide institutional frameworks to facilitate free markets and trade and to protect private properties and profit-making activities (Harvey, 2005). Both the promoters and the critics of neoliberalism view China’s rise as part of worldwide neoliberalization, but they offer very different explanations of the actual nature of China’s adherence to neoliberal doctrines.
The promoters of the free market, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), often spread the view that China has been on the fast track of economic growth because the country has adhered to neoliberal policy prescriptions such as privatization, deregulation, and decentralization of fiscal resources and decision-making power from the central to local governments. They believe that with a more open market, a more developed private sector, and a stronger regime of private property rights, eventually the benefits of the market reform will trickle down to the masses. This position, however, is simply not supported by empirical evidence. The economies of a number of Latin American countries, such as Mexico, Argentina, and Jamaica, were devastated after their governments followed structural adjustment policies prescribed by the IMF that included devaluation of currencies, decreases in workers’ wages, reduction of social expenditures, privatization of state enterprises, and the opening up of the domestic economy to foreign investment. China’s reform measures little resembled these shock therapies. All of these processes happened in China, to a certain degree, but they took place over a longer time period – the reform has continued over a period of more than three decades, and the practice of privatization and deregulation has always been highly selective so that the destructive effects of these market reforms are minimized and delayed.
The critics of neoliberalism question the exploitative growth path China has taken, censuring the current polarization of Chinese society, as evidenced by the widening gaps between the rich and the poor, urban and rural residents, and coastal regions and the hinterland (Harvey, 2005; Arrighi, 2007). Although they do not necessarily think that China’s reformers, such as Deng Xiaoping, used the prescriptions of the World Bank or the IMF to guide their actions, they interpret the key reforms China has made, in the sectors of land, housing, and state-owned enterprises, as clear evidence of privatization and deregulation similar to what happened in the West in the 1970s, Latin America in the 1980s and Eastern Europe in the 1990s. For example, David Harvey writes that “the outcome in China has been the construction of a particular kind of market economy that increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements interdigitated with authoritarian centralized control,” and he calls this unusual mix of neoliberal elements and authoritarianism “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (2005: 120). He further argues that the market reform in China exemplifies a process of “accumulation by dispossession” – of farmers, urban workers, and migrants – and reconstitutes class power, as evidenced by the sharp increase in income inequality, just like that in the US, the UK, and Latin America.
The critics of neoliberalism are right to point out that China’s success story is inseparable from the worldwide neoliberalization that opened up space for China to be integrated into the world economy, and that China has turned from an egalitarian society into a highly polarized one. However, the broad-brush interpretation and categorization of China’s reform as an example of generic neoliberalization does not help explain why China has, over such a short period, become the second largest economy in the world, and why other emerging economies such as India, Russia, and Brazil, which also neoliberalized, have not grown at a similar pace.
The second camp of political economic analysis traces China’s rise to context- and history-specific conditions and institutional innovations. For example, Giovanni Arrighi identifies two conditions that laid the foundation for what he calls the “Chinese ascent” (Arrighi, 2007). The first is the result of the social legacies of the Chinese revolution and three decades of socialism. Arrighi argues that by the late 1970s China was in a better position to launch its reform than other developing countries such as India, because socialism had delivered high literacy rates, good education, and a long adult life expectancy, and therefore China’s labor force was relatively healthy and well educated at the dawn of the reform. China’s booming export sector benefited greatly from the country’s cheap labor, but Arrighi emphasizes that it was not just the low cost, but also the education and health of the labor reserve that marked a difference from other developing countries and attracted foreign investment.
Second, the early success in rural sectors of Township and Village Enterprise (TVE) initiatives laid firm foundations for the economic take-off later. Deng Xiaoping’s reform targeted the agricultural sector first. Between 1978 and 1983, the Household Responsibility System was introduced, under which the decision making power over agricultural surplus was returned to individual rural households. In 1983 – for the first time since 1958, when the hukou system2 was implemented to restrict peasants’ mobility – rural residents were given permission to travel outside their villages to seek business opportunities and outlets for their products, and in 1984, farmers were allowed to work in the TVE sectors in nearby towns. TVEs helped to absorb China’s huge surplus of labor from the agricultural sector, exert competitive pressure on state-owned enterprises, generate tax revenues for localities, and expand the domestic market (Arrighi, 2007). TVEs also led to rapid industrialization and urbanization of the countryside, and no other developing country had similar success in raising productivity and living standards in rural areas. Overall, focusing on local institutional contexts, Arrighi argues that the legacies of socialism and the achievements of TVEs in the 1980s are what prepared the ground for China’s economic miracle later on.
Economist Huang Yasheng attributes China’s economic take-off to the TVE initiatives in the 1980s as well, rather than conventional mechanisms of growth such as private ownership, property rights, and financial liberalization. The TVE initiatives of the 1980s, according to Huang, encouraged private entrepreneurship and led to decentralization in the following decades (Huang, 2008). However, rather than viewing China’s growth as continuous and accelerating after the initial take-off of the rural sector, Huang notices a rupture in the Chinese growth strategy. He observes that beginning in the early 1990s, China reversed many of its highly productive rural experiments with TVEs, and China’s policymakers have since favored cities instead of rural areas for investment and allocation of resources. Shanghai – China’s largest commercial city – best illustrates this urban-biased growth model, according to Huang. During the second half of the 1980s, Shanghai’s leaders gradually came to dominate national politics by taking top positions in the central government, and since then the central government has initiated many policies favorable to economic development in Shanghai, such as establishing Pudong New District in 1992, the first district of its kind, designed to jump-start a financial center. The Shanghai city government restricted the development of small-scale, entrepreneurial, and rural businesses, and favored instead foreign companies and large enterprises with strong government connections. Contrary to the common praise and admiration for Shanghai, in Huang’s account Shanghai is one of the least entrepreneurial cities in the country. Huang argues that the Shanghai model of growth is expensive and leads to sharp social inequality. For example, relative to the national mean, Shanghai’s GDP increased massively in the 1990s, but the average household income did not change much. Also, since 2000, during a period of double-digit GDP growth, the poorest population segment in Shanghai has seen its income further decrease. In Huang’s narrative of China’s ascent, there are two Chinas – the entrepreneurial, market-driven rural China, and the state-led urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand, but in the 1990s, the situation was reversed and Chinese development became more urban-driven.
The two explanations introduced above – one from the perspective of neoliberalization and the other focusing on local institutional arrangements – complement one another, and together they provide a fuller account of the rise of China. It is crucial to recognize the local historical and institutional context in which the transformation from a planned to a market economy took place, but it is also important to keep in mind that China’s reform measures would not have been as effective as they were without the larger trends of neoliberal economic restructuring, which opened up space for China to integrate itself into the world economy. Moreover, as Huang Yasheng correctly observes, there was an “urban” turn in the early 1990s in state development policies, evidenced by the massive investment in urban regions, strong intervention by local governments in the micro-management of economic affairs, and tax policies favoring foreign and state-owned enterprises while discriminating against domestic, private, and rural entrepreneurship. In short, China’s economic boom since 1990 is an urban boom, and the Chinese miracle is made in its largest urban regions.
THE URBAN TRANSITION
China is the most populous country in the world, and it is no easy task to gather accurate statistics on how many people currently live in the country and how the population is geographically distributed. Beginning in 1953, the government has been conducting a population census about once every ten years – in 1953, 1964, 1982, 1990, 2000, and 2010 – except during the period of the Cultural Revolution. The most recent census, the Sixth National Population Census, was carried out in 2010 and it required more than 1 million census workers to complete.
The past six censuses have documented China’s urbanization levels – that is, the percentage of “urban population” in the national total – during the second half of the twentieth century, but demographers and geographers have long pointed out that the criteria used to define the “urban population” vary from census to census; for example, no criteria have been used twice in a row without change (Zhou and Ma, 2003). In the first census in 1953, “urban population” included the total population residing within the administrative boundaries of cities (shi) and towns (zhen), but in the next census in 1964, only the non-agricultural population residing within the jurisdictions of cities and towns was counted as “urban.” The change can be explained by the state effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s to restrict urban population growth so that the state did not have to take care of the social welfare needs of migrants coming from the countryside to live in cities. In the 1990 and 2000 censuses, the criteria used to define the “urban population” became more elaborate – for instance, dividing cities into those with districts and those without, taking account of the population density of places, and starting to count migrants who have lived in cities and towns for more than six months as part of the “urban population.” Also, for the first time in the 2000 census, places with a population of more than 3,000 were considered “urban” – no population benchmarks were previously used to define “urban.” But many villages with advanced economic development were also counted as “urban” in the census even if their population did not meet the 3,000 benchmark (Zhou and Ma, 2003). In short, the criteria for defining what is “urban” and who counts in the “urban population” have been inconsistent from census to census, and this should be kept in mind when we use census data to discuss China’s urban transition.
The 2010 census delivered some alarming, but not completely unexpected, results. Due to the continuing One-Child policy, fertility rates remain at a very low level and China’s population growth has definitely slowed down.3 The total population in 2010 was 1.37 billion, increasing by 5.84 percentage points from 2000, and the annual increase between 2000 and 2010 was only 0.57 percent. The average Chinese household size in 2010 was 3.1 persons, declining from 3.44 persons in 2000. At the same time as the slowing of its growth, China’s population continues to move around the country. The 2010 census counted 221 million migrants, defined as people living in a different place from that recorded in their hukou registration for six months or longer. The migrant population increased by a staggering 83 percentage points over what it was in 2000.4
The continuing economic growth and migration have tipped the balance between the rural and urban populations. China had always had a larger rural population than its urban population in the twentieth century. In the 1982 census, the recorded urban share of the national population was merely 20.6 percent, and, by 1990, it had increased slightly to 26.32 percent. In the 1990s, the urban share of the national population increased by nearly 10 percentage points, to 36.22 percent in 2000 (figure 1.1). The urbanization level of China in 2000 was still much lower than that of other developing countries, such as 59 percent in North Korea, 62 percent in South Africa, 73 percent in Russia, 75 percent in Cuba, and 92 percent in Argentina.5 But the first decade of the twenty-first century saw the largest growth of urban population – by 13.45 percentage points, compared to the earlier decades. The 2010 census reported that between 2000 and 2010 China’s urban population expanded by over 200 million, and currently half of China’s population lives in urban areas.
Figure 1.1 Urban population shares in the national population, 1949–2010
Source:China Statistical Yearbooks, 1982–2010.
As large cities continue to grow, medium-sized and small cities have boomed too, resulting in a relatively even pattern of city-size distribution. In the 1980s, the National Bureau of Statistics classified cities into five categories according to their population size – super-large cities (more than 2 million), extra-large cities (1–2 million), large cities (0.5–1 million), medium cities (0.2–0.5 million), and small cities (less than 0.2 million). These older classifications have become obsolete with the growth of both the number and the size of cities (tables 1.3 and 1.4). In 1981, there were 18 Chinese cities with a population of over 1 million; by 2009, there were 129 cities with a population of over 1 million, and another 110 cities with a population of between 0.5 million and 1 million. Despite the restrictive government measures to curb population growth in super-large cities, the population of Beijing increased by 42 percent, and those of Shanghai and Tianjin grew by 38 and 29 percent between 2000 and 2010.
Table 1.3: Number of cities in different size categories, 1995–2009
Source:China City Statistical Yearbook, 1996–2010
Note: Until 2000, the statistics included both county-level cities and prefecture-level cities. From 2001, the statistics included only prefecture-level cities.
Table 1.4: 15 Largest cities in 1981 and 2010: a comparison
Source: 1981 data are from China Statistical Yearbook, 1982. 2010 data are from One World – Nations Online, at http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/china_cities.htm, accessed on June 5, 2011.
Note: The data exclude agricultural populations living in urban areas.
* These cities did not appear in the top 15 list in 1981.
Population movements follow resources and economic opportunities, which are often found in the largest urban regions. It is no surprise that China’s most developed urban regions – the Beijing-Tianjin-Tangshan urban region, the Yangtze River Delta (Shanghai-Suzhou-Nanjing-Hangzhou), and the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou-Shenzhen-Dongguan) – have gained the most population, at the expense of the less developed regions in the western interior (figure 1.2). The provinces of Guangdong and Zhejiang grew by 21 percent and 16 percent in population in the period between 1978 and 2000, while western provinces such as Gansu and Sichuan have lost population. Smaller cities grew at an even faster rate than large cities. For example, cities with 0.2–0.5 million people grew by an average of 5.86 percentage points annually between 1978 and 2000, and cities with less than 0.2 million people grew by an average of 5.31 percentage points, compared to 4.47 percentage points for cities with over a million people in the same period (Xu and Zhu, 2011). The rapid growth of small cities is a result of the deliberate state policy of controlling the expansion of big cities by developing medium-sized ones and building up small cities since the 1980s.
Figure 1.2 Map of major urban regions
Urban population growth can be driven by a number of factors, including natural population growth, rural to urban migration, economic developments such as the decline in the farming sector, increasing employment activity in the manufacturing and service sectors, and the pouring of investment into urban areas (Pannell, 2002). In the Chinese case, natural population growth has apparently slowed down due to the One-Child policy, but nevertheless it still contributes significantly to the increase of the urban population because of the large size of the national population. Rural to urban migration has increasingly become the major driving force for urban population growth, spurred by the employment opportunities available in urban areas and the relaxation of the hukou
