China in 2011 crossed the urbanization Rubicon when half of its population of 1.35 billion people was reported to live in cities and towns. Today that number has climbed to roughly 700 million urban residents, as China's urban transition continues apace. Of equal significance, this now accounts for roughly 10 percent of the world's people. What happens in China's myriad urban places matters to everyone on earth, and this volume seeks to help us understand how and why the Chinese city is so significant.
Weiping Wu and Piper Gaubatz are two seasoned and widely published scholars of the Chinese city and related processes of urban growth and change. They have set out to provide a comprehensive review and explanation of the Chinese city, its historical and geographical setting, its recent trajectory of economic and spatial change, and the changing lifestyle as well as challenges that face today's residents. Although the book is anchored, as the authors declare, in the spatial sciences of geography, urban planning, and environmental studies, its reach and scope is in fact broader, as it touches on the economy and a variety of complex policy issues that characterize China's remarkable rise and the interplay of urban change with economic and national development.
Intended for advanced undergraduates, this book in fact is of use and value for specialists and general readers who seek to learn more about the character of the Chinese city and the multifaceted nature of the dynamic urban transition that drives the astounding growth of these cities. In addition to the thoughtful and well-written historical and geographical chapters that offer a clear context and framework for what follows, there is much more. The narrative here helps demystify some of the more arcane aspects of China's cities while also reminding the reader that Chinese cities are indeed different and might not conform to some of the conventional theoretical constructs that are familiar to students of Western urbanization and comparative urbanism.
Of particular interest are the chapters on China's historical urban system and traditional urban form. These present a brief but insightful review and survey of the main currents of the manner in which the Chinese urban system and network has evolved from its beginnings based on administrative functions with minimal commercial activities to centers of commerce and trade during the Tang and Song Dynasties. The authors have reviewed an abundant literature and offer a convincing synthesis of the manner in which the form of Chinese cities, derived in part from cosmological ideas that used specific cardinal directions and axes along with walls, gates, and squares, changed in a manner that reflected both culture and belief systems. What we find today is the outcome of many centuries of traditional design and construction now being rapidly transformed in ways that sometimes obscure the grandeur of the past unless it is reconstructed in an ersatz manner to appeal to tourists or a contrived view of what the city of history was.
The recently elected president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, offered his vision of “China's Dream” as part of his goal for where his administration hopes to take the nation during the next ten years. In this dream he sees a modern, powerful country assuming its rightful place in the long historical trajectory of global or at least East Asian regional supremacy. Today this vision in part centers on the cities, especially Beijing and Shanghai, which are seen as the showpieces and crowning achievements of Chinese urban design, both historical and modern.
Related to the notion of “dreams” is the “city of dreams,” an appellation now currently in vogue to describe an area of landfill called Cotai between the Macau Peninsula and one of its adjacent islands. This “city of dreams” contains some of the most stunning and elaborate gambling casinos and hotels found anywhere, a place so garish that it makes Las Vegas blush. Wu and Gaubatz specifically did not include Hong Kong and Macau in this volume, both of which are today special administrative areas of China. In some ways this is a pity, as these two cities are among the most modern but also most unusual and remarkable urban places seen in China or elsewhere. They provide compelling evidence that these hybrid Chinese cities are indeed different while also offering harbingers of what the urban future with its pell-mell rush to modernization might bring to the People's Republic.
The core of the book focuses on post-1949 events, the socialist Chinese city of the Maoist period that ended in the late 1970s and its modern reform and postreform urban settings. The Maoist period witnessed a time when China sought to industrialize quickly based on an autarkic system in which self-reliance was the key force for growth with little attention to the service economy. Agriculture was expected to fund and serve the nation's industrial drive to maturity. Social mobility was limited by the establishment of a household registration system that kept peasants on the farm and out of cities, and urbanization proceeded at a modest pace. Such a structural divide between urban and rural had profound consequences for cities, for they were starved of funds for their development exclusive of almost anything other than for industrial development. The social gap and inequality between rural and urban (nonprivileged and privileged) continues to this day as one of China's most sensitive and enduring policy issues.
The disastrous results of the Great Leap Forward are well known, and this was followed by an equally bleak period of the Cultural Revolution. Mao died in 1976, and by 1978 reforms began that led to an awakening of China's economy, which was soon accompanied by the greater growth of cities and towns. Labor services were needed in cities for construction, and as China began to build more factories for consumer items, new jobs were created. Rural people began to migrate to the cities, but they were without the privileges reserved for urbanites, those with an urban “hukou” or household registration. A two-tiered society began to emerge within the spatial confines of the city in which there developed an underclass of rural migrants with no access to housing, health, or educational services, yet who were absolutely necessary for the success of the burgeoning economy.
Within the governing elite, conservatives and reformists were squabbling over the direction of the reform and the national and regional economies. The supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping, and his supporters held sway with their increasing commitment and belief in the power of the market and its incentives. In 1992 he made a historic journey to the south to observe firsthand the miracle of the Pearl River Delta urban region, which was fast becoming the consumer factory to the world. “To get rich is glorious,” or at least so it was attributed to what Deng asserted. He returned to Beijing having placed his imprimatur of managed state capitalism on the economic growth model of China joining the global economy and driving its phenomenal growth with exports of manufactured goods, a lesson learned from the earlier successes of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Now China was taking full advantage of its own proximity and cultural linkages to Hong Kong.
These stories and lessons are all chronicled in detail in this book with lucid descriptions and explanations of the policies and how this growth was orchestrated through the cities and towns, not just of the Pearl River Delta such as Shenzhen and Dongguan, but also other important locations in the lower Yangtze region with its focus on Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Ningbo, and other cities.
We learn also of the serious problems China's cities face, such as how to finance growth and expansion. The solution is to convert farmland on the urban periphery despite the reality that this land technically belongs to the collectives and the farmers who are collective residents. Yet cadre officials corrupt the system by colluding with developers to sell this land and pay off the collectives and farmers with only a small fraction of the true value of the land. In this way land can be obtained for development and speculation on housing, another problem facing virtually all of China's growing cities. The mismatch between the needs of migrants for adequate housing and the amount of housing being constructed highlights the growing inequality that bedevils China's policymakers and officials as they seek to provide for the tens of millions of new urban residents.
For me, one of the pressing realities of China's surging urbanization and the dilemma of the Chinese city is the matter of scale. As this book so eloquently describes, never have so many people created cities and urban places at such a pace and scale as what is happening in China today. The data and statistics that Wu and Gaubatz present are drawn from up-to-date official sources. Although there might be some shortcomings in such data, these are probably as accurate as are possible given the size and numbers involved. These data tell a powerful story and reflect the remarkable transformation underway in the world's largest country. What becomes clear at the end, however, is the triumph of the Chinese city, as it is in the vanguard of the economic and development trajectory of twenty-first-century China.
The authors have succeeded well in providing a thoughtfully conceived, well-organized, clearly written, and carefully executed account of the modern Chinese city and the essential processes involved in its growth and change. As an accurate and well-documented account of one of the great processes of human change underway during the last half-century, this book is essential reading for students, professionals, China specialists, and urbanists from a variety of disciplines. I highly recommend it.