The Structure of Social Space in Beijing in 1998: A Socialist City in Transition

Abstract

The 1984 urban reforms in China introduced an urban land market and a housing market to Chinese cities and had profound impacts on urban structures. Using data from a 1998 survey and other sources in Beijing at the subdistrict (jiedao) level, this research found that differentiations of social areas were taking place in Beijing after over a decade of urban reforms. Unlike western cities with socioeconomic status and family status as dominant forces in forming social areas, Beijing began to experience the impact of differentiation of socioeconomic status (e.g., income gaps), and the family structure factor was ineffective in Beijing because of decades of family planning. Factor analysis revealed four factors that underlay the social-spatial structure in Beijing: (1) land-use intensity as the dominant factor displaying a concentric zonal pattern, (2) neighborhood dynamics, mainly composed of the floating population ratio, featuring a sectoral pattern, (3) socioeconomic status exhibiting a combination of sectoral and zonal patterns, and (4) ethnicity resembling a multiple nuclei pattern. Superimposing the four factors generated a complex urban mosaic in Beijing. Cluster analysis was used to classify the subdistricts into nine different social areas.

Keywords:

• Beijing
• cluster analysis
• social-area analysis
• urban reforms in China
• zonal and sectoral patterns