Confronting The Challenges Of Urbanization In China

Since the late 1970s, China has experienced an unprecedented pace of urbanization. In 1978, only 17.8% of the population resided in urban areas, but by 2013 the level of urbanization had reached 53.8%. During the same period, China also enjoyed spectacular economic growth. China had become the second largest economy in the world by 2012, just behind the United States. Despite China’s highly acclaimed achievements in urbanization and its economic miracle, urban China confronts a set of significant challenges. This book provides theoretically informed and empirically rich analyses of some of the key challenges facing China’s urbanization. The first part deals with new patterns of urbanization, focusing on comprehensive measures and environmental dimensions of urbanization. The second part of the book focuses on several aspects related to migrants in cities: migrant entrepreneurship, return migration, and local people’s attitudes toward migrants. The final section examines two key issues important for migrants, urban local residents, and policy-makers that have become quite contentious in China today: housing and urban health care. This collection presents original, cutting-edge research on some of the most pressing challenges confronting contemporary urban China, conducted by researchers from multiple social science disciplines. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of urban studies and China studies, as well as those in sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science.

This book traces the history of urbanization in China and discusses major problems and challenges the country is facing as it undergoes a profound social transformation. The author argues that as China tries to build not just more but also better cities, i.e., cities that are not only economically competitive but also people- and environment-friendly, it should adopt urbanization strategies and policies that promote integrated development for both rural and urban areas, and coordination among otherwise disparate objectives – such as industrialization, ecological modernization, informatization and cultural heritage preservation – nationwide and at various scales.

The key challenges facing China in the next two decades derive from the ongoing process of urbanization. China's urbanization rate in 2005 was about 43%. Over the next 10-15 years, it is expected to rise to well over 50%, adding an additional 200 million mainly rural migrants to the current urban population of 560 million. How China copes with such a large migration flow will strongly influence rural-urban inequality, the pace at which urban centers expand their economic performance, and the urban environment. The growing population will necessitate a big push strategy to maintain a high rate of investment in housing and the urban physical infrastructure and urban services. To finance such expansion will require a significant strengthening and diversification of China's financial system. Growing cities will greatly increase consumption of energy and water. Containing this without at the same time constraining the economic performance of cities or the improvement in the standards of living will call for enlightened policies, strategies, careful urban planning, and significant technological advances. This volume identifies the key developments to watch and discusses the policies which would affect the course as well as the fruitfulness of change.

This book provides a general description and evaluation of the process of urbanization in China and the urgent challenges facing the Chinese government. Urban Transformation in China examines the changing pattern of China's urban population and the determinants of these changes, including an analysis of the spatial structures of China's cities and industry and an assessment of urban productivity growth and the role of mega cities in national development. The book's coverage encompasses both academic and policy perspectives. With its sister volume Urbanization and Social Welfare in China it provides a comprehensive and multidisciplinary overview of the country’s urbanization process.

This book is an interdisciplinary examination of China's new urban development model and the challenges Chinese cities face in the 21st century. China is in the midst of a historic developmental inflection point, grappling with a significantly slowing economy, rapidly rising inequality, massive migration, skyrocketing housing prices, alarming environmental problems, and strong pushback from the West. In this volume, Western and Chinese scholars in different disciplines offer the clearest look yet at some of the main challenges China faces, including domestic and international contexts, the new urban development model, inclusion and well-being of migrants and their families, and urban sustainability. This book sheds light on China’s ongoing development and future directions, and has strong policy implications for anyone interested in the future of China.

China’s extraordinary economic boom since the late 1970s has been accompanied by massive urbanization, with the proportion of the population living in cities rising from 18% in 1978 to 54% in 2014. Currently the Chinese government has amongst its objectives the target to increase this to 60% by 2020, and also to improve the quality of China’s cities. This book examines a wide range of issues connected to China’s urbanization. It considers the many problems which have come with rapid urbanization, including urban housing problems, difficulties affecting rural migrants in urban areas, and a lack of social protection. It examines areas of current reform, including land reform, shanty town renewal and moves to address environmental problems. It explores governance issues, and throughout assesses how urbanization in China is likely to develop in future.

Urbanization is one of the major challenges facing China. Of China’s 1.3 billion people, around half still live in rural areas. There has been huge migration from rural areas to cities in recent years, a trend that is likely to continue strong for some time. The strains that this vast migration puts on China’s cities are enormous. This book makes available for the English-speaking reader the results of a large group of research projects undertaken by CDRF, one of China’s leading think tanks, into the details of rural-urban migration, the resulting urban growth and the problems associated with all this. The book goes on to put forward a new strategy, which aims to ensure that China’s urbanization proceeds in an orderly manner and that people and their needs are put at the centre of the strategy. Key parts of the strategy include that 'city clusters' should become the main form of urbanization; that these should be arranged geographically in a pattern of 'two horizontal lines and three vertical lines'; that industrial and employment structures should highlight regional features and diversity; that urban public services should be more equitably distributed; that there should be new forms of urbanization management and city governance to accelerate urbanization and ensure harmonious social development; and that the whole process should be conducted in an ecological, 'green' way.

This book explores the process of urbanization and the profound challenges to China’s urban governance. Economic productivity continues to rise, with increasingly uneven distribution of prosperity and accumulation of wealth. The emergence of individual autonomy including demands for more freedom and participation in the governing process has asked for a change of the traditional top-down control system. The vertical devolution between the central and local states and horizontal competition among local governments produced an uneasy political dynamics in Chinese cities. Many existing publications analyze the urban transformation in China but few focuses on the governance challenges. It is critical to investigate China’s urbanization, paying special attention to its challenges to urban governance. This edited volume fills this gap by organizing ten chapters of distinctive urban development and governance issues.