Understanding China’s urbanization: The great demographic, spatial, economic, and social transformation, by Li Zhang, Richard LeGates, and Min Zhao

《Understanding China’s urbanization: The great demographic, spatial, economic, and social transformation, by Li Zhang, Richard LeGates, and Min Zhao》

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来源: JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS,Vol.41,Issue2,P.271-273

语言: 英文

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作者单位: Arizona State University

摘要: Understanding China’s Urbanization is a massive compendium of facts and knowledge regarding China’s post-1980s rapid urbanization. It reflects the research findings of faculty at Tongji University, home to some of China’s leading urban planning scholars. Overwhelmingly academic in orientation, the book would have benefited from inclusion of a wider range of sources, particularly from the massive body of evidence-based research that has been carried out on China’s urbanization by international development agencies such as the World Bank.At 376 pages, the book covers a wide range of topics, but I found it difficult to discern a central message. The authors are certainly ambitious, declaring the book to be “the most comprehensive and up-to-date description of Chinese urbanization since the beginning of the period of reform and opening up that began in 1978” (p. 12). Early on, the authors promise new conclusions, but they fail to deliver; there are few new insights regarding Chinese urbanization. The book’s value is as a comprehensive, mostly chronologically organized, benchmarking of Chinese urbanization over the last 40 years.Most scholars of urbanization and city building in China would agree with the book’s key points, including that (a) China is not underurbanized, (b) decision making is more household based in China than in the West (although the Chinese household is weakening with the rapid rise of individualism), (c) migration is market driven, and (d) China’s economic rise, and peaking of its rural–urban transition at the turn of the 21st century, fortuitously coincided with a strong upturn in globalization. With regard to the other assertions by the authors—for example, that rural–urban and regional disparities will rapidly fall—the jury is still out.The middle chapters of the book (chapters 2–8) are very descriptive in nature, chronologically addressing a wide range of topics; that is, the hukou (household registration) system, the structure of local government, regional policies, migration, the rise of megapolitan clusters, and town/rural urbanization. However, disappointingly, the authors offer few critical assessments or policy recommendations. To put it bluntly, the authors seem unable to find their “voice.”Chapter 3, on the structure of China’s subnational administrative system, will be of value to nonexpert readers attempting to understand China’s subnational administrative structure; particularly helpful is figure 3.1 describing the arrangement of China’s urban and rural governance system. Chapter 5 covers globalization and foreign companies’ direct investment in China, the exogenous driver of Chinese urbanization. The authors emphasize China’s movement to a more market-oriented and globally connected economy.Chapter 9 is where “the rubber hits the road”: the authors put forward a “Double Dual Transformation” model. The essence of their argument is that increased productivity in the modern urban sector, which is both state and market driven, needs to be synchronized with more of an emphasis on the quality of urbanization, if China is to escape the “middle-income trap.” The middle-income trap is a theorized economic development situation, where a society that attains a certain income (due to given advantages) will get stuck at that level. The authors argue correctly that China’s urban fabric is of lower quality than expected given its level of economic development, because of the emphasis on economic efficiency to date. However, they may be overly optimistic regarding the speed with which China will exit the middle-income trap, postulating that China is an outlier. They argue for exceptionalism of the Chinese urban trajectory, that Chinese urbanization has its own features that are different from those of all other countries. Many scholars argue the opposite, that the export-oriented, peri-urban industrial estate–based manufacturing model (the peri-urban area being the rural–urban transition zone where urban and rural uses mix and often clash), involving high public investment (and debt), initial low-quality city building, and emphasis on low-cost surplus labor was pioneered in many other countries in East Asia including South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Singapore. Many of these countries have hit bumps in the road as they progressed (or tried to progress) beyond China’s current level of economic development.The authors are right in arguing that “not one country has developed into a high-income country with a low urbanization quality” (p. 335). If so, Chinese officials have their work cut out for them in improving urban environmental quality (particularly air quality), the livability and walkability of its cities, and transforming its semi-urban (floating) population of over 200 million people into permanent urban residents (“citizenization”). Achieving these goals will be expensive and disruptive, but China has over the last 70 years responded to challenges when necessary. The good news, as the authors allude to, is that the rural–urban transition has peaked in China and that China is in the latter stages of the demographic transition. Thus, urban population growth will slow and dramatically level off in this century. Consequently, China will be a relatively minor contributor to global urbanization between now and 2050, especially compared with Africa and South Asia.In general, the authors should have done more editing, they should have developed clearer conclusions, and they should have balanced academic sources with other information. In its present form, the book would be of limited value in undergraduate teaching or to the general public. The book might be of more interest to graduate students and urban China scholars who could use it for benchmarking purposes.