You may choose to develop ideas based on the previous response paper (attached Paper_China_Today.pdf). For your final paper, you will write a 6-page essay (double-spaced, Times New Roman font 12) and address following questions:
Michelle_Michy
20191203034002urban_china_xuefei_ren__1_china_urbanized_.pdf
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after the Cultural Revolution, China was still a backwater – a developing society with a large rural population, an outdated manufacturing sector, and dilapidated housing stock and infrastructure in urban areas.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)
1978 11.7 381
1979 7.6 419
1980 7.8 463
1981 5.2 492
1982 9.1 528
1983 10.9 583
1984 15.2 695
1985 13.5 858
1986 8.8 963
1987 11.6 1,112
1988 11.3 1,366
1989 4.1 1,519
1990 3.8 1,644
1991 9.2 1,893
1992 14.2 2,311
1993 14.0 2,998
1994 13.1 4,044
1995 10.9 5,046 Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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1996 10 5,846
1997 9.3 6,420
1998 7.8 6,796
1999 7.6 7,159
2000 8.4 7,858
2001 8.3 8,622
2002 9.1 9,398
2003 10.0 10,542
2004 10.1 12,336
2005 11.3 14,185
2006 12.7 16,500
2007 14.2 20,169
2008 9.6 23,708
2009 9.2 25,608
2010 10.3 29,992
Table 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 Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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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 Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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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.
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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 Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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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.
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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 Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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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
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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 system to allow people to move between localities. In addition, a third mechanism is clearly at play for urban population growth: the administrative reclassification of formerly non-urban areas as urban areas, whereby residents living in these places are automatically counted as “urban” even if they still engage in farming activities. Friedmann (2005) estimates that about a fifth of the increase of the urban population in the 1990s is due to administrative reclassification. There are two types of officially designated urban areas in China – cities (shi) and towns
(zhen). The criteria for classifying places as cities or towns have been significantly relaxed since the 1980s, and many counties have been reclassified as cities. In 1978, there were only 193 cities in the country, but the number increased to 434 in 1988, and to 663 in 2000. Thus, between 1978 and 2000, the country more than tripled its number of officially designated cities. By 2009, China had 654 cities, including prefecture-level cities (i.e., cities with districts), county-level cities (i.e., cities without districts), and the four directly administered municipalities – Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, and Chongqing (table 1.5). The addition of new cities has mostly occurred in the more developed coastal regions. In the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, urban population growth was mostly dependent on the increase in the number of
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cities, while from the mid-1990s urban growth has been more driven by the expansion of the population size of existing cities (Xu and Zhu, 2011).
Table 1.5: Changes in the number of Chinese cities, 1981–2009
Source: China Statistical Yearbooks, 1982–2000
Note: The data do not include Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing. The total number of cities in 2009 is 654, with the four directly administered cities included.
HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF THE URBAN SYSTEM
Recorded urban settlements appeared in the North China Plain as early as the Shang Dynasty (1600–1046 BC), and China’s urban system has matured, differentiated, and evolved through
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the imperial dynasties and into the modern period. Compared to the autonomous urban settlements of the West, Chinese cities historically lacked political autonomy. Three features characterize the Chinese urban system in the imperial period, from the founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BC to the abdication of the last emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1912. First, although there were a number of politically powerful cities, China never had a primate
system, with one predominant city concentrating the majority of national economic activities and resources. Historically, economic integration advanced around urban centers in several regions, such as the Yellow River Plain and the Yangtze River Delta, which prevented any one of them from becoming nationally dominant (Skinner, 1977). Imperial China also experienced the reshuffling of the capital among major cities, and the fortunes of these capital cities often rose and fell with dynastic transitions. For example, Chang’an (today’s Xi’an) flourished during the Han and Tang dynasties; Kaifeng was the imperial capital of the Song dynasty and the major commercial center in the world in the twelfth century; Beijing served as the imperial capital of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries, and was the largest city in the world until 1750. Also, colonial penetration, which is often a major factor in producing a primate city, was limited in the Chinese case; colonial powers never gained complete control over any Chinese city, not even Shanghai (Murphy, 1974; Chen, 1991). Since around the time of the Song dynasty, China has always had a dozen dynamic urban regions, and city size was relatively evenly distributed. Second, historically, Chinese cities were predominantly administrative centers and their
political functions were more significant than their commercial functions in organizing urban social life. At least, this was the case until the boom of market towns in the Ming and Qing periods, as will be explained later in this section. Third, there was no rigid divide between cities and rural areas for most of the country’s history, and Chinese cities were closely connected to the countryside and the hinterland through cross-region trade and population movements. It was only in the 1950s, at the beginning of the socialist period, that an urban– rural hierarchy was institutionalized and reinforced. The sharp division between cities and the countryside is a socialist legacy and still significantly shapes Chinese society today.
The urban system before 1949 Unlike in Europe in the Middle Ages, where cities emerged as market towns, Chinese cities throughout most of history were primarily administrative centers and sites for the performance of rituals and ceremonies. Chinese cities in the ancient and imperial periods lacked political autonomy and were dependent on the rural hinterland for resources, and commerce never played a significant role in urban life (Lin, 2007). When Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified China in 221 BC, he made “county” (xian) the basic administrative unit, and all administrative functions were concentrated in xian capitals, that is, county-seat cities. The county has been the most constant administrative unit of Chinese society for over 2,500 years, and the number of counties and county-seat cities has remained more or less the same until today (Skinner, 1977; Shi, He, and Fan, 2010). In addition to county seats, administrative cities in ancient and
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imperial China also included prefectural seats, departmental seats, and imperial capitals. These were all political cities with administration as the primary function. They were also consumer cities, with their political and military significance overpowering their economic weight (Liu and Stapleton, 2006). Max Weber depicts the ancient Chinese city as a political entity without much autonomy,
whose citizens lacked an enterprising spirit with regard to urban economic and political affairs (Weber, 1958). According to Weber, Chinese cities never developed a powerful guild system comparable to that of the West during the Middle Ages, and this lack of urban autonomy partially explains the late development in China of legal foundations, modern capitalist organizations, and industries. But works by historians show that Chinese cities in the ancient and imperial periods were not completely buried under administration and bureaucracy. In a study on Hankow in the nineteenth century, Rowe (1992) argues that a distinctive urban consciousness, and a “public sphere,” clearly developed within the merchants’ communities and neighborhoods in this vibrant commercial town on the Yangtze River. Overall, however, compared to cities in the West, the lack of development of autonomous
commercial cities in the history of China is apparent, and it has to do with the way in which trade and commerce were organized. Confucian doctrine discriminated against commerce, and society was ordered around a hierarchy descending from scholars (shi), to farmers (nong), to artisans (gong), to merchants (shang). Although merchants often intermarried with families of government bureaucrats and sent their sons into the bureaucracy, they were never an independent force in cities (Whyte and Parish, 1984). Cities relied on tribute from other regions and did not need to develop trade and commerce on their own in order to survive (Chang, 1977). The distinction between cities and the countryside was neither clear nor institutionalized
throughout most periods of Chinese history. Urban settlements were often surrounded by walls, but the walls were mostly for security and defense purposes and not for separating city- dwellers from rural residents. The vast majority of city-dwellers in ancient and imperial China were peasants who would go out daily through the gates to work in the fields. In urban settlements, during the Qin and Han periods (221 BC to AD 220), the majority of the city population consisted of peasants, followed by government bureaucrats, their families and employees, and a small percentage of residents engaged in crafts, commerce, and trade (Chang, 1977). Writing about the history of Nanking between 1350 and 1400, Mote (1977) argues that the sharp distinctions between rural and urban areas that characterized early modern Europe never existed in late imperial China, and he notes an “organic unity” of urban and rural living that was not seen in the West. With the growth of the population, commerce expanded and the government gradually
withdrew from regulation of commercial affairs. Beginning in the Tang period (618–907), there was a secular trend of retrenchment of government functions and deregulation of commerce and trade. In the Song period (960–1279), many small market towns emerged, and they contrasted sharply with administrative cities. The cities that grew the most were regional economic centers, and it was outside the gates of these cities where markets expanded. Skinner
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(1977) conceptualizes imperial China as a conglomeration of eight macro-regions, each with a hierarchy of central places surrounding a regional core.6 Core cities were connected to towns and villages within the same macro-region through economic and political relationships. A well-integrated macro-region urban system may have been achieved during the Tang period around the capital city Chang’an, and during the Song period around the capital city Kaifeng. But until the nineteenth century, because of the limited transportation infrastructure, economic and administrative transactions across macro-regions were too weak to bind the urban systems in each macro-region into an integrated empire-wide urban system. Due to uneven levels of economic development and political power, urbanization rates
varied across regions. North China and the Lower Yangtze area had more advanced urban systems than other regions. North China experienced rapid urban development between the eighth and the thirteenth century, and this was marked by the rise of Kaifeng as the largest city in the region and the center of transport and economic transactions. As a commercial center at the intersection of four major canals, Kaifeng reached its peak in the eleventh century with a population of around 1 to 1.5 million, living both within and outside the three layers of city walls. The vibrant urban life of Kaifeng is vividly captured in the scroll painting by Zhang Zeduan, Scenes along the River during Qingming Festival – the most famous painting in Chinese art history, currently in the collection of the Beijing Palace Museum. The population of the central China region reached 33 million in the thirteenth century, but with the invasion of the Mongols, transport was disrupted, the Kaifeng market was destroyed, and most cities in the region declined altogether (Skinner, 1977). Large urban centers also emerged in the lower Yangtze region with the rise of Yangchow (spelled today as Yangzhou), Soochow (Suzhou), and Hangchow (Hangzhou). Regional integration proceeded with the advance of means of transportation and the opening
of China to foreign trade after the two Opium Wars (1839–42 and 1856–60). The urban system in the Qing dynasty (1644–1912) was marked by the development of canal cities, treaty port cities, and railway cities. First, in the Qing dynasty, existing cities along the Grand Canal further developed and new ones emerged too. With a total length of 1,776 kilometers, the Grand Canal begins in Beijing, goes through Hebei, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces, and ends in Hangzhou. The major canal cities include Hangzhou, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Tianjin, Dezhou, Linqing, Ji’ning, Huai’an, and Tongzhou. The canal facilitated transportation of goods and resources across the regions, and the cities along the route formed a transregional network independent of the traditional urban system (Liu and Stapleton, 2006). In the wake of its military defeat, the Qing dynasty signed the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 with the British, which gave birth to the second new type of city – treaty ports. Treaty ports were places that were forced to open to foreign trade through unequal treaties signed between China and Western imperial powers. The first treaty ports in China, established with the Treaty of Nanjing, were Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou), Ningbo, Foochow (Fuzhou), and Amoy (Xiamen). Through the early twentieth century, more than 80 treaty-port cities appeared across the country (Feuerwerker, 1983). Many of the treaty ports were extraterritorial entities where foreign powers were given authority to build “concessions” that were not subject to the
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Chinese legal and court systems. The leading example of such cities is Shanghai, which surpassed Beijing as the largest city in China in the 1930s. As treaty ports became major urban centers, they reshaped the traditional urban system revolving around administrative cities. And soon, with the construction of national railway networks in the early twentieth century, there appeared railway cities functioning as regional transportation nodes, such as Hankou (on the Beijing–Hankou railway) and Harbin (on the Sino–Russian railway). To summarize, there were several distinctive types of Chinese cities before 1949, including
administrative cities, market towns, canal cities, treaty ports, and railway cities. The traditional Chinese urban system was centered around administrative cities before the middle imperial period – until around the time of the Song dynasty; after that, with population growth and expansion of trade, cities with strong commercial functions flourished and an empire-wide urban system gradually developed. Sharp distinctions between urban and rural areas did not exist. Even in the Republican period, which witnessed the emergence of Western-influenced cities such as Shanghai, historians note that these modern Chinese cities were very much shaped by the rural culture brought by migrants from the countryside, who tried to establish familiar patterns of life in their new urban setting (Lu, 1999; Liu and Stapleton, 2006).
Industrialization without urbanization: 1949–1978 The traditional Chinese urban system that had evolved through the dynasties and the Republican era was fundamentally altered during the communist rule beginning in 1949. China in 1949 was a predominantly agrarian society with only 10 percent of its population living in cities. The urban system inherited by the communist regime had only a few large cities, and the majority of the urban population was concentrated in these cities. Geographer George Lin argues that the communist regime reorganized the pre-existing traditional Chinese urban system in two ways. First, large cities enjoyed significant expansion by assuming both economic and political functions – economically, they were the places with the most advanced industrial infrastructure, and politically, these cities also corresponded with provincial capitals. Second, the formerly underdeveloped northeast, central, and western regions received targeted investment and experienced rapid urban population growth, while cities on the east coast experienced decline and neglect during the socialist years (Lin, 2002). This dispersed pattern of urban growth created by channeling resources and investment from the coastal region to the interior was driven by the government’s commitment to national development as well as concerns over national security during the Cold War period. The egalitarian principles of socialism aimed to eliminate “Three Differences” – between industry and agriculture, between cities and the countryside, and between mental and manual labor. But, ironically, some of these differences were amplified, and even ossified, as a result of policy choices made under socialism. Mao Zedong’s communist revolution succeeded first in rural areas with the mobilization of
peasants, and there was a clear anti-urban bias in national policymaking during the socialist period. Mao himself disliked large cities, and he was known to remark that “it’s no good if
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cities are too big” (Naughton, 1995). Under the influence of Soviet urban-planning ideology, cities were seen as sites for industrial production rather than for consumption and developing service industries. National leaders believed that consumption and investment in urban infrastructure such as housing and transportation were non-productive and therefore should be kept to the minimum possible level. To avoid the costs of urbanization, the size of cities and the urban population were strictly controlled during the socialist years. The urban population increased by only 2.3 percent annually in the 1960s and 1970s, and it never exceeded 20 percent of the national population. Kirkby (1985) notes that the purpose of restricting urban consumption under socialism was to enhance the role of cities as industrial production centers, and that China’s urbanization was shaped by the industrialization imperative. The geographic distribution of cities during the socialist period closely followed the national
priorities of industrial development (Lin, 2002). During the First Five-Year Plan period (1953–7), the central government announced a list of 156 key construction projects for industrialization, which led to the expansion of existing cities and the creation of new ones.7 Both the number of cities and the size of the urban population saw an increase in this period. State investment was poured into cities in the northeast in the 1950s, such as Harbin, Changchun, and Shenyang. In the 1960s, concerned with national security and the threat of nuclear attacks from the United States, the central government initiated the Third Front project, to disperse industrial facilities from the east coast and northeast to the mountainous regions in the southwest. The Third Front project was tremendously costly, and not very effective: most of the country’s industrial facilities remained concentrated in large cities on the east coast throughout the socialist period. Beginning with the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, the growth of cities stagnated, and between 1965 and 1978, more than 17 million city youths were sent to the countryside to be “re-educated” by peasants. By the late 1970s, China stood out among developing countries for its disinvestment in cities and slow pace of urbanization. Not only did the socialist government disinvest from and neglect cities, but it extracted their
resources to subsidize national development (Naughton, 1995). In the 1960s and 1970s, the government both restricted the growth of cities and channeled resources away from large coastal cities to other regions in the country. Naughton (1995) argues that despite the communist government’s anti-urban biases, it had to rely on cities to collect financial resources in order to plan and run the national economy. Shanghai is an example. The city was the most advanced industrial center in the country, but had to turn most of its revenues over to the central government to be reinvested in other regions. There was little investment in Shanghai’s housing and infrastructure in the socialist decades, so that by the late 1970s, the city had acquired a museum-like look, with its dilapidated neoclassical and art deco buildings from the colonial era. The policy choice of “industrialization without urbanization” not only suppressed urban
consumption, but also destroyed the formerly diversified rural economy and produced a sharp distinction between cities and the countryside. Rural China before socialism had thriving craft industries and commerce, but by the mid-1960s, due to collectivization, the rural economy had become overwhelmingly concentrated in agricultural production (Fei, 1986). As commerce,
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crafts, and service industries were discouraged, more than 90 percent of the rural population was engaged in farming only, which was unprecedented in the country’s history. Cities specialized in manufacturing and rural areas specialized in agricultural production. The distinction between urban and rural areas had never before been as sharp as it became in the socialist years. In spite of the lack of investment in cities, urban residents at least enjoyed the benefits of state-provided housing, schools, hospitals, and other social welfare provisions, which were not available to rural residents, and this triggered a rapid migration from the countryside to cities in the 1950s. Unable to support the influx of rural migrants, in 1958 China introduced the hukou system, dividing the national population into urban and rural segments and restricting population movement between cities and the countryside. Thus, the urban–rural divide in Chinese society was aggravated by the state priorities of industrialization and the suppression of urbanization, and later was institutionalized with the hukou regime.
THE URBAN BOOM: 1980S–PRESENT Socialist urban policies were reversed in the 1980s, and the urban system was reorganized by the new priorities of the market reform. In the decade of the 1980s, urbanization took the form of rural industrialization through TVEs, a process often referred to as “urbanization from below” (Ma and Cui, 2002). Beginning in the 1990s, the center of urbanization shifted back to cities, with large-scale capital investments flowing into urban areas. This is described as a shift from “rural-based urbanization” to “city-centered urbanization” (Lin, 2002).
Urbanization of the countryside: the 1980s Before the reform, manufacturing and commercial activities in villages and towns were underdeveloped, and the economic activity of rural localities was largely restricted to farming. The Household Responsibility System was introduced in the late 1970s, and it replaced the collective farming practices under the previous system of People’s Communes by giving farmers greater incentive to increase production. By 1984, People’s Communes had been abolished completely. The enhanced agricultural productivity released a large amount of surplus labor and provided impetus for TVEs. Most TVEs interacted closely with local governments of towns and villages, and it was common for government officials to serve as managers and executives in these rural enterprises. The political careers of local officials largely depended on the economic performance of TVEs under their supervision, which provided extra incentive for local officials to be involved in the management and business activities of TVEs. The close relationship between local government and business is described as “local state corporatism” (Oi, 1992, 1999). The TVEs under the control of local governments could retain a significant portion of their profit after they had satisfied the fiscal responsibilities agreed upon between them and their superior administrative agencies. Local officials could benefit from various types of perks from the enterprises under their control, while residents also enjoyed higher income, increased job opportunities, and expanded social
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programs as TVEs thrived (Ma and Cui, 2002). TVEs were the major mechanism of urbanization in the countryside in the 1980s, and there
have been a number of distinctive models of TVE development and rural urbanization, reflecting the variations in the socio-economic conditions and institutional arrangements from region to region. The most studied are the Guangdong, Wenzhou, and Sunan models. In Guangdong, TVEs of mixed ownership engaged in subcontracted manufacturing and relied on investment coming in mostly from Hong Kong through family and kinship ties (Leung, 1996). In Wenzhou of Zhejiang province, TVEs were mostly privately owned and tended to specialize in certain products. In southern Jiangsu province (the Sunan region), TVEs were typically collectively owned and managed by town and village governments. In spite of the variations, what was common in TVE-led industrialization was active local leadership taking advantage of both regulatory changes such as fiscal decentralization and investment capital from domestic and overseas sources.
The making of a button town The tens of thousands of villages and towns in China experimented with various strategies to urbanize and industrialize, such as setting up small special economic zones and industrial parks, promoting real-estate development to attract rural peasants to live in nearby towns, and specializing in single products. Ma and Cui (2002) conducted a series of case studies on the urbanization of rural towns in the mid-1990s. Below is the story of Qiaotou town in Zhejiang province, which transformed itself from an impoverished agricultural village into the largest manufacturing and wholesale center for buttons in Asia. Qiaotou was an isolated town with a population of 64,000 in 1994, located in the hills of
southern Zhejiang, about 40 km from Wenzhou. Its growth had nothing to do with its location or local resources. Before the reform, the town was known for its traveling cotton fluffers (tan mianhua de). Cotton quilts and coats were commonly used by people throughout China to keep warm in winter, and lumps would form in the cotton with use. Cotton fluffers traveled the country and made a modest living by offering to loosen the lumps in cotton quilts and coats. Qiaotou’s cotton fluffers saw business potential in manufacturing and marketing buttons in their travels. Since manufacturing buttons required little skill, technology, or capital, small family workshops engaged in this business soon emerged in Qiaotou, and, in the meantime, traveling merchants from Qiaotou bought buttons made elsewhere and brought them back to their town for wholesale. The town’s button business grew rapidly. According to Ma and Cui (2002), by the mid-1990s, it had become the largest wholesale center for buttons in Asia, accounting for 80 percent of the country’s total button trade. The town government built 2,000 button stalls where more than 1,800 types of buttons were traded, 80 percent of which were produced locally. The town government collected rent income by leasing the stalls to sellers and also taxes from small enterprises making and trading buttons. The clustering of button makers, sellers, and sales agents led to the growth of a range of tertiary services in the town, such as restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, and transportation services. As Ma and Cui (2002) note,
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Qiaotou is a classic example of place-based specialization and agglomeration of small-scale production. In the same area around Wenzhou, there are many other towns specializing in a single product, such as Liushi (electronic goods and small household hardware), Yishan (synthetic fabrics), Jinxiang (trademark tags and pin buttons), Xiaojiang (woven plastic bags), and Xianjiang (plastic sandals). But single-product specialization is only one of the many paths taken in the urbanization and industrialization of the Chinese countryside.
City-centered urbanization: 1990s–present The focus of development shifted from rural to urban areas in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the designation of dozens of cities on the east coast as special economic areas and development zones. First, the central government selected four cities in Guangdong and Fujian provinces – Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen – as Special Economic Zones (SEZs), where favorable policies on land leasing, taxation, and labor regulations were introduced to attract investment from overseas Chinese diasporas in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. As the SEZ experiment in the south became an immediate success, in 1984 the central government designated another 14 coastal cities as “Open Cities,” for example, Dalian, Qinhuangdao, and Tianjin, to attract foreign investment (figure 1.3). In 1988, the entire Hainan province was turned into an SEZ and, in 1991, the central leadership decided to jump-start Shanghai by establishing Pudong New District and developing it into the primary financial center in the country. By the end of the 1990s, SEZs and “development zones” (kaifaqu) of various kinds had mushroomed across the country, signaling the shift of policy priorities to urban areas.
Figure 1.3 Map of Special Economic Zones and other cities with special status
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The shift from rural to city-centered urbanization is the result of a number of factors, such as China’s increased integration into the world economy in the 1990s, fiscal and administrative decentralization, and foreign investment pouring into urban areas. The city-centered urbanization is characterized by decisions to invest in major urban projects by bureaucratic elites from the central and municipal governments. For example, in the late 1980s, the central government was concerned with the slow pace of Shanghai’s growth, and the central leadership – composed mostly of former leaders of Shanghai, such as Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji – worried that Shanghai would be left behind other cities such as Guangzhou and Shenzhen. In 1991, the central government decided to build Shanghai into China’s primary global city and financial center, pouring a large amount of capital into the building of Pudong New District. By pulling resources from other regions and investing massively in infrastructure, the central policy quickly breathed new life into the city and, in the next two decades, Shanghai continued to be a beneficiary of policies and a target of investment. From a dilapidated socialist city with crumbling infrastructure to an international metropolis with sleek skyscrapers and a state-of-the-art public transit system, the transformation of Shanghai after the 1990s is clearly a result of urban-centered development policies.
CONCLUSIONS This chapter has introduced the major debates on China’s economic rise, recent demographic trends of urbanization, and the historical evolution of China’s urban system. The main points of the chapter can be summarized as follows. First, China’s economic rise has to be explained by both exogenous forces, such as the worldwide process of neoliberalization since the 1970s, and the endogenous factor of local institutional arrangements, such as the TVE initiatives. Second, even accounting for the often inconsistent criteria for defining the “urban population” in Chinese censuses, the urbanization rate has increased rapidly in the post-reform period, with an increasing number of new cities and the expansion of the population of existing cities. Third, the Chinese urban system has evolved over the imperial, republican, socialist, and post- reform periods. Cities in imperial China lacked political autonomy, and trade and commerce did not play a major role in shaping urban social life until the late imperial era. Socialist urban policies were characterized by industrialization without urbanization, dispersion of development across the country, and disinvestment and channeling of resources from large coastal cities to the rest of the country. The rural sector was heavily exploited to support industrialization in the socialist years. In the reform era, urbanization shifted from a rural- centered, in situ transformation of the countryside in the 1980s to city-centered urbanization in the 1990s. China’s economic rise was jump-started by the TVE initiatives of the 1980s, but relied more on capital accumulation through large-scale urban development after the 1990s.
Notes
1 China Statistical Yearbook, 2011. Ren, Xuefei. Urban China, Polity Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/newschool/detail.action?docID=1180926. Created from newschool on 2018-10-24 09:03:48.
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2 Hukou is the household registration system instituted in the 1950s that divides the national population into urban and rural sectors. See further discussions on hukou in chapter 2 with regard to governance, and chapter 4 in the context of migration. 3 China’s One-Child policy was implemented in 1978 and it applies to urban couples. The rural population, ethnic minorities, and parents without siblings are allowed to have a second child. On the origins and evolution of the One-Child policy, see Greenhalgh (2008). 4 National Bureau of Statistics, at http://www.stats.gov.cn (accessed on June 1, 2011). 5 Central Intelligence Agency, The World Factbook: Urbanization, at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2212.html (accessed on June 24, 2012). 6 Skinner’s concept of “macro-regions” has been criticized for its lack of consideration of cross-regional connections as well as its rigid view of spaces as containers of social activities and relations. See Cartier (2002). 7 China’s Five-Year Plans are policy documents issued once every five years, stating major economic development agendas for the whole country.
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