Stanford, CA: Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, 2017. xvi, 264 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$24.95, eBook. ISBN 978-1-931368-41-4.
China’s urbanization is a deeply transformative process involving an unparalleled rate of new construction and historically unprecedented volume of rural-urban migration, posing significant challenges to planning and governance. As the country has a unique set of power, political, and institutional configurations, adapting existing knowledge is often difficult, and new problems continually emerge that require fresh perspectives.
Eggleston, Oi and Wang’s edited volume is a timely contribution to research on the most urgent problems confronting China’s urbanization process. It is divided in roughly equal parts between issues with land and with people—between spatial development, property rights, and land financing on one hand, and services for migrants, food security, and housing security on the other. I call it timely because the book is a response to China’s most recent national policies on urbanization and development, and the “challenges” referenced in the title have also been acknowledged by China’s top-level policymakers. As the central government seeks transition into a more sustainable form of urbanization, it becomes apparent that reforming historically rooted, politically motivated, and contextually embedded institutions is more than difficult. The book demonstrates these difficulties through a selection of empirical analyses, case studies, and critical assessments that share a focus on the political economy of financing social, economic, and spatial development. The editors emphasize, from both policy and research standpoints, the importance of understanding China’s politics and power dynamics and variations in local conditions in policy implementation. The central concern of this book is showing how policy actions taken in the past and present might affect and shape the developments to come. By discussing current problems, the volume offers readers ideas about directions for future research.
Of the contributions (not including the two introductory overview chapters), two chapters are based primarily on quantitative analysis: chapter 3 by Desmet and Rossi-Hansberg compares spatial growth patterns of India, China, and the US, and finds that while China’s service industry in medium-density clusters thrives thanks to good infrastructure, growth in mega-cities is bottlenecked by migratory restrictions. Chapter 8 by Huang et al. analyzes the impact of urbanization on food security in China and finds that urbanization moderately reduces supply and increases demand of grain and other commodities. Chapter 6 by Ai and Zhou provides an in-depth ethnographic analysis of the conflicting stakeholder logics and behaviors in Chengdu’s experimental property rights “clarification” process from the municipal government down to the village representatives and households.
The rest of the chapters offer evaluations and critical assessments of current policy designs or institutional configurations based on historical data, factual information, and/or literature review. Chapter 4 by Liu discusses in detail the (un)sustainability of China’s notorious locally-driven, land-based finance and development. Shi argues in chapter 5 that rezoning and administrative adjustment of localities can lead to misallocation of central funds when there is a discrepancy between a place’s official designation and its actual development. Chapters 10 by Yang and 11 by Khor and Oi trace the evolution of China’s housing reform—the former tracking the development of various types of commercial and public housing and the impact on housing security, and the latter examining the institutional challenges of affordable housing provision. Finally, chapter 7 by Gu and chapter 9 by Xu address problems with social service delivery for rural migrants: the former assesses the current status of providing compulsory education for children of migrant workers; the latter discusses fund allocation and transfer issues associated with migrants’ pensions, education, and healthcare, highlighting the difficulties faced by migrant-receiving cities.
Given such a content distribution, this book is most valuable for researchers who seek to understand China’s governance institutions, policy rationales, and inter-governmental relations and politics. Most chapters, in one way or another and to varying degree, either criticize the insensitivity of central policy mandates to local conditions, or highlight incongruences between ideation and implementation, or discuss conflicting rationalities/priorities/imperatives between different levels of government. The volume’s strength lies in its understanding of the central problems of China’s urbanization, as evident in its chapter selections and thematic organization. It offers a wide scope without sacrificing the details. The editors acknowledge that covering such a broad topic in one book also means that many other important aspects or impacts of urbanization need to be selectively left out. Because of its emphasis on China’s unique policies and practices, it is overall less theoretically inclined. As such, this book is best paired with others that explore in greater empirical detail and theoretical depth any one of its themes, lenses, or cases that have particular interest for the reader. The “critical assessment” chapters, such as chapter 4 on land financing and chapter 7 on migrant children education, provide detailed, comprehensive overviews of problems of such complexity that they can be greatly complemented by future case study research on variations in local scenarios and practices. Finally, the book might also benefit scholars of comparative urbanization to gain insider perspectives on China’s situation.
Christine Wen
Cornell University, Ithaca, USA