The China Review, Vol. 10, No.

1 (Spring 2010), 110

Urbanization in China: Processes and Policies*

Chaolin Gu and Fulong Wu (Guest editors)

Given recent extensive studies broadly titled urban China research, what additional insight can be offered by this collection of papers? This introduction aims to distil concrete examples examined by the articles in this special issue of The China Review, summarize their major findings and highlight some suggestions for future research. The papers in this issue were originally presented at a conference organized at Nanjing University by Chaolin Gu, from 18th to 20th December 2005, and have since been substantially updated and revised. The authors include established scholars based in the West as well as promising Chinese researchers who conducted extensive policy studies inside China. Therefore, they represent a mix of multiple perspectives rather than a singular explanation of the complexity of Chinese urbanization. Urbanization is a complex and multifaceted process involving population migration from rural to urban areas, rural and urban land conversions, spatial reconfiguration of settlements, and changing governance

Chaolin Gu is Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Tsinghua University. His research interests include Chinese urbanization, urban systems, poverty and inequality, migration and city planning in China. Fulong Wu is Professor of East Asian Planning and Development and the Director of the Urban China Research Centre at the School of City and Regional Planning in Cardiff University. His research focuses on the transformation of Chinese cities and contemporary urban development and planning.
*

This collection of papers is supported by the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation Project of China (No. 40435013) on Chinese Urbanization Types, Processes and Dynamics.

Chaolin Gu and Fulong Wu

and management. The articles in this special issue address a wide range of changes associated with this process. Li Xun, Xu Xianxiang and Li Zhigang examine the changing land property rights in the process of land conversion. They highlight the land dynamics underlying rapid urbanization, especially through the conversion from rural to urban land. One innovative feature of their research is that rather than treating land conversion as a consequence of urbanization, they uncover land incentive as a driving force for rapid urban expansion and development. Such land politics form a different kind of territorial politics from that of the previous centrally-planned regime. Luo Xiaolong conducted an in-depth investigation of an industrial park in Jiangsu province. The case is unique and fascinating, as the industrial park is a joint project between different local governments. Through this case, Luo exposes a contradictory and perplexing feature of fierce inter-city competition similar to urban entrepreneurialism in the West, together with significant involvement of the state apparatus at various levels. He also finds that the role of local media under the control of the local state provides an orchestrated discourse for the project. Regarding the demographic aspect of urbanization, Kam Wing Chan, a pioneer of Chinese urbanization research, stresses the incompleteness of Chinese urbanization. His viewpoint stems from an understanding of Chinese society, in particular its continuation of the omnipotent state and the exclusion of rural population and migrants from the city. The legacy of socialist urbanization policy is profound. Such a continuation is also seen at the regional level. In the final paper, Zhen Feng, Shen Qing, Jian Boxiu and Zheng Jun discuss the fragmentation of cities in the municipal regions and the attempt to coordinate growth through administrative boundary adjustment and spatial integration plans. They highlight the legacy of statedominated growth, now manifested in terms of a complex jurisdictional structure. The issue of governance is further complicated by the widespread establishment of development zones with different jurisdictional affiliation and status. In the following discussion, we will introduce the key findings of these individual papers and then compare them under the broad framework of land, population and governance changes. The nature of Chinas land politics is still a controversial research topic. The reform of land property rights has been partial, incomplete, or

Introduction: Urbanization in China

ambiguous in the case of rural land ownership.1 Rural land is collectively owned and its conversion to urban land can only be achieved through land acquisition by the municipal government. Land regulation is pervasive; on the other hand, unregulated land changes are widespread. In the first paper of this special issue, Li et al. focus on land property rights and suggest that under the current dual system of rural and urban land there exists a land rent residual or gap, between fully de facto urbanized land and the current state of rural land ownership. This gap cannot be capitalized on by existing rural land users because they collectively own the land and sale to urban users is not permitted. The authors suggest that the need to capture this residual is the major reason for local governments to make up the fiscal revenue. Through this concept of land rent residual, they explain the widespread practices of establishing new development zones and districts as well as urban villages (chengzhongcun). In the former case, local governments strive to designate new areas to open up sources of land revenue. This causes the adjustment of administrative boundaries, which is also examined in the final paper by Zhen et al. In the latter case, chengzhongcun are developed by rural land users (farmers) who try to maximize their land rent residuals. By de facto conversion to urban uses, namely renting to the migrant population and other low-income families, farmers have managed to capture this land rent residual. However, farmers are not allowed to develop commodity housing, i.e. housing sold in the formal urban market. Because of this constrained property right, property prices in chengzhongcun are lower than in nearby urbanized areas. To the government, urban villages present an under-regulated living space, and thus a struggle to capture this land has begun. The capacity of retaining land plots is thus critical for the farmers if they are to have the prospect of different sources of income.2 Through diagnosing the problem of excessive land development, Li et al. provide a policy prescription to set up a property tax, which could open up a steady source of revenue, instead of aggressively developing new land. However, because of limitations on space, this suggestion has not been fully elaborated. In the paper that follows, Luo opens up discussion on land revenue incentive and territorial growth politics. His research is obviously inspired by Western studies of urban entrepreneurialism and research into growth coalition, which is here applied to Chinese cities.3 While the evidence for growth coalition has been so far anecdotal, Luo conducted

Chaolin Gu and Fulong Wu

an in-depth study of an industrial park jointly developed by two local governments. His research is, however, more than a confirmation of the existence of such a coalition. He highlights that such a growth coalition is mediated through the provincial government and other actors. Some private sector companies are participating, but the coalition was fostered by key politicians such as a local mayor. To attract investors, local governments also made tax concessions and facilitated land clearance. In the development of a growth coalition, small businesses as well as local residents are marginalized. At the centre of this coalition is land development. The development of a joint project opened up the possibility of real estate development. For example, a real estate company from Suzhou purchased some land plots in the city of Jingjiang at a historically high price, and, as a result, the joint project brought in significant land revenue to the local government. Such a land politics thus laid down an entrepreneurial governance based on the operation of land sales.4 Land-centred growth politics has transformed the role of the local governments, which in the process of land acquisition and expropriation is a decisive one, and has negative impacts on vulnerable farmers. Luo also reveals that local media, under the control of the government, play a role in providing an orchestrated discourse of a successful joint project. The media reports are skewed towards the aspect of economic development and downplay the negative implications for local residents. Through his own questionnaire survey, Luo found that local farmers are severely affected by the development, although because construction is as yet at an early stage, housing demolition is less of a problem. Farmers are marginalized in the new dynamics of growth politics. The case of this joint industrial park also reflects another interesting aspect of intercity cooperation, which is examined in a different situation in the last paper in this collection. As for the demographic aspect of urbanization, Kam Wing Chan has examined recent trends and patterns of urbanization based on 1990 and 2000 census data. His vantage point is on urbanization and social changes, and he asks what the fundamentals of Chinese urbanization are. He stresses that urbanization in China reflects the overall characteristics of Chinese society and also the legacy of social and political institutions. According to his research, there are two basic determinants in the process of urbanization: the administrative hierarchy and the restriction of population mobility. By the former, he means that, despite significant

Introduction: Urbanization in China

devolution of power to lower governments in the reform period, the hierarchical nature of the top-down policy control persists. One aspect is personnel control, or the appointment of local officials by the upper levels of government. Because of this top-down control on the one hand, and the switch to economic performance evaluation on the other, local officials strive to fulfil economic targets assigned by the upper level of government so as to drive their localities up the hierarchy of the administrative system. By doing so, they also accumulate the political capital to enable them to be promoted. By population immobility, Chan means a persistent dualistic segmentation of the rural and urban economies. As a result, the rural population has been largely fixed in place by the population registration system and is still excluded from urban welfare provision. Because of these two fundamentals, he argues that Chinese urbanization is incomplete urbanization. He investigates this incompleteness through empirical population studies. Following his series of studies on the definition and scope of urban population,5 he has found that the higher the rank in the administrative hierarchy, the faster the population growth rate of cities, although the smallest cities in some coastal regions (e.g. in Dongguan, in the Pearl River Delta) also experienced rapid growth. In the period from the 1950s to the 1980s, China had a relatively under-urbanized population compared with its industrial development, a phenomenon known as an under-urbanization. Chan points out that such a feature persists, despite massive rural-to-urban migration, and argues that while the economy has been almost transformed to non-agricultural activities, the de facto urban population, i.e. the actual residents, including rural migrants to the city, is still less than half of the total population. Manifested at the individual city level, because of the restriction of migration (especially the exclusion of social provision to migrants), Chinese cities, according to Chan, are undersized at all size levels. Chans study opens up an interesting research area in terms of the efficiency of Chinas urbanization and the size distribution of its urban system. The argument that Chinese cities are too small in population size is quite provocative, and deserves further serious study. The last paper in this collection, by Zhen et al., examines an emerging topic in Chinese urbanization. The paper goes beyond the scope of individual cities and looks at governance in the region. In this case, it examines the changing administrative structures and boundaries in the city-region of Changzhou, a major municipality along the growth

Chaolin Gu and Fulong Wu

corridor from Shanghai, via Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou, to Nanjing. While the complexity of Chinese inter-city competition and dynamics is becoming known in the literature,6 this paper focuses on a specific municipality and gives a very detailed account of changing municipal structure. Under the so-called new Southern Jiangsu model characterised by an export-oriented economy and private sector-driven growth, the metropolitan region of Changzhou has experienced phenomenal industrial growth, which has led to competition between Wujin and Changzhou. Wujin was a county under the Changzhou municipality, under the system known as city leading county. (For the administrative structure changes in China, see Ma.)7 The county of Wujin was then converted to city status, still under the Changzhou municipality. This created significant competition between Wujin and the city of Changzhou, which emphasized the development of high-tech development zones in the north of the city, while Wujin is adjacent to the southern boundary of the central area. In 2002, Wujin was converted once more, this time into a district of Changzhou, with a status similar to other urban districts of Changzhou, leading to the possibility of the integration of the two cities. However, because of the legacy of history, the provision of public services and public transport in the two cities are far from an integrated system. Each city has promulgated restrictive policies to prohibit the entry of service companies from the other city. In addition, the spatial pattern of the city-region is much fragmented, because of the existence of various development zones that have different administrative statuses and affiliations. For example, there are two high-tech development zones in the region, one in Changzhou and the other in Wujin. Zhen et al. discuss the problems of local fragmentation and the challenges to achieving regional governance. One important insight generated from their study is the attempt to use administrative boundary adjustment8 to solve the problem of inter-jurisdiction competition and the unsatisfactory result of this attempt. The spatial plan approach has also been usedfor example, Changzhou promulgated the Changzhou Municipality Strategic Plan. But again, such a spatial planning approach often reflects the interests of only one side and thus is difficult to implement. To conclude, we summarize and compare the findings of individual papers, which generally agree on several aspects of Chinas urbanization processes and policies:

Introduction: Urbanization in China

That urbanization is a much wider and more complicated process than population migration. It involves the conversion from rural land ownership to urban uses. This hinges upon the deeper institutional roots of rural-urban division, and leads to growthoriented politics and fragmented urban and regional spatial structures. That there remains some persistent institutional legacies. The state plays a significant role in land development, growth coalition and population migration. Land politics is now becoming an integrated part of the growth process, which defines the behaviour of local governments. The system of hierarchical control, especially in terms of personnel management and official appointments, still affects both urban and regional governance. That a complex spatial structure, often characterised by fragmented and complex coalition partnerships between the state and capital, has been created. Despite various attempts to reconcile competition between different jurisdictions, the underlying land rent or land appropriation, in addition to the fiscal structure, defines the growth politics and governance form. Neither administrative boundary adjustment nor spatial planning is very effective in solving spatial fragmentation. That Chinese urbanization demonstrates complex and contradictory yet complementary aspects of state control and dominance and increasing market formation, development and influence,9 especially in terms of capturing land rent and benefits. In the process, rural farmers become marginal groups, because with the current system of collective ownership they are not able to exert influence over growth politics, which are now increasingly manipulated by growth coalitions. However, a precise interpretation of such contradictions is far from agreed on and depends upon which side of the coin the researcher looks at. This collection of papers begins with the concept of property rights, revealing complex categories of ownership in both rural and urban sectors, then continues to expose the growth politics that are determined by the land rent appropriation, further highlights the aspect of population change referred to as incomplete urbanization, and finally stresses the fragmentation of governance and challenges to spatial integration.

Chaolin Gu and Fulong Wu

Despite some disagreement, echoing the intellectual challenges in urban China research in general,10 the papers reflect both path-breaking and path-dependent features of Chinas urbanization processes.

Notes
1. Zhu Jieming, Urban development under ambiguous property rights: A case of Chinas transitional economy, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2002): 41 47; Jiang Xu, Anthony G. O. Yeh and Fulong Wu, Land commodification: new land development and politics in China since the late 1990s, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2009): 890913. See Shenjing He, Yuting Liu, Chris Webster and Fulong Wu, Property rights redistribution, entitlement failure and the impoverishment of landless farmers in China, Urban Studies, Vol. 46, No. 9 (2009): 19251949. See Zhu Jieming, Local growth coalition: the context and implications of Chinas gradualist urban land reforms, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1999): 534548; Zhang Tingwei, Urban development and a socialist pro-growth coalition in Shanghai, Urban Affairs Review, Vol. 37, No. 4 (2002): 475499; Fulong Wu, Globalization, place promotion, and urban development in Shanghai, Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 1 (2003): 5578. Hsing Youtien, Land and territorial politics in urban China, The China Quarterly, No. 187 (2006): 575591. See also Xu, Yeh and Wu (Note 1) and George C. S. Lin, Reproducing spaces of Chinese urbanization: New city-based and land-centered urban transformation, Urban Studies, Vol. 44, No. 9 (2007): 18271855. See Kam Wing Chan and Ying Hu, Urbanization in China in the 1990s: New definition, different series, and revised trends, The China Review, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2003): 4971; Kam Wing Chan and Will Buckingham Is China abolishing the hukou system? The China Quarterly, No. 195 (2008): 582606. See Fulong Wu and Fangzhu Zhang, Chinas emerging city-region governance: Towards a research framework, Progress in Planning, Vol. 73, No. 1 (2010): 6063; Zhang Jingxiang and Fulong Wu, Chinas changing economic governance: Administrative annexation and the reorganization of local governments in the Yangtze River Delta, Regional Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2006): 321. See Laurence J. C. Ma, Urban administrative restructuring, changing scale relations and local economic development in China, Political Geography, Vol. 24, No. 4 (2005): 477 497.

2.

3.

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7.

Introduction: Urbanization in China 8. 9.

See also Zhang and Wu (Note 6). Fulong Wu, Chinas great transformation: Neoliberalization as establishing a market society, Geoforum, Vol. 39, No. 3 (2008): 10931096. 10. See the symposium (special issue) edited by Fulong Wu, Land development, inequality and urban villages in China, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2009): 885889.