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Urban China

Author: World Bank

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2014-07-29

Total Pages: 583

ISBN-13: 1464802068

In the last 30 years, China’s record economic growth lifted half a billion people out of poverty, with rapid urbanization providing abundant labor, cheap land, and good infrastructure. While China has avoided some of the common ills of urbanization, strains are showing as inefficient land development leads to urban sprawl and ghost towns, pollution threatens people’s health, and farmland and water resources are becoming scarce. With China’s urban population projected to rise to about one billion – or close to 70 percent of the country’s population – by 2030, China’s leaders are seeking a more coordinated urbanization process. Urban China is a joint research report by a team from the World Bank and the Development Research Center of China’s State Council which was established to address the challenges and opportunities of urbanization in China and to help China forge a new model of urbanization. The report takes as its point of departure the conviction that China's urbanization can become more efficient, inclusive, and sustainable. However, it stresses that achieving this vision will require strong support from both government and the markets for policy reforms in a number of area. The report proposes six main areas for reform: first, amending land management institutions to foster more efficient land use, denser cities, modernized agriculture, and more equitable wealth distribution; second, adjusting the hukou household registration system to increase labor mobility and provide urban migrant workers equal access to a common standard of public services; third, placing urban finances on a more sustainable footing while fostering financial discipline among local governments; fourth, improving urban planning to enhance connectivity and encourage scale and agglomeration economies; fifth, reducing environmental pressures through more efficient resource management; and sixth, improving governance at the local level.

Urbanizing China in War and Peace

Author: Toby Lincoln

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2015-05-31

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 0824854195

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Urbanizing China in War and Peace rewrites the history of rural-urban relations in the first half of the twentieth century by arguing that urbanization is a total societal transformation and as important a factor as revolution, nationalism, or modernity in the history of modern China. Linking the global and the local in space and time, China's urbanization was not only driven by industrial capitalism and the expansion of the state, but also shaped how these forces influenced daily life in the city and the countryside. Although the conflict that beset China after the Japanese invasion in 1937 affected the development of cities, towns, and villages, it did not derail previous changes. To truly understand how China has emerged as the world's largest urban society, we must consider such continuities across the first half of the twentieth century—during periods of war as well as peace. The book focuses on Wuxi, a city that lies a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai. In the early twentieth century local industrialists were responsible for it quickly becoming the largest industrial city in China outside treaty ports. They built factories, roads, and other infrastructure outside the old city walls and in surrounding towns and villages. Chapters examine the county's transformation as recorded in guidebooks and travel magazines of the time and the role of the state in the early 1920s and into the Nanjing Decade, when new administrative laws led to the continued expansion of the city under both municipal and county officials. They explore the revival of the silk industry during the Japanese occupation and the industry's role in driving urbanization, as well as efforts by Chinese leaders to carry out prewar development plans despite lockdowns and qingxiang (clean the countryside) campaigns. In the midst of the barbed wire and watch towers, plans to shape the built environment in Wuxi County and the region as a whole persisted and were carried out. Ambitious and well researched, Urbanizing China in War and Peace will appeal to scholars and students of Chinese urban history, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and the Republican period. Its engagement with issues of urbanization in general will interest urban historians of other times and places.

Urbanization in China

Author: Yan Song

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13:

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Unprecedented urbanization is taking place in China and will continue over the next decades. China's level of urbanization rose from 18 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1995 and to 39 percent in 2002. It is expected that China will quadruple its total GDP and reach 55 percent of urbanization by 2020. Urbanization in China is a comprehensive process involving transformations in many areas, including the management of spatial expansion via modern urban planning, the administration of land use changes via land policy reforms, the process of rural-to-urban migration, and the development of public finance systems. All of these changes are part of China's transition from a centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy.

China Urbanizing

Author: Weiping Wu

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2022-09-20

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1512823023

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China turned majority urban only in the recent decade, a dramatic leap given that less than 20 percent of its population lived in cities before 1980. This book situates China’s urbanization in the interconnected forces of historical legacies, contemporary state interventions, and human and ecological conditions. It captures the complexity of the phenomenon of urbanization in its historical and regional variations, and explores its impact on the country’s socioeconomic welfare, environment and resources, urban form and lifestyle, and population and health. It is also a book about China, in which the contributors provide new perspectives to understand the transitions underway and the gravity of the progress, particularly in the context of demographic shifts and climate change. The chapters in China Urbanizing, written by American and Chinese scholars, achieve three interconnected aims. The first is to explore how the process of urbanization has shaped and been influenced by the social, economic, and physical interactions that take place in and beyond cities, and the state interventions intended to regulate such interactions. The second is to examine the shifts and evolutions emerging in urban China, such as the economic slowdown, population aging and low fertility rates, and how cities interact with the environment and planet given China’s rising role in the global discourse on climate change. The third is to explore new sources of information for conducting research on urban China, such as satellite and street-level imagery data and online listings, to account for the complexity and heterogeneity that characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization. Contributors: Juan Chen, Dean Curran, Deborah Davis, Peilei Fan, Qin Gao, Pierre F. Landry, Shi Li, Shiqi Ma, Justin Remais, Alan Smart, Shin Bin Tan, Jeremy Wallace, Sarah Williams, Binbin Wu, Weiping Wu, Guibin Xiong, Wenfei Xu.

Understanding China's Urbanization

Author: Li Zhang

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2016-03-25

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 1783474742

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China’s urbanization is one of the great earth-changing phenomena of recent times. The way in which China continues to urbanize will have a critical impact on the world economy, global climate change, international relations and a host of other critical issues. Understanding and responding to China’s urbanization is of paramount importance to everyone. This book represents a unique exploration of the demographic, spatial, economic and social aspects of China’s urban transformation. Based on years of fieldwork and data analysis from different types of cities and towns in every region of China, the authors present a detailed description of how China has urbanized since 1978 and an original theory about the way in which top-down and bottom-up policies have impacted urbanization. They describe China’s on-going urbanization process as a ‘double-dual’ transformation from a planned economy to a more market-oriented one and from a concern with the quantity to the quality of urbanization. In doing so, the authors provide the most comprehensive and up-to-date book on Chinese urbanization to date. This scholarly study will appeal to academics and practitioners, including professors and postgraduate students of urban studies, planning, geography, Asian studies, and other social science disciplines and professional fields concerned with cities and urban development. Professionals involved in international development, particularly in China and elsewhere in Asia, will be particularly interested in the book.

Urbanization and Urban Governance in China

Author: Lin Ye

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-29

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1137578246

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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.

The Great Urbanization of China

Author: Ding Lu

Publisher: World Scientific

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 9814287806

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As China rises to become the world's largest economy, it is expected to alleviate half-a-billion people from being rural villagers to urban residents in the coming decades. The great urbanization of the world's most populated country is sure to be one of the most remarkable social-economic events in the 21st century. This book aims to give the reader a clear and comprehensive review of this unfolding event. It not only presents a historical review of the evolution of public policies and institutional reforms regarding urban development, but also an up-to-date survey and in-depth analysis of various social-economic forces that define and contribute to the process of urbanization. The target audiences include students of modern China and professionals interested in China's urban development. The general public as well as scholars may also find the book informative and fascinating.