The spatial patterns of China's rapid economic transformation fundamentally challenge conventional geographies of urban and regional development. This book provides a theoretically informed case study of the local character of regional change in China's lower Yangzi Delta, as well as a new analytical framework for understanding China's unique form of economic modernization.
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.
"The development of 'market socialism' in China has contributed to a spatial economic transformation characterized by an apparent capacity to rapidly industrialize without transferring large numbers of people into big cities. The author offers an explanation of the emergence of these relatively productive non-urban regions, an area where conventional theories of development, industrialization and urbanization have proved inadequate. China's distinctive experience is also held up as a unique source of reflection on the critical dimensions of regional change in an increasingly volatile global economic environment." "China's Spatial Economic Development contributes both a new theoretical framework and a wealth of original research material to the study of rural transformation and urban transition in China. It will, therefore, be of vital interest to Asian studies scholars, geographers and economists working on the transitional economies."--BOOK JACKET.
As China becomes more and more market-oriented, the spatial development dilemmas it encounters are more and more like those one finds in capitalist nations. This book, an updated edition of China's Spatial Economy (OUP 1990), both illustrates and examines the growing differences between and within the increasingly diverse regions of China. The contributors to this volume look to the future of China's major economic regions in light of the numerous problems this country now faces. Also, they show how these problems are affecting various parts of China in different ways.
This book pursues both narrative and analytic approaches to better understand China’s spatial economic development and its implications for Tibet. Accordingly, this book focuses on Tibet – an autonomous region in the far west of China – as the subject of an in-depth case study, highlighting its unique geopolitical and socioeconomic features and external and boundary conditions. China’s great diversity in terms of physical geography, resource endowment, political economy, and ethnicity and religion has posed challenges to the studies of spatial and interprovincial issues. Indeed, the Chinese nation is far too huge and spatially diverse to be easily interpreted. The only feasible approach to analyzing it is, therefore, to divide it into smaller geographical elements so as to arrive at better insights into the country’s spatial mechanisms and regional characteristics. In this context, the book combines analytic and narrative approaches.
China is a powerful engine of the global economy and the country's rise is undoubtedly the outcome of its protracted campaign of designing and implementing national development strategies since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This book reviews the transformation and innovation of China's economic development strategies, especially Deng Xiaoping's Three-Step strategy and Xi Jinping's internal and external strategies. By introducing the concept of strategic paradigm, it analyzes the theoretical basis of myriads of economic development strategies and predicts China's choice. With the evolutionary process and the outstanding problems in national development planning as the main thread, it discusses the improvement of the national planning system, specifically of the national overall planning system, the regional planning system, the interplay and conflict between regional planning. It also studies the reform of city-county planning system, major function-oriented zones (MFOZs) and planning legislation and institutionalization. It also attempts to put forward proposals to coordinate the interests of planning departments and make different types of planning at different administrative levels compatible.
During the period of economic policy reform from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, China experimented with new forms of socialism, embraced new technologies, introduced reforms to rural and industrial productive enterprises, and the country opened up to the Western world. By looking at issues associated with regional development, transport, population distribution, and the large cities, this volume demonstrates how the space economy responded to economic reforms, as well as acting as a "shock absorber" for some of the more profound swings in policy. This study should be of interest to scholars in geography, urban studies, and China studies.
This book is organized around different spatial scales. It investigates how the Chinese socialist state under reform affects, influences, and controls the activity spaces of different members of society, thereby transforming the economy and society at the regional province (and its larger spatial unit), the city, the village, the factory, and the individual levels. This way of addressing China's spatial development is new to the literature. The book accomplishes this task by drawing on a variety of experts from different disciplines, including geography, sociology, economics, anthropology, political science, and urban and regional studies. Different in approaches, these experts enrich the volume by providing many in-depth analyses of thc development problems of China.
In the past three decades, China has experienced an unprecedented pace of economic and urban development. It’s economy is now transforming from one based on manufacturing industries towards the producer services, with the importance of these services in the national and regional economy being recognized by economists and policy makers alike. With growing demand and policy support, producer services are expected to expand rapidly, leading to a new wave of economic and urban development in China. This groundbreaking volume is one of the first to address questions related to the development of these services in China. The contributions explore a wide range of associated topics including the characteristics of the growth of producer services and how this is related to China’s economic and urban transition, the distribution of these services amongst Chinese cities, as well as drawing comparison between producer service development in China and Western counterparts. This volume also discusses the dynamics of the development of these services in China and how the political-economic embeddedness of China has shaped the development of producer services. Finally, the consequences of this growth and how the economy and urban space have change in response is explored, as well as the challenges Chinese cities face in moving towards a service economy, and how this can inform future public policies. This volume addresses the pressing need to understand the economic and urban changes in post-industrial China to allow appropriate strategies and policies to formulated to facilitate future development in China. The text is rich with statistical data and diagrams, providing original contributions and a cutting edge overview. This timely publication will be of interest to upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers interested in China, Urban Studies and Economic Development.
China is a large developing economy and it has been deeply involved in globalization since its economic reform and opening-up. Simultaneously, China has seen a significant change in the spatial distribution of economic resources, especially capital and labor. In the recent 10 years, economists have made significant progress in both theoretical and empirical studies on related topics. The book provides an overview on the existing literature and current policy debates on what we have known and what we have misunderstood. This book includes an analytical framework of the New Economic Geography (NEG) with political economy to help us understand China’s regional development issues. The book of 10 chapters is organized into four thematic sections. The first section is a theoretical discussion on the relationship between economic agglomeration and interregional balanced development. The second section is a political economy analysis on regional and urban-rural development. The third section provides a summary on empirical literatures concerning from market segmentation and institutional barriers to production factor mobility. The final section consists of four empirical chapters on the relationship between agglomeration and balance, which is the core of relevant policy debates. The book argues that for China to achieve both efficiency and balance for regional development, China may need to reform its systems which constrain production factors mobility. This book is a valuable reference for readers who are interested in spatial economics and the Chinese economy, especially its regional and urban development.
