Pudong is a district located at east of the Huangpu River and is opposite to Puxi, west of the Huangpu River and the historic city center of Shanghai. Since the establishment of Pudong New Area in early 1990s, the backward Pudong has become a thriving financial hub of modern China and home to the Lujiazui Finance and the Pilot Free-Trade Zone, and the Shanghai Stock Exchange. This book sets Pudong in a broad historical background and records the historical changes and various details and legends in the Pudong's development process. It reflects the tortuous process of China's reform and is the first book detailing the complete history of Pudong. It offers suggestions that can be popularized and emulated to achieve significant development across China.
Examining the rise of Pudong and its role in re-creating Shanghai as a global city, Global Shanghai Remade utilises this important case study to shed light on contemporary globalisation and China’s integration with the world since the late 20th century. Unpacking the rise of Pudong in the context of Deng Xiaoping’s nation-building agenda, this book explores the development of the district from its earliest planning into a global city centre through multiple perspectives. In doing so, it explores the role of key decision-makers and actors, the strategic planning process, the approaches to urban development, and some of the iconic projects that define the rise of Pudong, Shanghai, and China itself. A timely volume for the 30th anniversary of China’s strategy of ‘developing and opening Pudong,’ it combines the analyses and findings from these perspectives into a framework for a broader understanding of city-making with Chinese characteristics. The first study of its kind, providing a comprehensive and systematic examination of Pudong, this book will be useful for students and scholars of urban planning and design, as well as Chinese Studies and Development Studies more generally.
This book examines the factors which contribute to local green development in China and employs political ecology to analyze the relationship between power and the environment. Specifically, it looks at which actors control access to resources and are therefore able to promote environmental progress. Following the reform and opening-up of China in the 1970s, entrepreneurs and local officials profited economically and politically and formed close relationships, known as guanxi in China. As a result, they have also been criticized as those responsible for the associated ecological damage. This book does not contest this association, but instead argues that the current literature places too much emphasis on their negative influence and the positive influence of their environmental work has been neglected. Building on three case studies where local green development is being pursued, Shanghai Pudong New Area, Baoding, and Wuning, this book shows how local officials and entrepreneurs can also be the crusaders of a greener environment at the local level in China. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, with a particular interest in environmental policy and politics, business and society, as well as those interested in sustainable development more broadly.
A fascinating look at China now and in the years to come, through the eyes of those at the helm As China continues its rapid ascent, attention is turning to its leaders, who they are, and how they view the country's incredible transformation over the last thirty years. In How China's Leaders Think: The Inside Story of China's Past, Current and Future Leaders, Revised, bestselling author Lawrence Kuhn goes directly to the source, talking with members of China's ruling party and examining recently declassified Party material to provide readers with an intimate look at China's leaders and leadership structure, visionary principles, and convulsive past, and tracing the nation's reform efforts. Focusing on President Hu Jintao's philosophies and policies, the book looks to the next generation of China's leaders to ask the questions on everyone's lips. Who are China's future leaders? How do they view China's place in the world? Confronting China's leaders head on, Kuhn asks about the county's many problem, from economic imbalances to unsustainable development, to find out if there's a road map for change. Presenting the thoughts of key Chinese leaders on everything from media, military, banking, and healthcare to film, the Internet, science and technology, and much more, the book paints an intimate, candid portrayal of how China's leaders really think. Presents a fascinating insight into how China's leaders think about their country and where it's headed Asks the tough questions about China's need for reform Pulls together information from over 100 personal interviews as well as recently declassified Party documents Taking readers closer to Party officials than ever before, How China's Leaders Think documents China's thirty-year struggle toward economic and social reform, and what's to come.
In the 1980s, China faced the monumental task of creating, from scratch, internationally competitive companies. This challenge was especially daunting in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. The Inside Story of China's High-Tech Industry describes the emergence and growth of this industry in China through a historically situated analysis of China's leading science park, Beijing's Zhongguancun, also known as China's Silicon Valley. Zhou challenges the prevailing view that foreign multinational corporations and exports are the driving forces for technological progress in less developed countries by arguing that, in the case of China, it is the conjunction of domestic and export markets that has provided the main impetus to technological learning and the development of industry competitiveness. This is the best treatment to date of China's most important innovation region. It will be useful for scholars and students in the fields of economics, regional sciences, geography, planning, sociology, information technology, and business management, as well as for anyone interested in the rise of China and global technological development.
When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) assumed power in October 1949 China was one of the poorest nations in the world and so weak it had been conquered in the late 1930s and early 1940s by its neighbor Japan, a country one-10th its size. More than five decades later, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is an emerging economic, political, and major military power with the world’s fastest growing economy and largest population (1.35 billion in 2015). A member of the United Nations Security Council since the early 1970s and a nuclear power, China wields enormous influence in the world community while at home what was once a nation of largely poverty-stricken peasants and urban areas with little-to-no industry has been transformed into an increasingly urbanized society with a growing middle class and an industrial and service sector that leads the world in such industries as steel and textiles while becoming a major player in computers and telecommunications. All the while the country has remained under the tight political control of a one-party system dominated by the Chinese Communist Party that despite periods of intense political conflict and turmoil governs China with a membership in 2014 of 88 million people—the largest single organization on earth. This third edition of Historical Dictionary ofthe People's Republic of China contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about China.
This book provides a historical review of the transformation of China’s image around the world since the 1978 Reform and Opening Up. Based on a synthetic model that the author constructs for evaluating national images, together with a historical review and quantitative analysis, it discusses the issues and challenges confronting China’s image around the world since the Opening Up. To help rectify the situation that most of the research on China’s reform efforts focuses on hard power (esp. economic power), this book, which mainly focuses on China’s soft power, reviews and assesses its global image from the three perspectives of politics, economy and culture. In the process, it sheds valuable new light on the presentation of China’s image and the world’s perceptions of China.
A History of Design Institutes in China examines the intricate relationship between design institutes, the state, and, in later periods, the market economy through a carefully situated discussion of significant theoretical and historical issues including socialist utopia, collective and individual design, structural transformation, and architectural exportation, amongst others. It shows how, over the past six decades, China’s design institutes have served the state’s strategy for socialist construction and urbanisation to create socioeconomic and cultural value. Through first-hand research, authors Xue and Ding reveal how the tensions between pragmatism, creativity, collaboration, and resistance have played a crucial role in defining architectural production. Appealing to academics, researchers, and graduate students, this book provides a much-needed contribution to the discourse on architectural history, building practices, and policymaking in contemporary China.
A single volume history of China, offering a look into the past of the global superpower and its significance today. Michael Wood has travelled the length and breadth of China, the world’s oldest civilization and longest lasting state, to tell a thrilling story of intense drama, fabulous creativity, and deep humanity that stretches back thousands of years. After a century and a half of foreign invasion, civil war, and revolution, China has once again returned to center stage as a global superpower and the world’s second largest economy. But how did it become so dominant? Wood argues that in order to comprehend the great significance of China today, we must begin with its history. The Story of China takes a fresh look at the Middle Kingdom in the light of the recent massive changes inside the country. Taking into account exciting new archeological discoveries, the book begins with China’s prehistory—the early dynasties, the origins of the Chinese state, and the roots of Chinese culture in the age of Confucius. Wood looks at particular periods and themes that are now being reevaluated by historians, such as the renaissance of the Song with its brilliant scientific discoveries. He paints a vibrant picture of the Qing Empire in the 18th century, just before the European impact, a time when China’s rich and diverse culture was at its height. Then, Wood explores the encounter with the West, the Opium Wars, the clashes with the British, and the extraordinarily rich debates in the late 19th century that pushed China along the path to modernity. Finally, he provides a clear up-to-date account of post-1949 China, including revelations about the 1989 crisis based on newly leaked inside documents, and fresh insights into the new order of President Xi Jinping. All woven together with landscape history and the author’s own travel journals, The Story of China is the indispensable book about the most intriguing and powerful country on the world stage today.
Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 2030. Between now and then, the country's urban population will leap to over one billion, as the central government kicks its urbanization initiative into overdrive. In the process, traditional social structures are being torn apart, and a rootless, semi-displaced, consumption orientated culture rapidly taking their place. Ghost Cities of China is an enthralling dialogue driven, on-location search for an understanding of China's new cities and the reasons why many currently stand empty.
