Chinese Cities in the 21st Century: Challenges & Insights

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  Chinese Cities in the 21st Century: Challenges & Insights

Chinesecities in the twenty-first century represent one of the frontiers of urban research and provide a fertile ground for theory production beyond the Anglo-Saxon experience.

Huang Youqin, 2020. Chinese Cities in the 21st Century, Palgrave Macmillan.

Source: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030347796

China is in the midst of a historic developmental inflection point, grappling with a significantly slowing economy, rapidly rising inequality, massive migration, skyrocketing housing prices, alarming environmental problems, and strong pushback from the West. Chinese Cities in the 21st Century by Youqin Huang, Professor of Geography at University at Albany, SUNY, is a timely book providing new insights for understanding the new challenges that Chinese citiesare facing in the new era.

This book is a product of an international conference that Prof. Huang organized in April 2017, which brought together a group of well-known China scholars from multiple disciplines (economics, geography, planning, real estate, sociology, political science, public policy, and urban studies) who have conducted in-depth discussion on recent changes and challenges in Chinese cities. This book offers an updated and multidisciplinary analysis of the latest issues and challenges in Chinese cities in the twenty-first century.

This book is organized into four parts based on the four main challenges Chinese cities face in the twenty-first century: A new domestic and international context, the new urban development model, migrants’ and their families’ inclusion and affordable housing for growing and aging urban population, and urban sustainability. Here is an excerpt from chapter 1 in which Prof. Huang gives a brief introduction to the following 13 chapters.

A new domestic and international context

Chapter 2 by economist Barry Naughton focuses on the domestic context. It offers an in-depth assessment of Xi’s economic policy making and governance style and their impact on China’s urban development. Naughton argues that Xi may shape Chinese cities, as Napoleon III put his mark on Paris or Peter the Great on Saint Petersburg. There are three broad forces that shape Xi’s policy making: The desire to maintain high- speed growth, the drive for effective top-down control, and the need for economic reforms to maintain productivity growth, which interact with each other creating a policy package that shapes urban development in China.

Despite the desperate need for further marketization, Naughton argues that ambitious reforms have largely stalled out, leaving direct government action as the most important force shaping Chinese cities. The top-down control tends to limit the growth of the largest cities, while the urge to keep growth high has led to ahigh level of investment in urban infrastructure and housing, which in turn results in a more homogeneous urban landscape. Opportunities for millions of rural migrants to integrate into urban life have also not improved as much asexpected. Ambitious new city construction plans such as Xiong’an will reshape Beijing, Shanghai, and Pearl River Delta regions over the next decades.Naughton argues that these policies amount to a huge gamble on the effectiveness of government-led urban development.

As Fig. 2.2 shows, urban land revenues have amounted to between 5% and 7% of total national GDP every year since 2010 and indeed reached a new peak of 7.8% of GDP in 2018.

As Fig. 2.3 shows, housing has thus far sustained an apparently in exorable increase not only in absolute value, but relative to the rest of China’s growing economy. In 2018, housing sales equaled a remarkable 14% of GDP, higher thanany previous year (and proportionately more than in the USA).

Chapter 3 by Timberlake et al. focuses on the role of Chinese cities in the global economy by examining cities as geographic nodes grounding the flows of capital, its control, and its deployment across the globe. Since China’s opening up to the world economy, its key cities have become increasingly more prominent in this network. Using formal network analysis, this chapter situates China’s cities within the hierarchical global system of cities and locates Chinese cities’ relative positions within the global network for each year, andidentifies changes in their degree of centrality to the global network.Timberlake et al. find that more Chinese cities join the world’s most central global cities (relative centrality) and many of them become more central to the network over time (absolute centrality) during 2001–2014. This demonstrates the increasing importance of Chinese cities in the global system of cities thus the world economy. It should be noted that this has already happened before bold initiatives such as BRI and Made in China 2025 were launched.

Chapter 4 by sociologist Xuefei Ren focuses on one of the main challenges Chinesecities face during rapid urbanization—informal settlements. Ren adopts acomparative approach and examines how Chinese cities respond differently toinformal settlements from other Global South nations. Ren proposes an analytical framework to explain the variations in policy responses to informal settlements and argues that the various policy initiatives are largely shaped by four factors: Intergovernmental relations, electoral politics, municipalfinance, and the capacity of the civil society. With examples from China, India, and Brazil, this chapter comparatively examines how these forces have produced distinct informal housing policies, such as urban village removal in Guangzhou, slum rehabilitation in Mumbai, favela up grading in Rio de Janeiro. Ren argues that the removal-based urban village policy in Guangzhou is mainly driven by landbased public financing, the relative autonomy of local governments in devising urban village policy, the lack of electoral politics, and a weak civil society in China.

Chapter 5 by political scientist Fubing Su and economist Ran Tao unpacks the institutional roots of the landed urbanism from the perspective of public finance. China’s new development wave since the mid-1990s is characterized by local governments’ rush to build industrial parks on the one hand and massive in vestments in both residential and commercial properties and strong urbanismon the other hand. How to explain local governments’ continuing drive for development? This chapter argues that the re-centralization of the fiscalsystem leaves local governments in fiscal shortages, while economic liberalization and regional competition exacerbated local government’s revenue imperative. The land regime provides the final institutional link that enabledlocal officials to leverage urban infrastructure and real estate for industrial expansion. This study helps us understand the seemingly puzzling development model Chinese cities adopt and sheds light on the ongoing debate about China’s development model.

Chapter 6 by urban planner Weiping Wu focuses on one aspect of this new development model—the rapid development of urban infrastructure in China and the increasingly important role of private participation in financing urban infrastructure when public funds are stretched during rapid urbanization. Based on a publicly accessible online database and in-depth interviews, this chapter analyzes the patterns, returns, and prospects of private participation across four different infrastructure sectors in China (energy, telecommunications, transport, water, and sewerage), in comparison with other emerging economies. While private participation in China is still at its early stage, there has been significant private investment in infrastructure, mainly from other developing countries and domestic investors. Private providers are more concentratedin water, power, and road projects, with a particular concentration ingreenfield projects. While the returns are decent, investment risks including regulatory, currency, demand, and general business risks remain high in China, which discourages private participation.

Chapter 7 by geographer Wei Xu further examines China’s development model by tracing the development path of Yuhang, Zhejiang Province and explaining how Yuhang has transformed from a traditional society centered on agriculture to a suburban Central Business District (CBD) featured by modern industries and advanced technology and innovation. With a long itudinal perspective and ethnographic approach, this chapter reveals the dynamic but path-dependent nature of economic development that is characterized by periodic equilibrium trajectoriesand development shocks. The unraveled narratives contribute to the under-standing of the dynamic central and local scalar relation as well as the role of structure and agency in urban transformation in China. While local actors such as cadres and entrepreneurs are crucial in triggering local based-growth processes, the central state is instrumental in initiating reform policies incentivizing the locals and mitigating developmental shocks at the critical junctures. The decisive role of social structures in producing the incrementality of economic reform and social change is balanced by the pivotal role of human agencies across scales in navigating through the critical junctures.

Migrants’ inclusion and affordable housing

There are about 250 million migrants living in Chinese cities and more than one-third of all urban population are migrants (Chan 2015). How to integrate this largeinflux of migrants into the urban society and provide the growing (and aging)urban population with decent and affordable housing are two intertwined daunting challenges facing Chinese cities.

Chapter 8 by Huang et al. focuses on health of children in migrant families. Adopting the life course perspective and an approach of comparing children migrating with parents and left behind children (instead of local children), this chapter shows that migration has a complex impact on children’s health and defies the simplistic notion of migration having either positive or negative effect. Migration intersects with not only family arrangements and living conditions, but also gender and the timing of migration and parental absence. While migrating to cities itself does not benefit children, poor housing conditions in cities have a negative impact on their health. The timing of parental migration is important, as preschoolers migrating with parents and teenagers left behind by parents have significantly worse health than others. Migration also has a gendered effect, as teenage boys benefit from migrating to cities while suffer from being left behind when compared to teenage girls.

Chapter 9 by economists Lili Wei and Jing Zhang analyzes the impact of urban population change on housing prices. With rising mobility and urbanized regions, housing price is no longer functioned at the city level. Using datafor the period of 2004–2015 in the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration, this chapter shows that there is a significant spatial auto- correlation inhousing prices in this region and population change has a significant positive impact on the spatial agglomeration of housing prices. As population tends to flow into a developed city with better infrastructure and economic opportunities, the increase in population size promotes the spatial agglomeration of housing prices; and there is a threshold effect in the impact of urban economic density on housing prices. Therefore, through transportation facilities and sound population policies, population in central cities could be dispersed to neighboring cities, and thus reduce housing demand in central cities.

Chapter 10 by geographer Shangyi Zhou focuses on informal housing for young professionals during rapid urbanization. Existing research on migrant housing and settlement in China has mostly focused on low- income rural-to-urbanmigrants, while middle-income professional migrants have rarely been studied. Yet the latter also lack housing afford- ability in large cities where housing prices have skyrocketed. From the perspective of consumer behavior theory, Zhou explains the existence of so-called “ant tribe” communities, a unique type ofinformal housing settlement where young college graduates live in extremelypoor living conditions at the fringe of Chinese cities. In addition to rents, commuting time and remittance to support extended families are important factorsin these professional migrants’ housing decision, which explains their poor housing conditions despite their relatively high income.

Chapter 11 by planner Tianxing Zhang focuses on how to provide appropriate housing to the aging population. China faces the “double aging”, the co-existence of agingpopulation, and aging buildings especially in old neighborhoods. Aging buildings might not suit elderly’s needs in many aspects, but they form a Living Environment of Familiarity (LEF), which is important for elderly’s physical and mental health. Thus demolishing aging buildings and replacing them with new housing and facilities, as many local governments have done, may not benefit elderly residents. After analyzing the housing dilemma faced by the elderly, Dr. Zhang proposes a strategy to utilize the elderly household’s surplus floor areas as social-spatial resources. This allows the elderly people age in place, enjoy better facilities and more public space, and live in an active and mixed community with a strong sense of community. This sheds newlight to the forthcoming “senior-urbanism” and challenges existing conceptualization on housing provision and consumption.

Urban Sustainability

Chapter 12 by planner Siqi Zhen provides an excellent overview of the environmental consequences of China’s on going rapid urbanization based on her research. The revealed preference evidences from the housing market and self-protection behaviors illustrate that Chinese urbanites’ demand for green cities is rising. They also show that the inclusion of greenness in local officials’ promotion criteria and the rising information transparency have incentivized local leaders to respond to such a demand by regulating pollution. The future trend and dynamics of pollution and the environmental justice in China are also discussed.

In Chapter 13, Xiaoling Zhang uses the concept of “urbanization bubble” to capture accelerated urbanization accompanied by expanding built-up areas and soaring housing prices in China. Focusing on land supply and demand, Zhang identifies four different states of urbanization bubble, namely bubble-free, acontrollable bubble, a potential bubble, and an uncontrollable bubble. Through empirical analysis, Zhang assesses the degree of urbanization bubble in Chinese cities, and argues that many cities experienced land urbanization bubble after 2008 and uncontrollable urbanization bubble happens mainly in non-first tier cities. Sustainable urbanization and policies are recommended.

Chapter 14 by economist Lijuan Si focuses on an ecologically fragile region in central China—cities in Qin-Ba Mountain area. This chapter evaluates the degree ofgreen development through developing a comprehensive Green Development Index(GDI) and an evaluation index system using the method of entire-array-polygon.Results show that the overall GDI in this area was below the standard level,whereas its resource and environmental indices were higher than socioeconomic indices. There are also large regional variations in GDI and between differentindices. This research provides important directions and policy implications to the green development of cities and towns in this area.

In conclusion, with profound socioeconomic and spatial transformation taking place in a much compressed time frame right before our eyes, China provides a wonderful research lab for scholars to study not only Chinese cities, but also cities elsewhere. Chinese cities in the twenty-first century represent one of the frontiers of urban research and provide a fertile ground for theory production beyond the Anglo-Saxon experience.

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