Chinese urbanization, including the daily life, migration strategies, and life choices of villagers and townspeople, is the focus of this study by Chinese and North American scholars. The study looks at the urbanization process and the vitality of post-reform Chinese society.

Since China entered the post-Mao "Reform Era" in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese economy has taken off as few economies ever have. Labor migration, rural enterprises, rising production, and globalization have all combined to end the isolation of the Chinese countryside. Yet although China's unsurpassed economic boom has produced reams of impressive statistics, has this economic growth led to improving the livelihood of the average Chinese person? Has development accompanied economic growth? Has the promise of "opening to the outside" been fulfilled in providing a better life for China's 1.2 billion-plus people? In this book, which is based on field work, Guldin presents and explores some of the changes sweeping through China in the 1990s that are affecting hundreds of millions of people. Guldin looks at the growth of town and village enterprises, labor mobility, and the other aspects of rural urbanization to investigate the connection between economic growth and development in contemporary China. The political changes at the village level, the swelling flows of capital, data, goods, and people, new ways of thinking and behaving, and a significant surge in social inequalities are all topis for chapter discussions. Guldin invites readers to face the same question that former Chinese peasants must face, namely, how to respond, as their villages are transformed forever.

From 1949 to today, China has experienced dramatic changes in its economy and urban development. This book examines these changes and looks at one city, Shenzhen, in detail. The performance and behavior of a fledgling property market in the transitional economy are analyzed in the backdrop of real estate commodification and marketization. Students and researchers in urban geography, urban planning, economics, business, and real estate will find this monograph lucid and original. Two distinctive periods divide the last fifty years of development in China. The period 1949 to 1978 was dominated by central planning. After 1978, however, economic reforms brought a new property market to many of China's cities. The economic surge of this period has transformed these cities and helped create new metropolises. The special economic zone of Shenzhen grew from what was, until 1980, a landscape predominantly made up of rice paddy fields and traditional villages. By 1995, the population of the city grew to more than two and a half million. Two modes of land provision are identified as the main contributors to Shenzhen's urban development process, which is also echoed in other Chinese cities. Incremental urban land reforms are elaborated within a broad framework of institutional change, while marketization has brought many changes to Chinese society. Continued urban reform toward a market economy seems now irreversible.

A timely and thorough analysis of the rapid urban growth in China.

This book focuses on the criminalization trend and process regarding the internal migration in contemporary China from the perspective Law-in-Action. In Chinese society today, internal migrants are commonly perceived as criminals. Crimmigration, a global term that communicated the convergence of the criminal legal system and the immigration enforcement system, manifest itself in China’s hukou-based (also known as the household registration system) criminal legal system. How hukou has been constructed into the concept of Crimmigration in China strikes at the core of the ultimate questions of this book: who is being criminalized, how does the political-economic-cultural institution known as ‘hukou’ shape the criminal justice process, and how has the role of hukou changed over time in the ever-changing process? Drawing on interviews with police, prosecutors, criminal lawyers & judges, prison staff and migrant leaders in Yangtze River Delta, China, this book reflects on a historical development on hukou and its function in social control. Each chapter contributes to an extended analysis of pragmatic aspects of decision-making moments in the criminal justice system. This book will appeal to criminology researchers and students with in interest in law, politics, migration, and citizenship in contemporary China.

In 1915 Robert Park penned his seminal paper “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment”. This essay provided an agenda for the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, which formed the basis of urban research for decades. Given that China’s urban centres now occupy the spotlight that once belonged to American cities, Park’s essay is a platform and point of departure for this volume, which gathers together reflections from a broad range of urban China specialists to consider Park’s (ir)relevance today – for cities in China, for questions about the social life of the city and for urban research more generally. Essential for a broad range of urban studies scholars, this book is an invaluable teaching resource and a useful tool for policy-makers and planners.

After over a decade of administrative and economic reform in mainland China, the center has become increasingly remote and less important for many localities. In many ways, the mobilization capacity of the central government has been weakened. Central government policies are often ignored and local officials are often more interested in personal projects than in centrally directed economic plans. In this study of local government and politics in China, the author explores when and why local government officials comply with policy directives from above. Drawing on interviews with government officials in various municipalities and a review of county records and other government documents, he provides the first in-depth look at policy implementation at the county and township levels in the PRC. The book examines the impact of the Chinese cadre system on the behavior of local officials, local party and government structure, relationships among various levels of Chinese local government, policy supervision mechanisms at local levels, village governance of China, and more.