Addressing fundamental questions surrounding the critical changes affecting China’s urban landscape, social organization and community governance, Property Rights and Urban Transformation in China thoroughly reviews the reform of property rights in changing political and economic conditions.

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.

Now an established global force, China has experienced a sustained period of staggering economic growth since policy reform in the 1970s. Chinese urbanisation is the most significant example of economic, environmental and social change both within China and globally. In recent years, central government has made a concerted effort to encourage city governments to realign their priorities and achieve a balance between economic efficiency, social justice and environmental protection. Chinese Urban Transformation: A Tale of Six Cities is a fascinating exploration of the dramatic development Chinese cities have undergone. Tracing this transformation through a comprehensive analysis of social and economic change in six cities, it unravels the complex relationship between policy, outlook and role that urban development plays in China’s view of itself, including the tensions resulting from rapid social and economic change.

This book explains the origins of Chinese land politics and explores how property rights and urban growth strategies differ among Chinese cities.

How have the development and redevelopment of China’s cities since the early 1950s transformed the settlements and fortunes of a fifth of the world’s population? Rapid urbanization since the 1980s has changed the nation from a rural society to an urban one, marking it as one of the most significant transformations in history. As a country with severe land scarcity, land resources are intensively contested for during urbanization under the new regime of marketization. This book focuses on the impact of the institution of land rights that have transitioned from private ownership to socialist state ownership, and subsequently to public land leasing in the urban domain, and to collective ownership in rural areas. In the context of defining the relationship between the state and the market, the gradualist transition of land rights gives rise to intriguing processes of place-making. The elaboration of these processes will engage several revealing conceptual notions: land as a means of production, land commodification, ambiguous land rights, incomplete land rights, trading land use rights for land development rights, institutional uncertainty, land rent seeking and dissipating, local developmental state, danwei-enterprises, and more. The newly created landed interests are embedded intricately within the urban spatial structure. This book would especially be of interest to scholars interested in developmental economics, urban planning, geography, public policies, public management, and sociology, and also practitioners focusing on development and planning.

This book presents an analysis of betterment and compensation issues under the Land Use Rights (LURs) System in China since 1988. The topic originates from the observation of widening inequity and increasing uncertainty associated with the failure of g

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.