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Considering China's 'isolated' digital ecosystem, this paper examines China's 'check-in' activities to understand how the wanghong economy is driving China's new rounds of urban development, with the purpose of supplementing existing research on digital economies from the Chinese context. Focusing on a representative case study area called Dongshankou in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places and an emerging commercial centre, I sought to enrich existing studies about digital economies and extend scholarship on platform urbanism from the cultural economy perspective. First, I argue that Chinese consumers' check-in activities function as the data accumulation process, structuring Dongshankou's digital capital through the assemblage of online posts and geotags. Therefore, Dongshankou's urban development challenges the conventional view of creativity as the key factor in the cultural economy for urban development, given that digital capital is now the key driver for urban development in the digital age. Second, the growth of wanghong stores in Dongshankou reveals how the wanghong economy is materialised into urban cultural objects. Emotional value – a crucial selling point that these wanghong stores aim to provide to facilitate consumers' check-in activities – illustrates how China's highly participatory digital ecosystem extracts users' emotions and bodily experiences into the process of capital accumulation, which structures the 'platform urbanism' through our daily lives. This paper broadens the horizon for an alternative theoretical agenda in platform urbanism: beyond focusing solely on platform algorithms, how digital platforms and emotions become inextricably linked in economic production should be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state has been pivotal in both facilitating financialization and dealing with its consequences, through which the state itself has also been reshaped. This paper proposes a "state selective financialization" framework to highlight the intentionality and selectivity of the state in (de)financialization. Based on practices in China, we examine the latest state efforts to reconfigure the land reserve system in order to cope with local financial risks associated with land-backed borrowing. The state de-leverages reserved land locally and uses it to secure bonds through a state-managed top-down process. The changing mechanism demonstrates the central state's intentional role in selecting financial instruments and recentralizing its control over land financialization, whereby it has tried to mitigate financial risks and oversee local development. Instead of financialization versus de-financialization, we find financialization in China is a selective governance tactic to address state concerns. Moreover, rather than seeing financialization as a process outside the state, this research emphasizes that selective financialization is an internal process to reconsolidate the power of the central state and rebuild alignment among multi-scalar state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors of EPA: Economy and Space have announced the winners of the Ashby prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in 2022. Kun Wang, Junxi Qian, and Shenjing He were awarded for their paper on global destruction networks and hybrid e-waste economies in Guiyu, China. Andrea Ricci was awarded for his paper on global locational inequality. The papers have been made free to access for one year. The authors express their gratitude for the recognition and discuss the importance of their research in addressing cultural and economic issues in the Global South. [Extracted from the article]

The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity—states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the "free market". This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a "rise" of state capitalistic maneuvers from China as a dynamic sovereignty–accumulation nexus. Specifically, Chinese state capitalism—and arguably state capitalism in general—constitutes the reproduction of sovereign rule. Underpinning this tension-filled process is territoriality: the use of territory for political, economic, and social ends. This dynamic relationship will be illustrated through an examination of how and why Yunnan, a southwestern Chinese province that was economically marginalized for several decades, emerged as a geostrategic platform for facilitating new rounds of capital accumulation. Through large-scale infrastructural investments in Yunnan, the Chinese state generated new territorial configurations that (a) enabled the positioning of Yunnan as a "bridgehead" of Chinese economic statecraft and (b) encouraged investments aimed at capturing new growth opportunities. While this state-led developmental process partially resolves tensions generated by previous rounds of capital accumulation, it also generates new tensions. Building on this case study, the paper demonstrates how Chinese state capitalism more accurately exemplifies a state-building process that is embedded in and is constituted by a central contradiction between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power. It concludes by presenting two directions for future research on Chinese state capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the contributions to the review symposium on How China Escaped Shock Therapy. I discuss the strategy of economic system reform that started from the non-essential parts of the industrial system in order to eventually transform the commanding heights; the spatial dimension of reform in relation to "dual circulation" and the coastal development strategy; the nature and meaning of Chinese gradualism; and China's price stabilization strategies of the 1980s in relation to later inflationary challenges. Finally, I reflect on the symposium as a dialogue between economic geography and a history of ideas in action that I pursued in my book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical engagement with Isabella Weber's fascinating new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It foregrounds the book's contributions to knowledge on a hitherto under-explored topic – why shock therapy advocates were unsuccessful in launching all-out price liberalisation across China during the 1980s – and introduces new questions through assessing Weber's analysis vis-à-vis three geographical aspects of Chinese political-economic evolution: (a) the role of landownership control and redistribution in stabilising the Chinese economy following the Communist Party of China's (CPC) revolutionary victory in 1949; (b) the path-dependent effects of Mao-era (1949-1976) landownership institutions on economic reforms during the 1980s; and (c) Deng Xiaoping's approach to the multi-dimensional emergence of coastal-oriented industrialisation. These three aspects collectively accentuate how the territorial configuration and regulation of the Chinese political economy, so fundamental for producing and sustaining CPC regime durability, undermined the neoclassical bias towards price liberalisation. Understanding the geographical preconditions that underpin post-1949 Chinese political-economic evolution is therefore crucial for understanding why shock therapy was ultimately deemed incongruent with CPC rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of digital platforms as a new form of business organisation concentrates power in the United States and China. Platform capitalism further intersects with and reinforces pre-existing trends towards state capitalism, where states more actively direct economies in response to economic turbulence and heightened geopolitical tension. The concentration of global business power within two states, combined with the increasing capacity for these states to leverage and direct platform activities for their own geopolitical–economic ends, has catalyzed the rise of 'state platform capitalism' (SPC). This paper develops the notion of SPC as an emergent logic of competition for both states and firms – in particular, the ways in which Beijing and Washington instrumentalise and mobilise domestic platform firms in pursuit of geopolitical–economic objectives, while platforms become increasingly interdependent with their home state institutions. Competition in the global political economy is increasingly centred on the recruitment of users and nations to these rival state-platform nexuses (national 'stacks') as a means of establishing and exercising extraterritorial economic and political power. Empirically, we identify variations between American and Chinese modes of practicing state platform capitalism, and we examine three axes within which this competition unfolds internationally: currencies, standards and cybersecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent formulations of state capitalism tend to present it as a distinct system, anchored in China, in opposition to a neoliberal model represented by the United States and its global armatures. As an alternative to this binarism, this paper argues for Gillian Hart's relational-comparative approach to the geographies of the new state capitalism. It outlines three of Hart's theoretical-methodological principles—multiple trajectories, conjunctural analysis, and articulation—and demonstrates how they can be used to analyze the interrelations between "statist" and "liberal" development trajectories, through an empirical account of conjunctural struggles in and between China and the World Bank during the Tiananmen Square crisis. It argues that Tiananmen was an inflection point in the relation between the development trajectories of the Chinese state and the World Bank, where conflicts over the continuity of economic reform were simultaneously struggles over the boundaries of the state. Examining these institutions conjuncturally shows that China's "state capitalism" is not an opposite of the Bank's liberal model, but has been, in part, produced through power-laden contests over the meaning and materiality of state and market in multiple arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State capitalism is experiencing a revival as a term to capture the current capitalist constellations and departures from neoliberalism. Unlike, neoliberalism, however, the term state capitalism has a long history reaching back to the age of imperialism in the late 19th century. Although state capitalism has been used as a prerogative term by Marxists, liberals, and neoliberals alike, it has served as a programmatic label for developmentalist and neomercantilist projects in reaction to imperialism in the periphery. This paper argues that we need to bring the intellectual history of state capitalism into the 'new state capitalism' debate. China has played a major role in the revival of state capitalism in the social sciences, but the long history of China's engagement with state capitalism as a concept and program dating back to the late Qing reformers has been overlooked for the most part. State capitalism is by no means new to China, from Liang Qichao, Sun Yatsen, and Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, the idea that China had to create a modern nation-state and industrial capitalism in the name of economic progress and to get ahead in the global competition is a recurring theme. What is new is that for the first time, the ambition to use state capitalism as a means to catch up with the West is bearing fruits in ways that could undermine the predominance of Western economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an Exchange section dedicated to the question of the new state capitalism. It is suggested that the new state capitalism, both as an ascendant concept and as marker of socioinstitutional facts on the ground, signals a significant geohistorical moment, perhaps not a new "era" as such, but a notable inflection point. This warrants critical attention, even if first-generation treatments of the phenomenon itself may have been somewhat wanting. Contributions follow from Ilias Alami, Jennifer Bair, Isabella Weber, Marion Werner, and Heather Whiteside, each of whom provide a critical take on (debates around) the new state capitalism from their own theoretical perspective and vantage point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid urbanisation of China has increased public awareness of rising housing prices, particularly in large and medium-sized cities. The popularisation of the Internet in China has driven a shift in the public's attention to housing prices, moving from geographic space to cyberspace. Based on web search engine data using geotag, this paper attempts to create a better visualisation of the shift in the public's attention to housing prices from the perspectives of geographic space and cyberspace. Intercity interaction is also analysed in the context of cyberspace-based urban networks, through hybrid featured graphics. Specifically, data regarding public attention to housing prices are gathered (via queries data through Baidu Index) in 363 Chinese cities. The data are divided into a local city housing price attention index and an offsite city housing price attention index. Second, public attention flows are presented using origin-destination flows maps, chord diagrams and violin diagrams. These hybrid feature graphics show the interrelationship between cities and the complexity of public attention flows. This information will help us to reveal intercity interaction and the cyberspace-based urban network structure in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Urban polycentricity' has become both a conceptual framework capturing emerging empirical realities and a spatial planning vision adopted in cities across Europe, USA, and, recently, also China. Despite the blossoming academic literature on polycentricity, only limited attempts have been made to explore whether and how polycentric urban development at different spatial scales affects the urban economy. In this paper, we empirically analyse whether and how urban polycentricity at different spatial scales in China is associated with urban economic performance. To this end, we extend the Cobb–Douglas production function and include measures of both inter-urban and intra-urban polycentricity to explain differences in labour productivity. The analysis links intra-urban monocentricity and inter-urban polycentricity with higher levels of labour productivity. In addition, the analysis points to an agglomeration spillover effect, as well as a potential weak positive interaction effect between intra- and inter-urban polycentricity. The paper concludes with policy implications for China's spatial development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-term rentals facilitated by online platforms (like Airbnb) have recently become a subject of intense debate, leading many city governments to pass new regulations attempting to control both their proliferation and platform activities. While these policy responses vary greatly from city to city, there is little comparative research to explain this diversity. This paper employs a sociological approach to public policy analysis to compare the politicization process, collective action around and regulation of platform-mediated short-term rentals (PM-STR) in three cities – Barcelona, Paris and Milan. They were chosen to represent most-dissimilar cases in terms of regulatory outputs, both in terms of stringency (weak in Milan, intermediate in Paris, strong in Barcelona) and choice of policy sectors (sharing economy and tourism in Milan, housing and land use in Paris, urban planning and tourism in Barcelona). Two main findings emerged from the comparison. First, the differences between regulations can be explained by the type of actors who politicized the issue in the first place and framed it within a specific policy sector, the pre-existing policy instruments traditionally used in that sector and the distribution of competences between the city and higher tiers of government. Second, the regulations remain continuously subject to intense political mobilization by six types of actors with clashing interests: professional STR operators, associations of hosts or 'home-sharers', the hotel industry, residents' associations or citizens' movements, 'sharing economy' advocates and corporate platforms. Each actor constructs different narratives regarding PM-STR, claiming different types of rights in this contentious politics of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the cultural inscription of urban space in China as a technology of government. Based on a three years of fieldwork, including interviews, surveys, and participant observation, the paper examines the case of one city's campaign to increase its "happiness index" by creating an ethnic culturally themed built environment. The paper examines the city's happiness campaign as a project of biopolitical urbanism, and finds that while urban Chinese governmentality bears some striking resemblances to liberal approaches that view the city as a machine for experimenting with, and producing, certain kinds of (governable) citizens and social relations, the happiness campaign should also be understood as a deliberate effort to reinforce state power at the local level. The happiness campaign, in other words, aims to reproduce a sovereign mode of state power even as it speaks a language of neoliberal governmentality. Thus, the colonization of culture by biopolitical urbanism in China today suggests a complex combination of disciplinary and discursive modalities of sovereign power rooted in the paternalistic legacies of Chinese statecraft. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to reassess the role of failure in policy mobilities. Empirically, this paper examines the various aftermaths of, and the continuing trans-local connections originating from, the prominent but un-materialized Sino-British Shanghai-Dongtan eco-city—with a particular consideration on its relation with a subsequently realized project—the Sino-Singapore Tianjin eco-city. The findings reveal that despite its apparent failure, Dongtan eco-city established a set of urban planning procedures adopted by many, including those who designed and delivered the Tianjin eco-city. Meanwhile, Dongtan’s failure to materialize motivated the Chinese government to pursue collaboration with the Singaporean government over the increased involvement of private Western partners. The intent to avoid association with Dongtan’s failure also fostered a new eco-urbanism model based on rebranding the planning practices of Singapore’s public housing. Parts of Dongtan eco-city have also lived on through the international circulation of a piece of planning software that was first developed for the failed project. This paper contributes to the policy mobilities literature by challenging its dominant focus on successful exemplars and exploring how a project fails in implementation yet parts of it remain mobile, influential and present in other developments. This paper also advances the understanding of contemporary urban sustainability by revealing how eco-urbanism models are co-produced in this globalizing era between the global North and South, as well as within the global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relies on the empirical framework introduced in Combes et al. (2012) to address the following main questions: (a) what are the relative contributions of agglomeration and selection forces expected to drive the urban productivity premium previously observed in Chinese cities, and (b) to what extent does the industrial parks and zones (IPZs) program, a popular place-based policy, simultaneously influence selection and agglomeration mechanisms? The main findings are as follows. First, both agglomeration and selection forces are observed in larger, denser Chinese cities, indicating that earlier studies that failed to take into account selection likely overestimate the effect of agglomeration economies. Second, after taking into account non-random site selection based on matching, the IPZs program intensifies both agglomeration and selection forces, although the results depend strongly on who administers the program. The empirical findings highlight a theoretical connection between state intervention and explaining the observed urban premium in a transitioning economy context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world's largest carbon emitter, China is under great pressure to cut down carbon emissions. Understanding the evolution of carbon emissions across Chinese cities is important for policymakers when allocating carbon emission quota among these cities. This paper draws upon the Open-source Data Inventory for Anthropogenic CO2 to calculate city-level per capita carbon emissions in China from 2001 to 2016. Overall, we find that per capita carbon emissions of Chinese cities have been generally on the rise during the 2001–2016 period. However, there has been on average a modest decline in per capita carbon emissions of cities in China's Yangtze River Delta region and Pearl River Delta region from 2011 to 2016, after a remarkable increase during the 2001–2011 period. Besides, the average north-south gap has been enlarged, with northern cities having a relatively higher level of per capita carbon emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2008, China has introduced state-led financialization to inject low-interest, stable and long-term loans to facilitate urban redevelopment through national shantytown redevelopment schemes (SRSs). Extending critical state theories to China's transitional economy, we consider SRSs to be a policy model of the state project (mode of policy-making) of crisis management that aims to revitalize the national economy in the wake of the global financial crisis. Essentially, this state project serves to tackle the legitimation crisis threatened by both the economic crisis and the escalating social discontent. Drawing on an empirical study of Chengdu, a regional hub in western China spearheading SRSs, this paper examines how the Chinese state at different levels interacts with the nascent financial market in the creation of a new "model" of urban redevelopment under state-led financialization. Having been exploited to manage economic and legitimation crises, this model has simultaneously become a source of "crisis of crisis-management" owing to the state's "over-intervention". This research contributes to a fresh understanding of the multiplicity of financialization by linking the financialization of urban built environment with the financialization of the state project, in which financial motives and practices shape the mode of policy making. The Chinese experience also presents a decentered interpretation of state-led financialization that renews our understanding of the multifaceted state and state projects, particularly the hybridized, often contradictory motivations and socio-economic outcomes of state interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationship between rescaling and the neoliberalization of water governance in the South–North Water Transfer Project. It demonstrates that the Chinese government has selectively adopted some neoliberal tools while rejecting others and dismissing the ideology of neoliberalism. These elements of neoliberalism are sometimes associated with the rescaling of water governance upward, downward, outward and inward. Rescaling has evolved expediently rather than through planned design, reflecting both the exigencies of practical problems and the legacies of bureaucratic power struggles. Market-friendly reforms enable more actors to bring environmental interests into state and market institutions, to form a closed network with policy-makers. The distinctive conflict between the actual existing selective neoliberalization and official discourses of anti-neoliberalization reflect the particularities of neoliberalization in China's hydro-politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the onset of circularity, this paper examines the first outward-moves and first inward-moves of rural–urban migrants in China. Using event-history analysis, we investigate the impacts of time-varying individual and household characteristics on the mobility of 787 rural workers from six villages in Anhui Province, based on a longitudinal study of 150 households for the period 1980 to 2009. The findings show that the probability of initiating the first outward-move and first inward-move is affected by age, gender, education, decade, and life-cycle and household-arrangement factors such as the location of dependent children, spouse, and elderly parents. New-generation migrants are more likely to move outward and spend longer time outside the home location than their predecessors. Gender differences persist; women continue to be less likely to move outward and more likely to return, and their mobility patterns are much more sensitive to caregiving needs than men. These results suggest that migrants’ circularity will persist and that China’s urbanization policy should consider multi-locality as a central component of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the effects and underlying intentions of Swedish practices of exporting sustainable development models to Chinese ecocities. Under the 'bestpractice' banner, international architectural firms are often invited to masterplan ecocity developments. The 'sustainable city' has thus become an export commodity, supported by the Swedish government and seen as especially suited to the Chinese ecocity market. Two cases are examined, where Swedish architecture firms have been commissioned to masterplan Chinese ecocities: the Caofedian and Wuxi Eco-cities. In particular, I examine three kinds of 'effects': first, the planning discourse manifested in the planning documents; second, how these plans materialize on the ground; and, third, the effects of this exported planning practice on Swedish policy and practice at home. This paper advances our understanding of how transnational urban sustainability practices are constructed and circulated. It further adds to the field of planning mobilities by examining not only the discourse and diffusion of transnational master planning but also how the 'export' circulates and returns. I argue that the two intentional logics of exporting the Swedish 'sustainable city'--to shape a better world and to export clean-tech products--could both be seen as having failed in these two cases. Instead, the naming and branding of the ecocities seem to boost a certain repetitive problematic idea and practice of sustainable urban development. I argue that the Swedish exported practice strengthens and legitimizes a circulating narrative establishing a sustainable urban planning practice fostering a paradoxically generic image of upper-middle-class consumers as ecocity inhabitants in China as well as in Sweden. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In focusing on the way emotional ideologies underpin migration regimes, this paper underlines how migrants manage their emotions in a quest towards wider economic and social integration. It compares the experiences of Mainland Chinese immigrants who are in Canada with those that returned to China temporarily but plan to remigrate to Canada eventually, thus sustaining transnational journeys. The paper suggests that the intersection of emotional and migration regimes imposes norms and sanctions that direct migrants towards what are considered appropriate emotions and emotional subjectivities. The economic logics shaping the circulation of emotions within and across geographical space during transnational sojourning is referred to here as the emotional economy of migration. The paper argues that certain emotions appreciate or depreciate in value as they are mobilised geographically during such transnational sojourning. The analysis contributes to migration scholarship by drawing out the emotional logics, circulations, and calculations that structure and prop up the political economy of migration regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the politics of religious space and hybridized cultural identity in the reconstruction of Miao ethnicity in China. With a case study of the entanglement of ethnic language and ethnic minority's relationship with Han Chinese cultural hegemony, this paper examines the translocal production of cultural hybridity and the political potentials of religion and religious space in a multiethnic social milieu. It is argued that translocal flows of cultural resources should be taken into account in order to investigate the ongoing production and changing political connotations of hybridized cultural identities in heterogeneous time-spaces. In this study dynamics of political negotiation and community belonging inspire us to adopt a perspective looking into the dialectics of the religious and the political, inter alia the historically contingent construction of sociocultural boundaries. We suggest that the creative use of translocally constituted hybridity is an act of resistance which negotiates hegemonic ideologies undergirding cultural dominance. This paper contributes to the study of the politics of minority ethnic identities in China by examining Han-minority power relations, with specific focuses on cultural reconstruction and resistant actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the spatial dimension of power relations and the seeking of social justice through an urban redevelopment project. I seek to provide an on-the-ground investigation on the role of space in affecting power relations and, hence, the seeking of social justice. Bringing together a relational approach, the positioning of actors, and the broader bottom-up conceptualisation of power, this paper presents a link between power and space, suggesting that different forms of power stem from the multiple connections which different actors draw from space, be it place or shifting positions. In the context of China's villages-in-the-city redevelopment, this idea suggests that the dispossessed are not entirely powerless, although their formal rights to participate are forfeit. In other words, the power of the dispossessed is spatially defined and their seeking of justice is determined by negotiated power relations. Put in the context of a Chinese city, this paper moves the discussion of social justice beyond liberal democratic societies where most of the literature is based. Such a move is expected to generate new understandings of the geographies of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hukou system is one of the most enduring legacies of the 20th-century Chinese socialist control instruments. The hukou in the Chinese context is an official identity of residency rights in a given geographic unit. Cities use the hukou policy to impede the urban hukou of migrants who are deemed unworthy in terms of socioeconomic attributes. Based on policy documents and data collected from forty-five sample cities, this paper offers statistical measures and explanations for barriers to urban hukou nationwide. The paper introduces the city's entry barrier (CEB) index to rank the degree of difficulty of acquiring urban hukou and performs factor analysis to identify the key determinants that significantly explain the various levels of the CEB index across cities. Our empirical findings suggest that a more developed city tends to develop a higher entry barrier to its hukou. The intention of city governments to impose barriers to urban hukou is enshrined largely in their progrowth mentality and their metaphors on the political economy of urbanization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's unprecedented urbanization since the 1978 economic reform has left many rural villages engulfed by expanding urban jurisdictions. Because of the collective ownership of land, these villages have not vanished over night. On the contrary, they have maneuvered to bypass planning and construction codes and rebuilt themselves into highdensity neighborhoods, housing millions of migrants in the cities. This paper analyzes the continued survival of the collective economy of these villages-in-the-city (chengzhongcun) from the perspective of public finance. Urbanized villages remain financially responsible for public services within their jurisdictions, including infrastructure, sanitation, policing, social welfare, and even education. Neither the problem of urban-rural disparities, nor the consequent lack of adequate public services has been resolved by the integration of these villages into urban areas. These villages have had to find new ways to cope with rapid population growth, finance an urbanized community, and at the same time, bear the burden of their stigmatization as a cancerous growth within otherwise 'modern' cities. Using the rapidly urbanized Pearl River Delta region as an empirical case, this paper explores how the urban villages are asymmetrically integrated within the cities: they contribute to the city's growth, but receive little or no public support. In contrast with the common sense that incorporation into an urban jurisdiction will bring about rising fiscal investment, in China, it is the rural villages that are financing the growth of cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The floating population is a major source of social inequality in China and a direct target in its new-type urbanization plan. Although this population spread very unevenly both within and between provinces, and the responsibility for their citizenization lies mostly with local authorities, their geographical distribution and representation in the total population below province level remain understudied. This paper fills the gap. The county-level census data in 2010 were analyzed with the help of the cartogram technique. Results showed that the floating population was concentrated predominately in three key coastal regions and moderately in inland provincial capitals, with great variation both within and across key regions and provinces. Their share in the total population was also very high in the concentrations, closely followed by many counties along the coast and inland borders. Hence these 'hot spots' are very crucial for addressing social inequality and materializing the new-type urbanization plan in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational regionalization has become a popular development policy among East Asian countries since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Expanding upon Brenner's theory of state rescaling, this paper focuses on China's transnational regionalization projects and how the Chinese state rescales to implement these projects. Specifically, this paper has two objectives. First, by comparing two projects of transnational regionalization in which Yunnan participates-the Greater Mekong Subregion program and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar forum-the paper critically probes the actual mechanisms (upward collaboration, downward implementation, and outward corporatism) deployed by the Chinese state to facilitate cross-border initiatives. This emphasis on the actual mechanisms thus theorizes back to Brenner's work, showing that regulatory restructuring entails complex power relations of competition and collaboration among various forces. Second, this paper examines how the Chinese state handles the territorial geopolitical relations which have emerged during the process of transnational regionalization. I seek to broaden the theoretical framework of state rescaling beyond the narrow confines of domestic city-regions to international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zhongguancun Science Park (ZGC) in Beijing is considered the most innovative region in China. This paper is based on a quantitative survey among ZGC companies that captures the cooperation patterns of the firms. The survey was funded by the German Research Association (DFG). In the process of technological upgrading and innovation, companies in Beijing—as well as in other developing countries—make use of knowledge originating in foreign companies or in universities and public research organizations. The findings presented in this paper confirm that ZGC companies are linked to both sources of knowledge to the same extent. Cooperation with foreign companies helps ZGC companies to get new ideas and to enter the market with new products, whereas cooperation with universities is used mainly to design new products. Thus, the patterns of cooperation show that ZGC can absorb new knowledge from different sources. However, not all of the high-tech companies in ZGC are able to make use of international linkages in the innovation process, as about half of them do not have the necessary capabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban development is a complex dynamic process involving various actors with different patterns of behaviour. Modelling urban development patterns is a prerequisite to understanding the process. This paper presents a preliminary multiscale perspective for such modelling based on spatial hierarchical theory and uses it for the analysis of a rapidly developing city. This framework starts with a conceptual model, which aims at linking planning hierarchy, analysis hierarchy, and data hierarchy. Analysis hierarchy is the focus of this paper. It is divided into three scales: probability of change (macro), density of change (meso), and intensity of change (micro). The multiscale analysis seeks to distinguish spatial determinants on each of the three scales, which are able to provide deeper insights into urban growth patterns shaped by spontaneous and self-organised spatial processes. A methodology is also presented to implement the framework, based on exploratory data analysis and spatial logistic regression. The combination of both is proven to have strong capacity of interpretation. This framework is tested by a case study of Wuhan City, China. The scale-dependent and scale-independent determinants are found significantly on two scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The industrialization and urban development in China have driven a huge portion of the rural population to its urban areas. While discriminating institutions engendered by the hukou system exclude most rural migrants from urban rights and benefits, the option of converting hukou has become increasingly available. Nevertheless, few rural migrants have chosen to settle down in cities by obtaining an urban hukou, which contradicts a common perception that rural migrants desire an urban hukou. Based on a recent migrant survey in Jiangsu Province, this paper explores rural migrants' intention of hukou conversion with respect to the availability, type, and quantity of rural landholdings in their home countryside, as well as their socioeconomic attributes and migration patterns. The results of regression analyses indicate that both the possession of farmland and housing land in rural areas significantly influences the intention of rural migrants to obtain an urban hukou in their destination cities. Moreover, systematic variances in settlement intention are found between the “born-after-1980” generation and their older counterparts, as well as between migrants from the more and less affluent regions. These findings suggest that the decision of hukou conversion incorporates varied concerns and purposes among rural migrants in Chinese cities, which should be addressed with more responsive rural and urban policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The commuting burdens of disadvantaged groups have recently become a renewed topic of concern with social inequities and just city. It is widely believed that social restrictions and individual’s self-etermined actions become more important determinants of low-income workers’ commuting costs than spatial constraints. However, it is doubtable to recognise the belief as a ‘universal’ truth since the evidences for this are still fragmented and particularly are dominated by cases from the Western-developed countries. This paper reports on an initial investigation into low-income workers’ commuting burden and its determinants in a rapidly developing city, looking at the case of Beijing. Spatial constraints caused by uncontrolled urban sprawl, an insufficiency of affordable housing and lower levels of public transport services are still major factors leading to additional commuting time for low-income workers, in particular, for those who travel by public transit. Individuals’ preferences for housing have effects on low-income workers’ commuting times. For the car users, the effects are greater than that spatial constraints have. However, a preference for greater proximity to the workplace rather than a better quality living environment in a community has a significant influence on low-income workers’ commuting times. It suggests the basic need for housing and jobs explains the greater commuting burden on low-income workers. Thus, today’s commuting burden in China for low-income workers could be generally understood by social–spatial structure rather than social–cultural forces. But it seems that the impacts of individual’s self-determined actions on commuting burden will increase in the context of individualisation of the society in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic restructuring and the dramatic expansion of higher education have generated large migration flows of skilled employees to Chinese cities. The residential mobility of skilled migrants has a large impact on the operation of housing and labour markets and the (re)production of social inequities. In this paper we examine the effects of life-course trajectories and institutional factors on the residential mobility of skilled migrants, in comparison with local skilled workers in Nanjing, using a retrospective survey conducted in 2012. Results show that skilled migrants have a higher level of residential mobility than their local counterparts, and that this difference arises from the locals' early entry into homeownership. Yet, migrants and locals also share similarities: market factors that are closely related to household, labour, and housing careers are decisive in explaining the residential mobility of skilled workers, indicating that life-course theories are also applicable in the Chinese context. The impacts of traditional institutional factors, such as hukou, employer type, and Chinese Communist Party membership, are of a much smaller magnitude, indicating that markets have become dominant institutions in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the crucial years between 2002 and 2012 when land enclosures, reclamation works, and architectural production transformed the urban landscape of Macau. Building on the literature on urban informality, I first analyze how planning as institutionalized informality unmapped the city of Macau through a complex medium of neoliberal ethos, technical rationality, and geopolitical calculations. Then, I show how the casino concessionaires remapped the city in a highly competitive milieu by tracing how they maneuvered to secure relative locational advantage. This analysis shows the importance of framing mapping and unmapping as a simultaneous dialectical process so as to render the creative-destructive dynamic of capitalist urban transformation. It also suggests how we can further the analysis of urban planning as an informalized practice and institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's massive volume of and dramatic increase in migration have stimulated increasing research in this area. However, researchers have not paid sufficient attention to return migration until recently when the issue of migrant labor shortage in Southern China has been linked to return migration back to the rural areas. Taking advantage of information contained in the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey and the 2000 China Census, this paper provides a systematic analysis of interprovincial return migration to Sichuan province, one of the most important migrant-sending provinces in China. We focus on return migrant selectivity, the impact of local labor-market conditions and migration networks on return migration, and nonfarm work participation among return migrants. Return migration in the late 1990s shows positive selection on education and return migrants are more likely to engage in nonfarm work. The pattern for the early 1990s is just the opposite of what is observed in the late 1990s. Our multilevel models show that labor-market conditions as well as migration networks in destination areas play important roles in the return migration process. Policy implications of this trend of return migration are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China the development of high-speed rail (HSR) is a national strategy for stimulating economic growth. Major decisions, such as determining which cities to connect and deciding the locations of stations, are made through a state-led planning process. Consequently, HSR stations are often located in urban edges. The connections of these stations with local transport infrastructure and services vary significantly. Passengers need to spend extra time to reach these stations before they can use the HSR. This paper examines the time savings due to the improved intercity connections brought by HSR. It goes on to investigate the user friendliness of HSR by measuring the total door-to-door travel time and accessibility. On the basis of data gathered from questionnaire surveys and from total travel time estimations, it is argued that the poor accessibility of HSR stations hinders the effectiveness of the HSR system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature contextualizes China's suburban growth with market-oriented reform and emphasizes the role of local entrepreneurial government. However, studies on the demand-based factors are still lacking. Drawing upon a random survey undertaken in Songjiang, an outer suburban district of Shanghai, this paper investigates the demand-side driving forces of suburban growth in China: ie, who the suburban residents are, what has driven them to move to the suburbs, and how their differences have shaped suburban space. With local natives, residents from central districts and migrants from other places as their major resident groups, Chinese suburbs illustrate a case where diverse population and types of development are juxtaposed. While migrants have flocked to the suburbs for employment opportunities, the residential moves of the other two groups, even though in some cases involuntary, are more likely to be associated with consumption considerations. Notably, alongside the emergence of single-family villas and gated communities, the pursuit of suburban living ideals has begun to play a role in China, though it is confined to only a few extremely rich families rather than the masses. In addition, three patterns of suburbs characterized by different types of households and developments--white-collar suburbs, migrant suburbs, and well-planned new towns--are identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a neo-Polanyian framework of neoliberalization-asmarketization for understanding geohistorically embedded marketization based on five interlinked theoretical conceptualizations: embedded marketization, hybrid integration, double movement, active society, and qualitative state. I argue that this framework can be useful to supplement existing theorizing of neoliberalism, and to facilitate comparative case studies across vastly differently contexts. This framework is then taken to analyze China's post-Mao transition to a market economy. I argue that China's gradualist transition from a centrally planned economy to a mixed economy has been maneuvered by a self-regulating party-state (dis)embedded in a deactivated (active) society. Due to the existence of multiple veto players and intraparty 'double movement', the marketization was able to be mostly socially progressive until 1993. However, it was no longer the case when the 'socialist market economy' was enshrined and, without political liberalization, the Chinese version of neoliberalization has become even bleaker than elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Chinese economy has transformed from the development of industries in the early economic reform period of the 1980s to the development of service industries in the 2000s and, more recently, the emergence of producer service industries. Producer services have become increasingly important to the Chinese economy. Most studies on producer services in China mainly focus on individual cities. Spatial development of producer services at the regional and national levels is relatively less examined. In this paper we analyze the growth and location of producer services in the Chinese urban system. The study also shows that producer services are becoming spatially more concentrated across the urban system. As producer services that are important in generating economic development are more likely to be located in large metropolitan areas, they tend to reinforce the competitiveness of large cities. Moreover, the uneven spatial development of producer services suggests that small and medium cities need to conduct careful market studies and analyses on their ability to attract producer service industries before they initiate large central business district development projects and invest in massive construction of offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional bias is an important topic in social justice and the presence of institutional bias is widely recognized in China's urban housing sector. This paper proposes a new framework for measuring and assessing institutional bias in China's urban housing system based on structural equation modeling and the Pratt index of relative importance for linear regression. The proposed framework analyzes the structural pathways through which nonmarket institutional forces affect housing, and provides quantitative measures to evaluate both the direct and the indirect effects of biased institutions on housing outcomes. A case study of Guangzhou is presented to demonstrate the proposed ideas and methods using first-hand household survey data collected in 2009. The results of the case study show the dominance of institutional effects over market effects on housing outcomes through direct and indirect pathways. The results also show that, although institutional forces affect most subjective and objective measures of housing outcomes, they induce the largest effects on homeownership attainment and physical housing conditions. This suggests that, at this stage, property ownership and material housing well-being are two potential central areas of China's housing justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Escalating housing prices in China's major metropolises have brought widespread discontents. There is a general impression that housing inequality is rising, and that housing has become increasingly out of reach of ordinary households. Yet, much of the literature on urban housing in China is based on data generated in the early reform period. Very little has been written about what has happened since the 1998 housing reform when both the production and the consumption of housing became primarily market based. The present paper aims to address this deficiency with reference to surveys conducted in Guangzhou in 1996, 2001, and 2005. Quality-adjusted inequality indices including the Gini coefficient and the Theil index are computed to compare housing inequality before and after the ending of welfare allocation of housing at the turn of the century. Quite unexpectedly, the results show only a modest increase in inequality in housing consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various research papers within the issue on topics including challenges of western-centric convergence thesis, the right to housing and exclusivity of property in China.

In this paper we engage with a theoretical reflection on the concept of the right to the city amidst China's emerging urbanism. In particular, we conceptualize the right to the city as embedded within the complex geometries of power relations throughout the production process of China's urban modernity; and in this sense assert the right to urban life is inevitably entangled with a social project of altering dominant power structures. We suggest that the rights of three social groups--namely socialist workers in work units, rural migrants, and urban redevelopment displacees--to the modern Chinese city is situated within the uneven distribution of social power and corresponding infrastructures of social control, which contribute to these social groups' structural marginality in the process of urban social formation. In some cases, these social groups may be endowed with substantial rights to social welfare but the dominant power structure is left unquestioned and unchallenged, resulting in latent forms of social vulnerability. Therefore, the concept of the right to the city needs to be captured as a combination of the distribution of things (social welfare) and the mobilization of process (structural change). In this sense, a Hegelian teleology of linear social development to comprehend the rights issue amid China's emerging urbanism must be called into question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the fi rst decade of this millennium China has demonstrated a stronger commitment to environmental protection. Yet, there remains a signifi cant gap between environmental laws and regulations and the quality of the environment. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for analysis that we apply to investigate the factors that account for this gap in implementation. We analyse the results of surveys conducted in 2000 and 2006 and interviews carried out in 2006 and 2007 in eleven jurisdictions of Guangzhou municipality on three factors: pro-environment orientation, institutional capacity, and external political support for environmental units. The results show that, after several decades of environmental protection regulations, the pro-environment orientation of environmental offi cials in Guangzhou has been strengthened, whereas the institutional capacity of environmental agencies, although often beefed up in real terms, remains inadequate due to the heightened expectations of state and society actors. It is the external political support received by environmental agencies that drives the success or failure of environmental protection enforcement. More often than not, the strength or weakness of political support is embedded in the policy design and implementation structure and is associated with the policy orientation of political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s and 2000s understandings of urban politics have become dominated by narratives of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism. Considerations of, and even interest in, the diversities that exist in the specific politics that shape place developments have often been relegated to a matter of secondary interest when understood in relation to broader structural global forces. This is particularly significant as urban development projects have become increasingly bound-up with cultural programmes, many of which are embedded in the social relations of places, yet are often dismissed as subservient to global, fast-track development logics. This paper draws on a study of the politics surrounding the development of one of Asia's largest culture-led urban development projects, the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. It explores the complex relationships between contemporary development discourses and historically embedded postcolonial subjectivities and policy legacies. It uses the evidence to argue for more nuanced interpretations of change, and calls for a stronger focus on the concrete relations in and through which policy abstractions are formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese economic reforms have moved Mao's antiurban paradigm to an urban-driven paradigm. Since the late 1980s, modernist reforms have led to large scales of urbanization, particularly in the suburban rural zones. Extensive amounts of farmland in Beijing have been expropriated for conversion to urban use to bolster economic growth. Whilst market reforms have resulted in a substantial rise in land values, as the state is effectively the sole landowner, little of the 'surplus value' thus created has gone to the peasants who merely have user rights. In response, peasants have created an informal sales and rental housing market to make up for their loss in livelihood, and to meet the demand of Beijing residents and low-income migrant workers. Supported by site surveys, this paper examines peasants' rights to the city, other property rights, and the ways in which they exercise their 'illegal' rights and the mechanism by which the 'surplus value' is shared between the state, the developers, and, albeit limited, the peasants in the urbanization process. More intricate policy measures have since been taken by the Chinese government in pacifying the social tension arising from inequitable housing distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper systematically investigates the impacts of openness on regional innovation in China, especially the role of absorptive capacity in mediating the spillover effect brought about by openness. Based on provincial-level data over the period 1997-2007 and adopting patents as indicator of innovation, the empirical results show that the estimated patents-R&D elasticity is lower than that for OECD countries, while there is a significant R&D spillover effect across regions in China. Technology import overall has no significant influence on fostering innovations, but it is significantly positive for coastal regions. Openness to trade, in terms of FDI and high-tech product exports, is witnessed to exhibit a significantly positive impact on promoting regional innovation. Crucially, the effects of technology imports and FDI on innovations vary significantly between coastal and non-coastal regions. Using human capital as a proxy for absorptive capacity, we find it helps in learning external sources of knowledge and then contributes to innovations. Moreover, absorptive capacity is expected to play an important role in mediating the spillover effect brought about by openness to trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western research reveals the significance of place in later life. In China the socialist welfare system of the work unit and the extended family have created even greater bonds between people and neighbourhood. The dismantling of this system and the weakening of family support have led to older people relying on other place-based structures which are now threatened by clearance. Older people who resided in Wuhan neighbourhoods due to be demolished talk of their everyday lives. The paper asserts the need to recognise the role of place and community as a locale for the well-being of older people that may be of increasing importance as other support structures are stretched to breaking point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the cultural dimensions of production networks between Japanese and Taiwanese firms. Conceptually, we argue that, due to historical and cultural ties between the two countries, as well as long-standing associations with Taiwanese suppliers, Japanese lead firms have deepened their relationships as Taiwan has entered a more technologically based stage of develop-ment. Taiwan has also been pivotal in Japan - Taiwan - China relations because of its cultural as well as geographic proximity to the two economic giants. Empirically, the analysis draws on interviews with sixteen Japanese electronics companies in Taipei and Hsinchu Science City, as well as secondary data concerning Japanese trade and investment in Taiwan. We contend that Japanese lead firms have moved to a position of insiders and partners with their Taiwanese suppliers in the information, technology, and communications sector. In addition, Japanese electronics firms now see Taiwan as a viable bridge to production and markets in China, while corporate relations are moving towards heterarchical or matrix arrangements, away from the hierarchical flying geese model. The study notes that there are challenges and limits to these new forms of relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies structural decomposition analysis to Chinese input-output tables in order to disentangle and quantify the sources of China's import growth and China's growth in vertical specialization: that is, China's incorporation into the global supply chain. China's exports and the role of processing trade therein have increased substantially in the last decade. Yet, they account for only one third of China's import growth from 1997 to 2005. Instead, the volume growth of China's domestic final demand is found to be most important. Moreover, compared with other countries, the structural change in input-output coefficients and in the commodity composition of domestic final demand turns out to be surprisingly important. Looking only at vertical specialization, it is concluded that more than half of its growth, from 21% in 1997 to 30% in 2005, is due to the growth of China's import ratios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]