CHINESE URBANIZATION IN THE LAST HALF CENTURY: A HESITANT SHIFT FROM RESTRAINT TO INEVITABILITY

Abstract

Urbanization in contemporary China has gone through two diametrically different phases of conceptual and developmental changes. In the last half century, urbanization in China traveled a winding route and finally settled on one that resembles those in other Asian nations. The party state's initial resistance to urbanization was in place, as the young nation was built on a rural based revolution. The skepticism of urbanity, which represented oppression and exploitation, induced an ‘anti-urban’ bias that all city growth must be controlled and limited, so that the countryside would not be kept disadvantaged again. After thirty years of socialist development, the party state recognized that China was still very underdeveloped relative to other Asian nations, and urbanization was their effective way for rapid growth. A radically different developmental path had to be sought. Urbanization under the market system became an acceptable mechanism for economic expansion. Pro-urban became the rule and city growth could trickle down to the countryside. For national development, restraint on urbanization gave way to the acknowledgment of the inevitability of urbanization. This paper reviews the evolution of China's urban development policy since 1949, in particular, the key changes in the context of the ideology, policy and implementation. It argues that the major urban development policy shift occurred in response to the radical transformation in the national political economy. Economic Reform in 1978 defined the critical juncture, which divided urbanization in China into two distinctly separate phases—the Socialist Era (1949–1978), and the Market Transition Era (post-1978).