The growth and structural change of Chinese cities: a contextual and geographic analysis

Abstract

Recent theoretical attempts to understand the dynamics of urban change in North America have been made predominantly on the basis of either the “growth machine” model or urban regime analysis, both of which see the growth of cities as the result of the interplay among some internal urban-based actors for financial gains and fortune building. This study adopts an approach that moves beyond internalism and the growth deterministic interpretation of urban change, to analyzing the functional and spatial (re)positioning of cities as a system or systems in the broader context of regional growth and national development strategies. The city in China has functioned not simply as a body of assets and property but more as the center of economic and social transformation engineered by the state for both growth and non-growth considerations. Prior to the 1978 economic reforms, the system of cities created by the Maoist regime was dominated by large and extra-large cities because of the imperatives of optimum industrialization. For the strategic consideration of national defense, most of the new cities were developed in the central and western interior rather than the eastern coast. Market reforms and relaxation of state control over local development since the late 1970s have allowed a large number of small cities and towns to flourish on the basis of bottom-up rural transformative development. The intrusion of global market forces has helped re-consolidate the dominance of the eastern coast in China’s urban development. China’s urban development over the past five decades has been the direct outcome of national political strategizing, state articulation and reconfiguration, and shifts in global capital accumulation. A superimposed dual-track system of urban settlements integrating the Maoist legacy of large city dominance at the top with the rapidly expanding component of small cities and towns in the bottom is quickly taking shape to characterize China’s urban development and urbanization.