Urban China

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Ethnography, with its focus on everyday experience, can yield significant insights into understanding migrant mental health in contexts where signs of severe mental distress remain largely imperceptible, and more generally, into how stresses and strains are lived through the spaces, times, and affective atmospheres of the city. Migrant ethnography can help us reconsider the oft-made connection between everyday stress and mental ill health. In this contribution, drawing on field evidence in central and peripheral Shanghai, we highlight the importance of attending to the forms of spatial and temporal agency through which migrants actively manage the ways in which the city affects their subjectivity. These everyday subjective practices serve to problematize the very concept of 'mental health'. The paper engages in a critical dialogue with sociological and epidemiological research that assesses migrant mental health states through the lens of the vulnerability or resilience of this social group, often reducing citiness to a series of environmental 'stressors'. Distinct from methods ascertaining or arguing against the prevalence of mental disorders among urban migrants, the insight of urban ethnography is to open up a space to explore the mediations that operate dialogically between the city as lived by migrants through particular places and situations and forms of distress.

In the past decade Chinese officials, scholars, and journalists have made the term ‘shiminhua’ a buzzword in discussions of the country’s urbanization. An innovation of PRC writers, the term relates to the problem of turning new urban residents into full members of the community, in legal, sociological, attitudinal, and/or economic senses. The term is cited to legitimate or contest policies directed at those on the margins of cities. Rather than offering a definition, or even a single English translation, this paper tries to make sense of shiminhua by linking it to several themes. Laden with ambiguities, problematic assumptions, and elite prejudice, the term is of little analytic value. Nonetheless, rhetoric about shiminhua cuts to the core of conflicts over legitimate membership in urban communities. The term’s use offers a window onto debates over major issues in China’s political and social development, including the extent of police control, legitimation of social stratification, and the sort of welfare regime the country should build.

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of a number of urban projects which, under the banner of experimentation, have promoted alternative models of city-making capable, in theory, of creating sustainable built environments. Among these supposedly experimental models, the smart city and the eco-city stand out in terms of geographical diffusion, and are hailed by their advocates as the mark of an innovative urbanism based on a scientific approach to urban development. Through the analysis of Hong Kong and Masdar City, examples of a smart-city agenda and an eco-city project respectively, this paper questions the sustainability of so-called smart cities and eco-cities, by investigating the extent to which they are developed in a controlled and systematic manner as their developers claim. More specifically, the paper counterclaims mainstream understandings of smart and ecological urbanism, arguing that what are promoted as cohesive settlements shaped by a homogeneous vision of the sustainable city, are actually fragmented cities made of disconnected and often incongruous pieces of urban fabric. Theoretically, these claims are discussed through the concept of Frankenstein urbanism which draws upon Mary Shelley's novel as a metaphor for unsuccessful experiments generated by the forced union of different, incompatible elements.

As a result of globalization and intensive modernization, cities in the People’s Republic of China have been undergoing a transformational process in the previous decades. An increasing number of cities are trying to achieve developmental goals by attracting investments and organizing city events of international importance. The impact of significant city events on urban spatial structure is a question that is worth exploring. This year (2010) the world EXPO will be held in Shanghai, with the EXPO site attracting an estimated 700,000 visitors per day. Chinese planners see EXPO 2010 as a way to firmly establish China as a member of the developed nations and underlining its global impact. With EXPO 2010 Shanghai as an example, the research explores the influence of government-led city events on urban spatial structure while focusing on the most relevant aspects of urban structure such as the EXPO site location, transport construction, site planning, and post-use.

The growing prevalence of foreign media consumption, including from Japan, has received considerable notice in recent work on PRC youth culture. To date, however, few studies have considered how youth of different social backgrounds perceive their consumption of Japanese popular culture in the context of the Party-state’s ‘patriotic education’ campaign waged in schools and in the mass media. Studies have also overlooked how rural and urban youth in China juxtapose the images and themes conveyed in the Japanese media that they consume with school and domestic media messages. Drawing on interviews with middle school students in Shanghai and Henan, the present study addresses these issues. It finds that while a majority of youths from different backgrounds express animosity toward Japan, they separate these feelings from their passion for Japanese popular culture. In some cases, consumption of Japanese media also allows teenagers to feel that they ‘know’—or even appreciate—the other country better. Amid the anti-Japanese messages currently circulating in PRC schools and domestic media, consumption of Japanese popular culture manifests a form of ‘expressive individualism’ among teenagers, who creatively construct their own notions of patriotism, national memory, and Sino–Japanese relations.

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco-cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards “green capitalism”. It argues for a critical engagement with new-build eco-city projects, first by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco-cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world's least wealthy states. Second, the paper investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Third, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco-cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and “green grabbing”. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these “emerald cities”, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.

This article investigates Taipingqiao urban redevelopment projects in Shanghai that have conserved the traditional ‘Shikumen’ architectural form with the goal of exploring the driving-forces behind Shanghai’s spatial restructuring and to shed light on the new mechanisms for public–private partnership evolving in China. A model called a ‘rent gap seeking regime’ (RGSR) is proposed to explain the mechanisms behind China’s urban redevelopment. It is found that the logic of capital accumulation has dominated the reshaping of Shikumen’s spatial forms and has been transformed into symbolic real estate values. It is argued that a pro-growth
coalition between district government and foreign capital emerged during this process of urban restructuring; the paper analyses the features of how this coalition exercises power. Finally, based on empirical research, the paper engages Western regime analysis in a theoretical dialogue.

• Lena Scheen writes a lucid and compelling account of literature written amidst Shanghai’s sweeping transformations from 1990-2010. She evokes lived experiences of the city via literary and cultural analysis informed by field research on influential authors, their texts and their public reception. Shanghai Literary Imaginings is essential reading on turn-of-the-millennium Shanghai literary culture.  -- Robin Visser, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Shanghai Literary Imaginings offers significant new insights into contemporary Chinese urban culture from a highly innovative methodological perspective. Its truly interdisciplinary approach makes Shanghai Literary Imaginings stand out from other books that comment on contemporary Chinese city life. -- Michel Hockx, SOAS, University of London
• Shanghai Literary Imaginings is an admirable feat of organization, analysis, translation, and interpretation, bringing to light a large body of work that would otherwise lie buried, at least in the western world of Chinese studies. -- Andrew David Field, Duke Kunshan University

In "The long shadow of the state: financializing the Chinese city" Fulong Wu reflects on the role of the state in financialization processes. The language of symbiosis, with key concepts such as mutualism, parasitism and commensalism, but also cleaning symbiosis, metabiosis, co-evolution, mutation and mimicry could help us to conceptualize state/finance relationships. Finance and the state have co-evolved and continue to do so. The role of the state in financialization processes often appears to be contradictory. Parasitism by finance may have already limited the state's capacity to respond to urban financialization. In a seemingly commensal relationship, the state may also be facilitating finance. In fact, such patterns may be indicative of a more mutualistic imperative in which the state tries to further its own interests through finance rather than at the expense of finance-it is here that Wu provides most evidence for the Chinese case. In other words, the state creates the conditions for the financialization of the city and by doing so it brings the characteristics of finance inside the state. In the process, the state mimics finance in order to extend state power and mutatesas a result of the specific co-evolution with finance. 
KEYWORDS: Financialization; the state; symbiosis; co-evolution; mutation

In 2018, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was, by most measures, more powerful than at any other time in its history and had become one of the most powerful countries in the world. Its economy faced serious challenges, including from the ongoing ‘trade war’ with the US, but still ranked as the world’s second largest. Its Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, continued to carve paths of influence and economic integration across several continents. A deft combination of policy, investment, and entrepreneurship has also turned the PRC into a global ‘techno-power’. It aims, with a good chance of success, at becoming a global science and technology leader by 2049 – one hundred years from the founding of the PRC.

In surveying the various ways in which the Party-state wields its hard, soft, and sharp power, the China Story Yearbook: Power offers readers a sense of the diversity of power at work both in China and abroad. Citizens of the PRC have long negotiated the state’s influence; increasingly, diaspora communities and other actors are now being subject to its might. As with previous editions in the series, we place important developments in historical context, and adopt a cross-disciplinary approach: it is our view that economy and politics cannot be divorced from culture, history, and society. The Yearbook provides accessible analysis of the main events and trends of the year and is an essential tool for understanding China’s growing power and influence around the world.

Why do central and local government initiatives aiming to curb the proliferation of garbage in Beijing and its disposal continue to be unsuccessful? Is the Uberization of waste picking through online-to-offline (O2O) garbage retrieval companies able to decrease waste and improve the lives of waste pickers? Most citizens of Beijing are well aware of the fact that their city is besieged by waste. Yet instead of taking individual action, they sit and wait for the governments at various levels to tell them what to do. And even if/when they adopt a proactive position, this does not last. Official education drives targeting the consumers are organized regularly and with modest success, but real solutions are not forthcoming. Various environmental non-governmental organizations are at work to raise the level of consciousness of the population, to change individual attitudes towards wasteful behavior, but seemingly with little overall effects.

深圳富士康工人的生活方式，某个程度是一种“疏离都市状态”，社会互动机会匮乏。本文从人文地理学角度，探索怎样的结构过程，让深圳富士康工人产生了社会疏离?强调疏离都市状态与劳动过程及其地理空间性有深层关系，多重尺度形构的打工体制，对农民工社会网络发展产生压抑，减少阶层流动机会，加上在企业尺度上的劳动控制因素之交互作用，产生高流动率的工作換，加剧工人在异地的疏离状态。面对持续的打工城市化现象，我们主张必须朝民工市民化、雇佣关系正规化的方向，推进户籍制
度、劳动政策和都市政策三个面向的改革议程。
Although there have been extensive studies on Chinese urbanization, few researches focus on the migrant workers in the world factory city and contextualize their livelihoods in those neighborhoods. This paper pays attention to the new-generation migrant workers' way of life in Shenzheng's Foxconn city, under-
stood as a relevant pattern of China's urbanism. Main research methods used were quantitative questionnaire analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews. Purposive sampling are used for collection of samples in field investigations conducted in July 2010, March 2011 and July 2011, each took around two weeks. 316 questionnaires were issued nearby Foxconn's plant in Shenzhen. Based on the first-hand survey data and in-depth interviews, we find evidence of“social alienation”is very common to these workers' urban experience. Furthermore, we argue that the interplay of hukou system, urban policy, Foxconn's enterprise strategies and labor control politics contributes to such alienated urbanism. Besides, there is not much opportunities for tech-
nique learning at the Pugong's(普工) work unit. On the production lines they are faced with base-level management's supervisory pressure as well as manipulation of workplace politics that strive for productivity. Offwork, Pugong is the wanderer in the city without much chance for social interaction. Moreover, the workers
are coping with huge disadvantages in regards of economic and hukou system if they wanted to settle in Shenzhen. Most Pugong would not settle and get married in Shenzhen, their family status is most often "split household" in two different places. Finally, this study highlights the multi-scalar institutional barriers that
squeeze the development of migrant workers' social networks and calls on an institutional reform.

China’s second-generation rural-to-urban migrant youth, who grew up in their parents’ adopted cities, are still denied urban residential status and suffer from the institutional closure of higher education opportunities. This article explores in ethnographic detail the experiences and subjectivities of migrant youth in Shanghai who since 2008 have been channeled to secondary vocational schools. It highlights the direct involvement of the local state in reproducing a social hierarchy in which migrant youth provide cheap labor for manufacturing and low-skilled service industries. It reveals how contention over the limited choice of majors and career trajectories persists between state intention, market demand and individual aspirations. The time and space provided by vocational schooling enable migrant students to gain urban habitus and form networks across boundaries. Vocational schools have thus become a unique site for studying education and class reproduction in a late- socialist context.

This chapter introduces the urban issue of the year — the air quality problem in China’s cities — in relation to the ‘Civilised City’ system. The system combines Maoist-style campaigns with ideals of urban modernisation, bestowing
the honour of the title ‘Civilised City’ on chosen places of reform. A hybrid form of social control and urban governance, the National Civilised City program sets out goals that encompass government accountability, air quality monitoring and improved public infrastructure including cultural facilities, in addition to programs promoting volunteerism and ‘healthy’ ideals for urban youth. It is a broad-based approach for all cities that recalibrates the party-state’s political and social agendas in relation to standard urban development benchmarks.

Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China are forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair's formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture-ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong-style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed-use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair's prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.

This article examines how the narratives of qilou (arcaded buildings) have changed through three very different moments over a period of almost a century. As a result, what public discourse once perceived as a new, modern form now serves as a symbol of traditional local culture. The metamorphosis of the qilou narratives in response to different visions, social circumstances and practices provides a good entry point for understanding the contestations and dynamics that have shaped priorities in seeing and thinking about urban space in South China. By relating subjective experiences with the physical environments, the case of qilou challenges the predominant framework of nation-state as an anchor for understanding contemporary China, and points to the significance of regional dynamics within and beyond international borders.

While the conventions of area studies scholarship have historically limited landscape analysis in China, the globalisation of scholarship and the new built environments of the reform-era Chinese city invite contemporary assessment. In Shenzhen, China’s leading Special Economic Zone, the planning and construction of a new city centre complex are designed to symbolise the city’s transformation from a manufacturing zone to a ‘world city’ and to function as its service-sector core. This landscape analysis applies the perspective of transnational urbanism to assess how the effort to instantiate ‘world city’ status in the built environment works
through plans, ideologies and representations of domestic and transnational e ́lites to establish legitimacy. The continuing strong role of the state in China makes the production of a new city centre a state-dominated enterprise; contesting meanings of these new landscapes takes place indirectly and symbolically in the arena of the state’s spiritual civilisation campaign.

The paper addresses the problem of the cross-cultural study of sexuality in global times. I take issue with the inherent bias in analytical frameworks and theoretical assumptions that typically structure Western studies of non-normative sexuality in ‘other’ places, and provide a critical reconsideration of the challenges to queer studies of transnational sexuality.
Recent anthropology-based studies of transnational sexualities and sexual globalization argue that Anglo-US queer studies emphasize desirable queerness as modeled on modern, Western ideologies of sexual freedom, identity, openness, and individual rights. The effect is one of considerable political consequence, where Western queer life-worlds become the default analytical yardstick for cross-cultural comparison, and where Anglo-US-centric categorizations forever anchor desirable queer formations within a Western knowledge circuit.
My discussion draws upon my own research of Chinese women’s narratives about lala, or lesbian, community and activism in post-millennial Beijing. I consider what lesbian identity, activism and rights might mean in a Chinese political and cultural context, and ponder the possibilities and limits of current analytical frameworks in this respect. I conclude that ethnography as method, theory, and academic-activist ethics, provides an invaluable tool for the study of transnational sexualities. It helps us move beyond the binaries of absolute and categorical differences between a Western queer self and the non-Western lesser other.

In the recent past, much research attention has been focused on the rising unemployment and rapid decline in income of the urban population in China. This was attributed to the restructuring of old institutions, namely State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) and Collective-owned Enterprises (COE), which had released many workers into the open market. Consequently, the number of "urban underclass" populace has proportionally increased. Furthermore, the large number of rural migrants who are traditionally poor and lack educational skills add to this new urban underclass. With the interplay of market forces, a new antagonism between the redundant workers and the rural migrants exists within the urban social stratification. Taking a macro view, the paper explores the dimensions of urban poverty in China through examining the rising number of beggars in urban areas and addresses issues related to the causes of urban poverty, in particular the new social structure in urban China, the policy initiatives that tackle the problem of increasing urban poverty, and the responsibility of the state in ensuring welfare.

Shanghai's Pudong financial district is known for its spectacular skyline, which Michelle Huang has referred to as 'a copy of a global city' – a reading that this article pushes further. What does this 'copy of a global city' tell us about the intricate relationships between globalisation, capitalism and urbanity? Whereas Koolhaas proposed the notion of the 'generic city' to grasp the future Asian city, this article argues that his reading reifies the conservative premise that globalisation equals homogenisation. Although Abbas' concept of the 'fake' comes closer to what we see emerging in Asia, it simultaneously reifies the problematic idea of an authentic original. Instead, the article proposes reading Pudong as a shanzhai version of the global city: meaning the culture of Chinese pirated, 'fake' products. By linking the notion of shanzhai to that of the global city, it aims to recuperate the locality, fluidity and peculiarity of the global city.

This study is based on field research in Peace Neighborhood in
Shanghai (2016–2018), where I followed a small group of “nail
householders” (dingzihu 钉子户) protesting the upcoming demolition
of their neighborhood, and recorded their stories. Whereas
previous studies on nail householders have focused on the residents’
strategies claiming their rights, I aim to add a subjective
dimension to better understand the individual experience of
forced eviction as an intrusion on people’s sense of place and
belonging. Taking the oral stories by one of the residents as my
main focus, I argue that the act of storytelling itself can become
an important form of urban resistance, recapturing a sense of
being acting subjects in the face of experiences that make people
feel powerless, unseen, and unheard.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2019.1656362

Since the Global Financial Crisis, the notion of securitization has become familiar to urban scholars, though research has been limited to mortgage-backed securities. This paper attempts to delineate the distinctive urban outcomes of securitization techniques applied to real estate, taking Hong Kong REITs (H-REITs) as a case study. It examines the way through which liquid H-REIT capital anchors into the built environment, and how this process impacts the life of local communities. The study shows that the urban dynamics of REIT investment contrast with the corporate environment and asset management objectives of the initiator/sponsor groups of H-REIT structures, a set of characteristics that are captured by the notion of “management styles.” Amongst the three management styles identified in the paper, those developed by the Hong Kong family-based groups have not been sufficiently active to produce significant effects on the built environment. In contrast, the Link REIT has an aggressive value enhancement strategy that has reconfigured the social geographies of retail consumption across the whole territory, to the detriment of social housing estate residents. These results support the recognition that the financialization of the built environment tends to exacerbate social polarization and to trigger political conflicts, but they must be weighed against the contingent conditions in which real estate securitization take place.

While previous studies have documented the trials of rural-to-urban migration in post-reform China, little is known of the consequences of urban demolition and attendant uncertainty on migrant mental health. Exploring the affective and subjective dimensions of life lived amidst rubble in a migrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Shanghai, this essay describes and analyzes small-scale practices of endurance through dynamics of time, place, and sociality. We understand these modes of dwelling in a ruined environment as key to what we refer to as the management of subjectivity, producing moments of being that potentially enable to feel and act otherwise. Considering the management of subjectivity in its own rights rather than as mere echoes of postsocialist governmentalities, we sustain a dialogue with recent writing on the production of happy and self-reliant marginalized subjects through the Chinese authorities' turn to “therapeutic governance.”

Villages in the city (VICs) have become a crucial topic within Chinese urban studies, spatially exposing the contradictions between fast urbanization processes and former rural communities. Beside the social implications of these areas encapsulated in metropolitan cityscapes, their redevelopment into future gated residential communities poses a series of questions about local socio-spatial practices put in transition. For instance their overcrowded built environment, absorbing historical stratifications, is under extreme pressures facing “pro-growth” municipal urban planning visions. Lijiao village represents in Guangzhou a crucial case study to illustrate how local listed cultural heritage could confront tested tabula rasa approaches, redefining the processes embedded in these kind of regeneration projects. The paper aims to demonstrates how the presence of historical relics, permitted the activation of a series of processes diverging from the neoliberal strategies applied by Chinese urban planning bureaucracy, questioning alternative methodologies which had to re-scale actions and cooperate with local consistency. On one side the creation of lists of buildings under preservation activated the compact intervention of institutions and experts, determining rules affecting the negotiation through legitimated procedures. On the other the intervention of the private investor, seeking an efficient quantity distribution over the demolished village, perceived local memory a tangible obstacle opposing the development.
Their contraposition promoted formalized spatial boundaries instead of integrating differences. Segregating cultural heritage from its local morphology, cleaning up history, therefore appears as the spatial compromise to safeguard relics elsewhere forcibly demolished or indifferently relocated. Preservation tactics and new urban development, stays one next to the other without considering the collective memory built over centuries of local practices. The spatial codification to promote development, seems the only way to surpass the contradictions of thirty years of fast urban development.

As China is increasingly integrated into the processes of economic, politi-
cal, social, and cultural globalization, important questions arise about how
Chinese people perceive and evaluate such processes. At the same time, inter-
national communication scholars have long been interested in how local,
national, and transnational media communications shape people’s attitudes
and values. Combining these two concerns, this book examines a range of
questions pertinent to public opinion toward globalization in urban China:
To what degree are the urban residents in China exposed to the influences
from the outside world? How many transnational social connections does
a typical urban Chinese citizen have? How often do they consume foreign
media? To what extent are they aware of the notion of globalization, and
what do they think about it? Do they believe that globalization is benefi-
cial to China, to the city where they live, and to them personally? How do
people’s social connections and communication activities shape their views
toward globalization and the outside world? This book tackles these and
other questions systematically by analyzing a four-city comparative survey
of urban Chinese residents, demonstrating the complexities of public opinion
in China. Media consumption does relate, though by no means straightfor-
wardly, to people’s attitudes and beliefs, and this book provides much needed
information and insights about Chinese public opinion on globalization. It
also develops fresh conceptual and empirical insights on issues such as pub-
lic opinion toward US-China relations, Chinese people’s nationalistic senti-
ments, and approaches to analyze attitudes toward globalization.

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“Modernity” continues to be a useful historiographical tool, however, it is tension-laden both theoretically and empirically. Conceptually, “modernity” can denote either a quality (“modern-ness”) or a condition referring to a specific period in history. With regard to empirical research, the essay takes a look at the recent history of China, arguing that although there exists a line between what is modern and what is not (between modernity and its Other[s]), this often appears fuzzy when we look at concrete historical manifestations. Two case studies bear this out: The first looks at the possibility of locating a rural modernity, challenging conventional scholarship that has situated the modern almost exclusively in China’s cities. The second case study elucidates the relationship between “Chinese” and “global” modernity, striking a balance between universalistic and pluralistic understandings of modernity. In sum, the essay shows that it is essential to incorporate the paradoxes inherent in the modern condition into the analytical framework.

At what point does a meaningful neighborhood, a community based on neighborly bonds, intimacy, proximity, informality and contact  become a segregated colony, enclave based on citizenship, economic status, vice and ethnicity? Park’s 1915 essay on ‘The City’ invites urban scholars to look more closely at this question, to explore what constitutes a neighborhood, and neighborhood change, and in so doing also processes of segregation. On the basis of this invitation, this study seeks to provide a broad overview of segregation research in China. It is not a study of whether the concept of segregation, as utilized by Park in 1915, exists in China today. Rather, it takes Park’s programmatic vision about segregation research and considers what research on segregation is like in China today. This is not a study of “actual” segregation, but rather a survey of the types of research covering various forms of socio-spatial differentiation in urban China.
This report begins with 1) a problem definition to establish why segregation is a significant urban phenomenon worth studying. It lays out why Park thought it should be studied, and how. As part of the problem definition, and on the basis of the following literature review, segregation is established as an urban process in China that is worth studying, but on different grounds. 2) The modes of segregation research is based on a literature review of research on urban China predominantly focused on the past 20 years. The results of this review were clustered in three dominant modes of segregation research in urban China: material, legal and morphological. The empirical research design substantiating these claims and their methodologies are considered. 3) Key research areas are defined, based on empirical gaps identified and potential for urban theorization.
The scope of this report is delimited to segregation research as it pertains to urban spatial form and does not cover other forms of social group differentiation like labor market segmentation or demographic change. These processes are included to the extent that they are referenced in the segregation research (ie. Related to danwei or the middle class). It serves as a complement to the scoping study on association, sociability and agency, which deals similarly with sociospatial differentiation, but focused on research about concepts like “neighborhood” and “community.” The goal of the report is to design a program of research on segregation in urban China, inspired by Park but informed by the rich breadth of work currently underway.

This article develops the concept of territorial urbanization in China through the historical conditions and research design problems of the Chinese administrative divisions in relation to comparative territorial thought. Subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed in China and the state maintains powers to establish new cities and enlarge and merge existing ones, and even eliminate others, with significant implications for geographically targeted economic development and governing powers. These territorial strategies, which administer urban expansion, rationalize government administration, and organize capital investment through continuing economic growth, are negotiated within the political system of the Chinese party-state and decided through non-transparent processes by the Chinese central government. Yet literature on urbanization in China often subsumes party-state territorialization practices under internationally recognizable epistemologies such as urban and regional planning and simplifies and contains their urban-economic transformations to fixed spaces in zone development. This analysis examines cities within the system of administrative divisions and pursues the question of the reproduction of state power through territorial urbanization in the Shanghai Pudong New Area, where a territorial merger doubled its size and central government policy imagines the future of China’s international financial center.

Taking Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby and Ge Hongbing's Sandbed as paradigms of the society of the spectacle, this chapter will scrutinise the tensions imposed on the individual by this society. How do the protagonists negotiate their identity in Shanghai’s fastchanging cityscape that is moving towards a high capitalist mode? And how does this negotiation intersect with gender? Being subsumed by the ideologised space, do the protagonists merely behave as uncritical consumers whose lives are determined by fleeting coincidental events and thrills, or do they still act as self-determining agents? How do they deal with questions on moral agency? Are sex and consumption ends in themselves, or do the protagonists use sex and consumption as a means to the end of self-expression and/or searching the self? Before addressing these questions, however, I will first briefly discuss the promotion and reception of Shanghai Baby and Sandbed, and then contextualise the novels’ portrayal of the city as sexualised space in Shanghai’s literary tradition, in which the trope of Shanghai as a seductive femme fatale is a recurrent trait.

This article aims to explore the mechanisms of the development zone fever in the Suzhou region, located in the fast-growing Yangtze River Delta, and investigates, from an institutional perspective, the practice of relevant intragovernmental governance in the context of rapid industrialisation since the 1990s. A specifi c mode of governance—the evaluative economic indicators scheme inherited from the earlier socialist planning
system, combined with the party/state’s promotion/evaluation system—plays an essential role in this transformation of farmland property rights. However, this model of development is not necessarily helpful for local fi nancial conditions and it results
in the disclacement of peasants and the loss of land resources. Based on the resulting ‘dilemmas of governance’, it is argued that, in addition to the ‘economic paradigm’, which focuses on consequences of fi scal reforms and devolution, scholars should pay more attention to factors such as the party/state’s promotion/evaluation system and the stress between the evaluative indicators system maintained by the central/local
sectoral command and the territorial jurisdictions. This could be helpful in gaining a fuller understanding of the dynamics and tensions of local developments in China.

This article explores the centrality of China's cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating and consuming skateboarding. China's urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding manoeuvres (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industry. After skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets in the 1990s, and once video became easier to circulate digitally through streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, the search for spots to perform and capture unsanctioned street skateboarding spread to China's urban landscapes, beginning with Shenzhen. China's cities are sites of global desire among skateboarders for the perfect surfaces and obstacles created in the built environment and the speed at which they are produced. Using skate video as an archive I make four arguments. First, China's cities imputed with a mythical character; endless spots produced with miraculous speed. Second, skate videos re-map China's cities through the skater's gaze, a form of urban knowledge both unique and widely-shared. Third, the search for spots indexes urban development in China, privileging the recent and shunning the past. Fourth skateboarding in China's cities create spaces for inter-cultural encounter between skateboarders and authority, the public and other skateboarders. The article concludes by discussing the utility of skate video as an alternative visual archive of urban China for foreign audiences and increasingly for skate communities in China itself.

The 1950s and 1960s together was a period of substantial change in China, seeing the cementation of Communist power under Chairman Mao, and the implementation of before unprecedented government orchestrated reform and social re-construction. In coming to power, the Communist party gained the majority of its support (volunteers in the Red Army and supplies for it) from rural agricultural labourers. The Communist ideology of social equality and the direct promise of Mao to bridge the urban and rural inequality in living standards, infrastructure, wages, and more, that had began to widen in the late 19th and early 20th century, won the favour of the impoverished, in comparison to China's urban population, rural population.

Despite the promises of the the Communist Party, and Mao himself, by the early 1950s, focus quickly moved away from the rural population it had relied so heavily on to come to power, to a focus on urban industry. The urban-rural inequality of pre-liberation China not only continued into the 1960s, but in some factors, the policies of the CCP only exacerbated the gap in living standards and infrastructure, with China's rural sphere falling even further into backwardness, stagnating behind the modernising, although very much underdeveloped and slum-esque, urban sphere.

The bike sharing phenomenon rising across China has illustrated the power of new technology to effectively address long standing transport problems. As China’s lack of a regulated environment, willingness to pioneer new innovation and tolerant society make it the perfect base for large scale change, the resulting temporary chaos can deemed acceptable as cities become real life testbeds to an urban transport revolution.

In the wake of the First Opium War, Christianity entered Xiamen and thereafter played a major role in the modernization of Gulangyu Island. Trinity Church, built in 1934, was a witness to the prosperity of Christianity on this island. Despite the harsh repression during Mao’s political campaigns, Trinity Church survived and revived after its reopening in the late 1970s. However, the church was doomed to decline because of the state-led commercialization driven by the development of tourism on the island. As Gulangyu experienced rapid social, cultural, and demographic changes, Christianity on the island in general and Trinity Church in particular were inevitably affected. This chapter, based on an ethnographic research of Trinity Church, reveals the fate of Christianity on the changing island.