The Great Urban Transformation Politics of Land and Property in China [Hardcover]

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

The Great Urban Transformationexplores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.

Stands as a bold and ground-breaking attempt to contest popular beliefs and challenge perceived notions. Hsing is to be congratulated for producing such an important milestone on the journey of scholarly enquiries into the gigantic and profound great urban transformation with a scale no less significant than the one masterfully addressed by Polanyi half of century ago. It is a milestone that sets the beginning of a long journey. --Annals of the Association of American Geographer

A magisterial study of the territorial competition that ignites this process in core cities like Shanghai, as well as the urban fringes and (most wrenchingly) the rural hinterlands. Reform era decentralization and market restructul£5