China’s multiple urbanizations since 1949: Toward a conceptualization

Source abstract

This paper reconceptualizes China’s post-1949 urbanization by identifying and theorizing three distinct but interrelated forms: population, institutional, and territorial urbanization. Prevailing accounts concentrate largely on population urbanization—measured by the de facto urban population (including migrants)—and interpret China’s urban transformation during the reform era through neoliberal or capitalist frameworks. Such readings, however, risk misrecognizing the underlying political logic of the process. They privilege capital while underestimating the structuring power of the party-state. Drawing on national statistics and institutional analysis, this study demonstrates that although population urbanization has accelerated dramatically since the onset of reform, it remains fundamentally circumscribed by the enduring hukou (household registration) system, which continues to regulate migrants’ access to urban social benefits. Institutional urbanization, defined with reference to the urban hukou population, reveals the persistent rural-urban divide embedded in China’s socialist political economy. Territorial urbanization, manifested in the administrative reclassification of rural areas into urban jurisdictions, underscores the state’s active expansion and consolidation of its core territory. Taken together, these three dimensions point to a mode of urbanization driven less by market imperatives than by Leninist-socialist party-state logics. In doing so, the paper challenges market-centered interpretations and advances a state-centered framework for understanding China’s urban transformation.