Cities with Invisible Walls (review)

Reviews 375 Kam Wing Chan. Cities with Invisible Walls. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1994. ix, 193 pp. Hardcover $69.00, isbn 0-19-585764-x. Almost all cities in traditional China were enclosed by city walls. The walls were constructed to protect palaces, temples, granaries, and urban residences against barbarian invasion, tribal uprising, and peasant rebellion. Perhaps as a symbol to eliminate the class difference between the urban elites and rural peasants, the Communist regime has demolished many city walls in China, including the most elaborate walls surrounding the city ofBeijing. Ironically, while the 1949 revolution led to the destruction ofphysical walls that delineated urban communities, it has also constructed invisible walls, in an institutional sense, around every Chinese city, in order to limit rural-to-urban migration. Kam Wing Chan's book with its metaphorical title is a welcome effort to reinterpret the urbanization process in post-1949 China, a process that has often been misinterpreted in Western literature because ofthe political rhetoric issued by the Chinese government. Cines with Invisible Walls is a revision and extension of the author's 1988 dissertation at the University ofToronto. While the dissertation focused on the Maoist era, the present study extends the analysis up to the early 1990s, covering much material in the post-reform period. The present volume is organized in five lengthy chapters and three useful appendixes, which clarify the definition and growth of the urban population from 1950 to 1990. The lengthy bibliography is a nearly exhaustive compilation of all useful literature in both English and Chinese, and it provides a valuable guide for serious students ofurbanization in China. Chapter 1 is a critical review ofboth Western and Chinese literature on China's post-1949 urbanization. According to the author, many studies on China's urbanization and development by Western scholars in the 1970s were strongly influenced by the political message ofself-reliant agricultural development and praised the Maoist "pro-rural" approach. It was not until the early 1980s that scholars in the West realized the heavily skewed Maoist strategy in favor ofindustry. Chapter 2 clarifies various urban population definitions used in Chinese literature between 1950 and 1990 and also traces the overall urbanization trends. Chapter 3 discusses the pursuit of industrialization with minimum cost to urbanization by dictating prices prejudicial to agriculture and restricting rural-tourban migration. With the institution of "invisible walls," China was relatively "under-urbanized" compared to other developing countries with similar levels of© 1996 by University industrialization, a phenomenon characteristic ofChina's modernization process. ofHawai'i PressChapter 4 analyzes the implementation ofpragmatic policies in the post-Mao period , such as household farming in the early 1980s, an "open-door" policy to promote foreign trade and investment, and a reassessment ofthe role ofthe city in 376 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 2, Fall 1996 national development by allowing surplus rural workers to improve the urban economy, particularly in the service and infrastructure sectors. However, the majority of the floating population in Chinese cities is still being discriminated against as the state refuses to subsidize urban benefits to many urban newcomers. To these temporary migrants, the invisible walls of Chinese cities have not been completely demolished. In the concluding chapter, the author predicts, based on the current dynamic rate of economic growth, that in the coming two decades the urban percentage of the population of China will almost double and reach the 50 percent mark around 2010. The author believes that China will follow the pack of newly industrializing economies in East Asia and experience this rapid transition in the early decades of the next century. Urbanization is a transformation of the occupation structure involving the transfer of a large number ofagricultural workers in rural areas to nonagricultural settings in towns and cities. However, while countries and urban centers like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong are able to import the bulk of their food from the world market to sustain their prosperous urban economies, would China be able to do the same in order to feed its everincreasing urban population? Many scholars feel that with a population approaching 1.3 billion by the year 2000, no country could feed China except...