Chengshi zhongguo de luoji by Yingfang Chen (review)

China's post-1978 reform has led to unprecedented urbanization, generating extremely complex and diverse patterns and processes of a rural-urban transformation. This great transformation has drawn much attention for understanding urban China, most of which was merely the countryside a few decades ago.

City: Chinese Logic studies various mechanisms that create the transformation. Using the state-society frame for analysis, it insightfully conceptualizes the mechanisms in urban China, whcih the author names as Chinese logic. These mechanisms consist of three layers of key elements that interact with each other (p. 31). The first layer is the fundamental power bodies of political and economic groups, key socialist legacies, and local power groups. Through a "strong logic" that the author refers to as major causality and interaction, these power bodies result in the second layer of ideologies, the party-state's principles, strategies, and objectives, as well as basic institutions. Based on a "weak logic," the second layer of elements results in and interacts with the third layer of legitimacy, social and cultural elements, and social actions/movements within the transformation.

In the frame of the mechanisms, this book provides a comprehensive examination of the transformation—urbanization, urban development, urban social movements, urban social structure, and epistemology/methodology. Each of the five parts includes several chapters. In the first part on urbanization, it examines three aspects: (1) the institutionalized formation of rural migrant workers and the construction of their identities, (2) the mechanism that absorbs rural migrants in the city, and (3) local farmers' urbanization during rural land expropriation. In the part on urban development, it examines socialist urban renewal, the crisis of legitimacy of urban development, and residential exclusion. In the part on urban movements, it examines how the urban underclass and the urban middle class claim their rights and protect their properties and interest, and how their actions become limited in the urban development. It also examines the value system that backs up the urban movements and the emergence of China's civil society. In the part on urban social structure, it pays attention to the transformation of family systems and urban poverty, as well as compares the social structures between China and Russia. In the last part on epistemology/methodology, this book rethinks how to study rural/urban China and urban underclass, as well as to understand and improve Chinese scholars' paradigm and empirical studies of urban China from a sociological perspective.

In general, this book tends to argue for an uneven urban power relation: In comparison with society, the state gains more power of constructing and interpreting the meanings of urbanization and urban development, as well as of legalizing and enforcing them accordingly. Society and urban movements with less power derived from social justice, rights, and social demands are subject to the state.

Two significant features in the book can draw any reader's attention. One is its critical perspective, and the other is rich empirical data. First, the book criticizes those well-accepted notions such as modernization, development, and urbanization, and questions the legitimacy and our common understanding of these notions. It points out that the fact of complete acceptance of these notions legitimizes any type of urban transformation, ignoring social values and justice in urban China. Discussing China's urban social structure, it highlights family systems as China's unique elements bonding the structure. It also questions our understanding of Fei Xiaotong's elaboration of rural China as the traditional Chinese society, for, as the author argues, a historical urban China such as ancient cities and towns exists and deserves our further study.

Second, this book uses Shanghai as a case to support the arguments and theoretical construction. The studies of Shanghai (e.g., its squatters, underclass, and middle class, and their actions and interactions with urban authorities) provide very rich empirical data. A vivid example is a story about urban residents' resistance of a street's (a Chinese local administration unit) redevelopment of the lower...