ABSTRACT
Urban localities in China, like all other sites of human activity, are a complex web of social and environmental processes. Existing Chinese law, custom, and a wide range of related social and environmental processes have generated a distinction between urban and rural localities that is reminiscent of the boundaries between two countries, albeit governed by a single party-state bureaucracy. The objective of this chapter is to elaborate a subset of the overdetermined effects shaping changes in the production and appropriation of surplus within these urban localities-showing how these changes simultaneously effect and are effected by the plethora of relationships composing the social formation, including the aforementioned processes shaping the urban and rural as distinct geo-social spaces within the larger Chinese social formation. Elaboration of the dynamic processes of change and the consequent contradictions exposed within the urban sites of production and appropriation of surplus provide another step forward in comprehending the larger transition to capitalism in the Chinese social formation, a transition that may ultimately undermine the boundaries between urban and rural (as well as the boundaries between China and an emerging global capitalist economic space).
