ABSTRACT
The pattern and processes of land development at the national level identified in the foregoing chapters in Part II need further explanations and demonstration at a finer scale. The phenomenal development of China’s land resources since the reforms has taken place simultaneously with an accelerated urbanization based on both cities and the countryside. For most of the years in the Mao era, Chinese cities, especially large cities, were not able to grow freely in population and land because of the state’s practices of urban containment for ideological and strategic considerations.1 Despite a substantial expansion of the industrial sector and a significant growth of industrialization, China’s level of urbanization increased by only 7 percentage points over a time span of nearly thirty years and it never exceeded 20 per cent until the post-Mao regime took over in the late 1970s.2
Institutional changes in central-local political and fiscal relations have, coupled with the increased influence of the forces of global competition, created a new political economy in which rapid urbanization has become not only possible but also highly desirable to municipal governments. The result has been a dramatic expansion of cities and accelerated growth of urbanization. Chinese statistical authorities reported that China had 43 per cent of its population living in urban settlements in 2005 and its urban built-up area expanded from 8,842 in 1984 to 32,520.72 sq km in 2005.3 By the end of 2007, China reportedly had a total urban population of 590 million which accounted for 44.9 per cent of its total population. It remains a subject for scrutiny exactly how much of these official statistics should be discounted because of the distortion of statistical reclassification and frequent administrative changes. It appears certain, however, that urban growth in post-reform China is no longer the victim of state containment and socialist transformation. Instead, urbanization has now been actively pursued by central and local governments as an important part of their developmental agenda.
