ABSTRACT
The growth and prosperity of Chinese cities (e.g., Shanghai, Tientsin, Hankou, Tsingtao) after the mid-19th century has seemed an obvious fact to many Western observers. After the industrial revolution, Westerners took their industrial systems and their post-industrial revolution social scientific theories to the cities along China’s coast which had been designated treaty ports by the unequal treaties. When they saw to their surprise that these Chinese cities (such as Shanghai) were so similar in outward appearance to their own cities (such as London), their overwhelming emotion — besides disappointment — was probably a feeling that backward, agrarian China had stepped onto the path of “urbanization.” Thenceforth, many Western Sinologists, in taking note of China’s modernization (or “Westernization”) naturally assumed that the “urbanization” which they observed was a revolutionary transformation - from rural China to urban China.
