ABSTRACT
The self-reliant nature of rural urbanization, so closely linked to its small parent communities, encourages highly dispersed location patterns in any given region and even at the micro level, where factories freed from any zoning constraints are scattered across the rural landscape. The command economy that was characteristic of China’s development after Liberation ensured the rapid increase in investment resources directed to urban areas. The web of subsidies to enterprises and individuals that have made urban development less attractive than rural urbanization is being dismantled. If the shackles constraining urban development are removed, then the Chinese city and town have a promising future. And in China’s case, that future looks more like Seoul, Hong Kong, or Bangkok, and much less like the shantytown-ridden cities of the rest of the Third World that have so frightened Chinese decision makers in the past.
