ABSTRACT
China’s controls over the size of the nation’s urban population are part of a general effort by its leaders to manage the economy through a command system operated by the government bureaucracy. In post-1949 China the landlords are gone and government officials remain, but there is little growth in the number of civil servants. China’s urban and population growth patterns prior to the beginning of the reform period, therefore, differed ma rkedly from the pa tterns found elsewhere in the world. The importance of collective industry to China’s industrial sector can best be understood by combining the data from all several components of collective industry along with state- and individually owned industry. China’s control of urban area development was part of a broader bureaucratic command system that was a major source of inefficiency in the use of urban resources.
