The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China - Hardcover

You-tien Hsing has crafted a broad but concise, coherent but open-ended narrative. Readers who make The Great Urban Transformation their introduction to Chinas urbanisation will gain much from this book, even if they do not see all the implications of its findings and insights. Readers who have worked in the field for some time will find this book suggestive of promising new directions for research and action. (Daniel Abramson, Urban Studies)

The Great Urban Transformation is a highly recommended book to serious students of Chinas urbanisation who would like to gain an insight into the underlying mechanisms of Chinese cities territorial expansion and the emerging struggles around land and housing. (Hyun Bang Shin, London School of Economics)

excellent guide to understanding the ongiong boom in China ... Fascinating examples of urban development, mostly from Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, accompany incisive conceptualization and analysis. Summing up: Recommended. (K.E. Stapleton, CHOICE)

Its highly readable narrative style alone makes this an important book: through diverse case studies, Hsing explains complicated development scenarios with clarity and insight ... refreshing and challenging (Carolyn Cartier, China Quarterly)

In this landmark book, Hsing captures the complex and contingent nature of property-making and property-ownership in rapidly-urbanizing China... This ambitious book should be read by everyone interested in the contemporary politics in China, and the ways state and society are co-produced and co-constitutive of the expanding urban landscape. (Aihwa Ong, University of California at Berkeley, Author of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural logic of Transnationality and Buddha is Hidding: Refugees, Citizenship, the New America)

A path-breaking book that brings to light one of Chinas most opaque yet profound developments ― the momentous contestations over land. Professor Hsing unravels the complex struggles over land use rights, housing entitlement and property ownership that have embroiled ordinary citizens and state officials at different levels of the Chinese government. It is an epic story told with analytical clarity, theoretical insights and deeply engaging human dramas. (Ching Kwan Lee, University of California at Berkeley)

This book is a masterful piece of scholarship and meaningful analysis. It is a most innovative contribution to the understanding of the transformation of China. It shows how the politics of land development is at the same time the key source of capital accumulation and class formation, and the trigger of social conflicts that may threaten the new Chinese order. Professor Hsing is one of the leading researchers on the study of capitalism in China, and her new book will change our way of thinking about one of the most important processes that are remaking our world. (Manuel Castells, University of Southern California)

Cities are the pivot of China's economy, as it resumes its place on the world stage. Shooting skyward, exploding outward, China's great cities seem to consume all in their path. Resistance is hard, and even the Chinese state has been reshaped to serve the urban juggernaut. No one captures this better than Professor Hsing. The Great Urban Transformation is essential reading for every student of Chinese development and global cities. (Richard A. Walker, University of California)

As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined.

The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market.