Youqin Huang

Zai Liang

Cheng Chen

Steven F. Messner

Since the late 1970s, China has experienced an unprecedented pace of urbanization. In 1978, only 17.8% of the population resided in urban areas, but by 2013 the level of urbanization had reached 53.8%. During the same period, China also enjoyed spectacular economic growth. China had become the second largest economy in the world by 2012, just behind the United States. Despite China’s highly acclaimed achievements in urbanization and its economic miracle, urban China confronts a set of significant challenges. This book provides theoretically informed and empirically rich analyses of some of the key challenges facing China’s urbanization. The first part deals with new patterns of urbanization, focusing on comprehensive measures and environmental dimensions of urbanization. The second part of the book focuses on several aspects related to migrants in cities: migrant entrepreneurship, return migration, and local people’s attitudes toward migrants. The final section examines two key issues important for migrants, urban local residents, and policy-makers that have become quite contentious in China today: housing and urban health care. This collection presents original, cutting-edge research on some of the most pressing challenges confronting contemporary urban China, conducted by researchers from multiple social science disciplines. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of urban studies and China studies, as well as those in sociology, anthropology, geography, and political science.

Insights from Social Science Perspectives

Confronting the Challenges of Urbanization in China

Meredith L. Weiss

Focusing on Northeast and Southeast Asia—regions notable for political diversity, difficult environments for fighting corruption, and multifarious anticorruption outcomes—this book examines the political dynamics behind anticorruption efforts there. The contributors present case studies of the Philippines, Indonesia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, and China that explore the varying roles anticorruption efforts play in solidifying or disputing democratic and nondemocratic institutions and legitimacy, as well as the broader political and economic contexts that gave rise to these efforts. Whether motivated by private interests, party loyalty, or political institutionalization, political actors shape the trajectories of anticorruption efforts by challenging their opponents over what constitutes corruption, what enables corruption, and how to combat corruption. Arguing that anticorruption strategy may be associated more closely with shifting bases of regime legitimacy than with regime type, the book sheds light on the divergent ways in which states control and respond to political elites and society at large, and on how citizens from across strata understand and engage with their states.

The Political Logics of Anticorruption Efforts in Asia

This book explores the Energy Minimization Multi-scale (EMMS) theory and the drag model for heterogeneous gas-solid fluidized flows. The results show that the cluster density plays a critical role with regard to drag. A novel cluster model is proposed and indicates that the profile of cluster density is single-peaked with the maximum value located at solid concentrations of 0.1~0.15. The EMMS theory is improved with the cluster model and an accurate drag model is developed. The model’s universality is achieved by investigating the relationship between the heterogeneity and flow patterns. The drag model is subsequently verified numerically and experimentally.

Investigations on Mesoscale Structure in Gas–Solid Fluidization and Heterogeneous Drag Model

The fall of communism in the Soviet Union led many to hope and expect that liberal democracy would immediately take root across postcommunist states, marking what Francis Fukuyama famously referred to as the "end of history." Since then, however, a very different picture has emerged, most notably in the form of nationalist sentiments that have steered many postcommunist countries in an illiberal direction, even in regimes committed to market reforms and formally democratic institutions. Cheng Chen examines this phenomenon in comparative perspective, showing that the different pathways of nation-building under Leninism affected the character of Leninist regimes and, later, the differential prospects for liberal democracy in the postcommunist era. In China and Russia, Chen shows, liberalism and nationalism were more difficult to reconcile because Leninism was indigenous and had a more significant impact on nation-building. In Hungary and Romania, by contrast, Leninism was a foreign import and had less of an effect on traditional national identity. As we witness the struggle to establish democracy in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq, a study that examines the salience of historical legacies seems particularly timely.

Cheng Chen

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