Books
01.07.20

China’s Urban Champions

The rise of major metropolises across China since the 1990s has been a double-edged sword: Although big cities function as economic powerhouses, concentrated urban growth can worsen regional inequalities, governance challenges, and social tensions. Wary of these dangers, China’s national leaders have tried to forestall top-heavy urbanization. However, urban and regional development policies at the sub-national level have not always followed suit. Why do policymakers in many cases favor big cities in a way that reinforces spatial inequalities rather than reducing them?

Conversation
11.30.17

The Beijing Migrants Crackdown

Jeremiah Jenne, Lucy Hornby & more

After a fire in a Beijing apartment building catering to migrant workers killed at least 19 people on November 18, the city government launched a 40-day campaign to demolish the capital’s “unsafe” buildings. Many Beijing residents view the...

Environment
08.02.17

Crowded Beijing Revives Old Plan for New Overflow City

 from chinadialogue

On April 1, 2017—April Fool’s Day—the government made a surprise announcement that a satellite city bigger than New York would be built from scratch on the outskirts of Beijing. Official news site Xinhua described...

Where The Streets Had My Name

If you’re not dead yet and you were never very famous, can you still get a street named after you in Beijing? You can if you’re 27-year-old artist Ge Yulu. Open Google Maps, enter his name, and there you will find a 1,476-foot-...

Caixin Media
12.15.16

Attempts to ‘Clean Up Beijing’ Target Low-Cost Migrant Homes

Li Yi, a young computer engineer working in Beijing, said authorities forced him out of his apartment in a village in Haidian district in November, days after his power supply was cut off even though he had paid the bills.

...

Features
09.13.16

The Destruction of Baishizhou

Eli MacKinnon

Early this spring, the Chinese character for “demolish” (“拆”) showed up in red spray paint on a strip of shops in Shenzhen’s Baishizhou neighborhood. Wang An, 41, has been selling women’s underwear from one of these shops for the...

Environment
08.21.15

Beijing Tells Mayors of Chinese Cities to Clean Up Their Air

 from chinadialogue

In China, “APEC blue” was the sarcastic term used to refer to the unusually clear skies Beijing enjoyed when an Asia-Pacific leaders summit was in...

Environment
01.21.15

‘New Measures Needed’ To Take China’s Cars Off the Roads

 from chinadialogue

As air pollution once more soared to hazardous levels last week in Beijing, in Washington a panel of Chinese and other international experts explained some of the...

In China, Projects to Make Great Wall Feel Small

The plan here seems far-fetched—a $36 billion tunnel that would run twice the length of the one under the English Channel, and bore deep into one of Asia’s active earthquake zones. When completed, it would be the world’s longest underwater tunnel...

Books
09.02.14

Cities and Stability

Jeremy L. Wallace

China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization"—the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes.

Reimagining China’s Cities

chinadialogue

After nearly three decades of rapid urbanisation, China’s official and unofficial city dwellers outnumber its farmers. China’s urbanisation counts as the biggest and fastest social movement in human history, a movement that has turned Chinese...

The NYRB China Archive
08.15.13

The Man Who Got It Right

Ian Buruma
from New York Review of Books

1.

Near the beginning of Simon Leys’ marvelous collection of essays is an odd polemic between the author and the late Christopher Hitchens, fought out in these very pages. Leys takes Hitchens to task for attacking Mother Teresa in a book...

Photo Gallery
03.28.13

Poor Accommodations

Hai Zhang

Decades of unprecedented economic growth have affected the lives of more than a generation of mainland Chinese and reshaped the urban structure of cities. China has become one of the most exciting and permissive places in the world to practice...

Books
03.22.13

Pressures and Distortions

Hai Zhang

Pressures and Distortions looks at the design, building, and interpretation of cities from the point of view of their residents.The cities chronicled in depth include examples from China (Shanghai and Shenzhen), Latin America (Bogotá and Mexico City), and Indonesia (Banda Aceh). Shorter sections cover Lima and Rio de Janeiro. The authors show how residents respond creatively to environmental disaster, poverty, housing shortages, and surging urban population. They also show how governments, international relief agencies, architects, and planners can shape better urban environments.

Environment
01.07.13

Car-Driving Officials in China Urged to Get on a Bus

 from chinadialogue

China’s new leadership has asked government officials to travel simply and, in normal circumstances, not to close roads to ease their journeys. In a recent visit to the Qianhai area of Shenzhen, south China, incoming president Xi Jinping made...

Opinion: How Cities Can Save China

Working on urbanization will foster solutions to the challenges the world faces from China's pressure on ecosystems, resources and commodities.

 

Books
10.01.12

Disappearing Shanghai

Howard W. French

This book is a photographic exploration of life in the old and rapidly disappearing quarters of Shanghai, with accompanying poems and essays by the author of fiction and poetry, Qiu Xiaolong.

The photographs, all taken in a documentary style over a period of five years, represent an intimate and invaluable visual natural history of a way of life in the workers quarters and other central districts of the city that held sway throughout the 20th century and into the early years of the 21st century, before yielding to the ambitious ongoing efforts at urban reconstruction.

The NYRB China Archive
09.24.12

Shanghai: The Vigor in the Decay

Ian Johnson
from New York Review of Books

This is a story that sounds familiar, that we think we know or can imagine: old houses torn down for luxury malls, ordinary people poorly compensated, an intimate way of life replaced by highways and high-rises.

All of this is happening in...

Books
09.19.12

Beijing Welcomes You

Within the past decade, Beijing has debuted as the defining city of the now and foreseeable future, and China as the ascendant global power. Beijing is the ultimate representation of China's political and cultural capital, of its might—and threat. For so long, the city was closed off to the world, literally built around the Forbidden City, the icon of all that was ominous about China. But now, the country is eager to show off its new openness, its glory and magnanimity, and Beijing is its star.

Caixin Media
08.31.12

Tall Order in Ordos

A desert city infamously littered with new but vacant apartment buildings and idle construction sites is getting no relief in the parched climate for local government budgets.

Ordos, where local leaders have been trying for years to build...

Rat World (Photographs)

Picture Beijing, and a skyline of fancy steel architecture and clouds of smog likely come to mind. But the most fitting metaphor for the city's growing pains may lie beneath its streets: In the past two decades, underground storage basements,...

Caixin Media
03.27.12

Wang Shu, Wary of the New

At a time when China was bursting with an urge to cover buildings in shimmering silver and gray, Wang Shu, the first Chinese winner of the Pritzker Prize, was an architect who felt that changing tastes didn’t have to mean changing one’s sense of...

Sinica Podcast
09.10.10

Showdown in Shenzhen

Kaiser Kuo, Jeremy Goldkorn & more
from Sinica Podcast

On September 6, Shenzhen celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its founding as a special economic zone (SEZ). And while the city feted itself at the highest levels of power, its celebrations were marred by an unexpected development: in a speech...

Books
04.01.10

Between Heaven and Modernity

Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment.

China’s Green Buildings and Sustainable Cities

Natural Resources Defense Council

The National Resources Defense Council is documenting the way in which it is promoting environmentally friendly growth principles in urban planning in China. This includes it partnership with Chinese governmental organizations in promoting and...