Will Urbanization Save the Chinese Economy or Destroy it?

Meg  Rithmire

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Chapter | The China Questions | 2018

Will Urbanization Save the Chinese Economy or Destroy it?

by Meg Rithmire

Abstract

The Chinese leadership under Xi Jinping has announced its intentions to transition the economy from one driven by investment and exports to one driven by domestic demand. The main strategy to achieve this transformation involves massive state-led urbanization. This essay explores whether the strategy will save the Chinese economy or generate social and political problems that imperil the country's growth and stability.

Keywords: China; urbanization; economic development; Urban Development; Economic Growth; China;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Rithmire, Meg. "Will Urbanization Save the Chinese Economy or Destroy it?" Chap. 16 in The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power, edited by Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

About the Author

Meg Rithmire

F. Warren McFarlan Associate Professor of Business of Administration

Business, Government and the International Economy

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Case | HBS Case Collection | June 2017 (Revised October 2017)

Philippines: From Sick Man to Strong Man

Meg Rithmire and Dawn H. Lau

Citation:
Rithmire, Meg, and Dawn H. Lau. "Philippines: From Sick Man to Strong Man." Harvard Business School Case 717-058, June 2017. (Revised October 2017.) View Details

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Article | Current History

China Gambles on Modernizing Through Urbanization

Kristen Looney and Meg Rithmire

Contemporary discussions of urbanization and urban construction in China tend to focus on “ghost towns” on the one hand or urbanization as China’s silver bullet to growth and reform on the other. In this paper, we detail what China calls its “New Urbanization Policy.” While these plans aim to formalize previously informal movements of land, people, and capital between urban and rural, the new urbanization does not upend China’s longstanding duality between those categories. The central goals of the new urbanization are to manage urbanization so as to generate domestic demand and reorganize agricultural production without experiencing destabilizing social and political pressures. If successful, the Chinese Communist Party will forge a new path of urbanization, building cities before recruiting urban citizens. The process, however, entails possibilities of yet other social dislocations, including concentrated poverty, ill-planned cities, skyscraper villages, and rural landlessness.

Keywords: Urban Development; Development Economics; Problems and Challenges; China;

Citation:
Looney, Kristen, and Meg Rithmire. "China Gambles on Modernizing Through Urbanization." Current History 116, no. 791 (September 2017): 203–209. View Details

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Article | Politics & Society | March 2017

Land Institutions and Chinese Political Economy: Institutional Complementarities and Macroeconomic Management

Meg Rithmire

This article critically examines the origins and evolution of China’s unique land institutions and situates land policy in the larger context of China’s reforms and pursuit of economic growth. It argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has strengthened the institutions that permit land expropriation—namely, urban/rural dualism, decentralized land ownership, and hierarchical land management—in order to use land as a key instrument of macroeconomic regulation, helping the CCP respond to domestic and international economic trends and manage expansion and contraction. Key episodes of macroeconomic policymaking are analyzed, with the use of local and central documents, to show how the CCP relied on the manipulation and distribution of the national land supply either to stimulate economic growth or to rein in an overheating economy. China’s land institutions, therefore, share “complementarities” with fiscal and financial institutions and benefit powerful political actors while imposing costs on marginal ones.

Keywords: China; economic reform; land politics; macromanagement; Government and Politics; Macroeconomics; China;

Citation:
Rithmire, Meg. "Land Institutions and Chinese Political Economy: Institutional Complementarities and Macroeconomic Management." Politics & Society 45, no. 1 (March 2017): 123–153. View Details

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Will Urbanization Save the Chinese Economy or Destroy it?

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