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"This paper discusses how widespread poverty and exclusion are in urban China during the period of transition from central planning to a market economy. Two poverty lines have been employed to measure poverty rates in urban areas: a diagnostic poverty line calculated by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) experts and a benefit poverty line used in the Minimum Living Allowance Program of the Chinese government. Both sets of estimates show marked variations by province. According to the former standard, the poverty headcount of China in 1998 was estimated as 14.8 million, with a poverty rate of 4.7 percent. According to the later standard, the poverty headcount for 2007 is estimated as 22.7 million, amounting to a poverty rate of 3.9 percent. Poor people are generally not living in absolute poverty, as their basic needs in food, clothing and shelter can largely be met. However, they have low incomes and restricted consumption potential. Economic constraints also entail adverse consequences like poor health, poor education and limited social contacts. Two groups of people are here considered as the new poor: unemployed or laid-off workers and labor migrants. This means that China now has two new forms of urban poverty which are caused by different factors and are combined with different forms of deprivation. Therefore, policy programs designed to eradicate poverty in urban areas have to be tailored carefully to the poor people's special needs. Job creation and a comprehensive social protection system are here proposed as two effective instruments in the fight against urban poverty." (author's abstract)

Der Bericht gibt einen Überblick über die Entwicklung der Urbanisierung in der VR China seit 1958 sowie über die gegenwärtige politische Linie der chinesischen Führung in dieser Frage. Er macht deutlich, daß quantitative Urbanisierungstrends nicht mit Indikatoren für die Modernisierung der chinesischen Städte gleichgesetzt werden können. Als zentrales Problem der Stadtentwicklung wird gegenwärtig der mit der Urbanisierung einhergehende übersteigerte Bodenverbrauch gesehen. Eine in China diskutierte Strategie gegen die Bodenknappheit stellt die Orientierung auf die Planung von Megalopolis-Städten nach japanischem Vorbild dar, die zugleich Zentren der industriellen Entwicklung bilden und weitgehend autark sind. Eine alternative Position sieht kleinere Städte als Motoren der wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung. Von politischer Seite wird die Internationalisierung der Städte im Binnenland favorisiert. Insgesamt untersteichen die Entwicklungsprobleme der chinesischen Städte die Notwendigkeit politischer Reformen. (BIOst-Wpt)

"China is undergoing a process of unprecedented urbanisation, with cities often being built from scratch in just three to five years. It is projected that 400 new cities will be built over the next 20 years with newly urbanised populations of over 240 million. So rapid and intense is this process that consumption of energy and natural resources is outstripping supply, posing unique challenges for the creation of sustainable cities. This issue focuses on how cities are being 'Made in China' today and how their development is to impact on the future of cities worldwide." --Book Jacket

"This book examines the condition of being a young person in China and the way in which changes in various dimensions of urban life have affected Chinese youths' quest to understand themselves."--Publisher's description

1. Introduction : moving on from images of Red Guards, the tank man and little emperors -- 2. Experiencing neighbourhoods -- 3. Ambivalence and tactics for coping with the tensions of metropolitan life -- 4. Bricolaic national and international orientations -- 5. Intergenerational dynamics -- 6. Ambivalence toward secondary education and the bitterness of the gaokao -- 7. Engagements with traditional media -- 8. The Internet in everyday life -- 9. Online carnival.

After decades of egalitarian, restricted consumption, residents of China's cities are surrounded by a level of material comfort and commercial hype unimaginable just ten years ago. In this first in-depth treatment of the consumer revolution in China, fourteen leading scholars of Chinese culture and society explore the interpersonal consequences of rapid commercialization.In the early 1980s, Beijing's communist leadership advocated decollectivization, foreign trade, and private entrepreneurship to jump-start a stagnant economy, while explicitly rejecting any notion that economic reforms would promote political change. However, by the early 1990s the reforms in the marketplace not only produced double-digit growth but also enabled ordinary citizens to nurture dreams and social networks that challenged official discourse and conventions through millions of daily commercial transactions. Using participant observation, contributors to this book describe and analyze a wide range of these changing consumer practices: luxury housing, white wedding gowns, greeting cards, McDonald's, discos, premium cigarettes, bowling, and more

After millions of migrants moved from China's countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of 'informal' urban enclave was born - 'villages in the city'. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China's economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord vil