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.

You-Tien Hsing

Professor and Graduate Advisor

PhD. UC Berkeley, 1993

Regional focus: China

My reasearch and teaching has been focused on the political economy of development in East Asia, especially China. I am interested in the question of power and space. My first book, Making Captialism in China: The Taiwan Connection, focuses on the role of culture in inter-regional capital flows. In my second book, The Great Urban Tansformation: Politics of Land and Property in China, I examine the issue of territorality. I look at how the transformation of the state and the society shapes and is shaped by land battles in Chinese cities and villages. My co-edited book, Reclaiming Chinese Society, looks at China’s emerging social activism in the struggles over distribution, recognition, and representation. My current project concerns the cultural and environmental politics in Northwestern China. For my research I draw inspiration from ethnographical work: in-depth interviews and participatory observation with a reflexive perspective. I believe that theorizing starts from muddy realities. It is a process of open dialogues and self-reflections, of which the historical and the geographical, the institutional and the emotional are all indispensable parts.