Pseudo-Urbanization? Competitive government behavior and urban sprawl in China

Abstract Urban population size is a slippery indicator of China's urbanization level. Urban sprawl through infrastructure construction, the setting up of development zones and administrative adjustments, expands urban space and in turn inflates urban population size without necessarily urbanizing the overall landscape or economy. This article seeks to distinguish urbanization from urban sprawl. It aims to uncover why and how local governments have spurred urban sprawl and shaped urbanization in today's China. It suggests that urban sprawl is a land-centered process engineered by the government primarily to generate revenue for local coffers. City building has become a competitive enterprise for local governments who seek to outdo each other in ‘place-making’, both to attract investments and to conjure up highly visible trophy projects. The implications of these findings on China's urbanization and how urban sprawl may be further studied are addressed at the end of the article. Notes *Chiew Ping Yew is Research Associate at the East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore (NUS). She is the author of ‘Explaining land use change in a Guangdong county—the supply side of the story’, The China Quarterly 207, (September 2011). Her ongoing research interests include the politics of land use conversion in China, transnational activism for the Tibet cause, as well as comparative development and democratization in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. Currently, she is involved in an inter-disciplinary research project—‘The impact of land rights on sustainable urbanization in China’—funded by the NUS Global Asia Institute. The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. The author can be reached by email at eaiycp@nus.edu.sg 1. John D. Kasard and Edward M. Crenshaw, ‘Third world urbanization: dimensions, theories and determinants’, Annual Review of Sociology 17, (1991), p. 470. 2. 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