URBANIZATION IN CHINA - A REVIEW OF ITS CAUSAL MECHANISMS AND SPATIALRELATIONS

Since China returned to the world platform two decades ago, the litera ture on Chinese urbanisation has grown greatly. It is therefore high t ime to review the forces underpinning Chinese urbanisation. Informed b y the realist philosophy and methodology, this paper is divided into t wo main parts. The first addresses the (non-spatial) causal mechanisms between 1949 and 1977. Neither the ideological, the class, nor the ec onomic formulation has touched on the more systemic mechanisms related to the socialist state and the shortage economy. This paper attempts to redress the imbalance by examining the advantages of combining Korn ai's shortage model with Foucault's concept of governmentality. By dra wing on concepts of spatial contingency, spatial boundary and locality effects, the second part of the paper argues that spatial relations d o play significant roles in revealing Chinese urbanisation policies an d patterns. In the postscript, the forces underpinning urbanisation si nce 1978 have also been examined within the context the framework outl ined. It is hoped that this paper will induce more serious theoretical discussion of Chinese urbanisation. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.