Suburbanization of Urban China: A Conceptual Framework*
Yixing Zhou, PekingUniversity
John R. Logan, University at Albany
*The authors thank Dr. Feng Jian, PekingUniversity, and Mr. David Chunyu, University at Albany, for their assistance in the preparation of this essay.
Suburbanization of Urban China: A Conceptual Framework
Suburbanization is treated as a universal phenomenon in Western social science. In Chinese cities a similar pattern appears to be developing. Major urban centers are beginning to hollow out at their core and shift both people and economic activity toward outer zones (Zhou and Ma, 2000). Large scale urban renewal and reconstruction in the central cities since the 1980s have relocated many city residents to suburbs (Wang and Zhou, 1999), and massive waves of migrants from other regions have been settled in peripheral areas. Suburbanization responds broadly to the rapid economic development of China since 1980, a process carried out through explicit public policies of re-engagement with the global economy and removal of barriers to urban growth. We might think of suburbanization as a natural and inevitable accompaniment to economic development. A more realistic view is that these two phenomena were a package deal, that economic and spatial restructuring of the metropolis was an intentional goal of the Chinese government as it sought to secure a new and stronger international position. Thus we have a fundamentally political understanding of suburbanization, in which at every level the economic processes that facilitate and shape suburban growth are grounded in policy choices.
Suburbanization responds to many different conditions, ranging from global shifts such as China’s reincorporation into the world economy and introduction of market mechanisms in its economy, to the specific details of land development and housing choices. We find it impossible simply to apply theoretical models that have been relied on in the West, such as distance-density gradients, the natural operation of the property market, or the impact of economic expansion. These forces play their part, but in a very specific historical and political context. We distinguish multiple levels of analysis, moving from the most general to the most specific. At each level we identify the main forces for change, describe their consequences, and show how these create the conditions within which processes at the next level need to be understood. From a theoretical perspective our contribution is to demonstrate the importance of such contextualization, and just as we draw on Western models to understand China, we believe that the peculiarities of the Chinese experience raise new questions about suburbanization in market societies.
In the following sections we begin by describing the timing and pace of suburban growth, emphasizing the case of Beijing that has been intensively studied by Zhou and his colleagues (Zhou and Ma 2000, Zhou and Meng 1998, Feng and Zhou 2003a). We then analyze the processes involved in this transformation.
The timing and pace of suburbanization
Before the 1980s, Chinese planners sought to decentralize the largest cities but with little effect. Certainly there was a potential for suburbanization, especially to meet the needs for housing. The population density in central cities reached very high levels. Per capita living space was only 3 to 4 square meters, so that typically three persons would share a bedroom that was only 10 feet by 10 feet. Population growth, even after fertility was limited by the one-child family policy and despite stringent restrictions on rural-urban migration, was greater than the rate of housing construction. Environmental quality was poor, especially where industrial plants were located in the inner city. In the 1960s and 1970s, some new industrial satellite townswere built around cities like Beijing and placed downwind of the city. The northwestern sector of the city (upwind) had already been designated for development of scientific research and education since the 1950s. But although many plants were constructed, their employees mostly remained in the city and commuted to the suburbs to work. Hence there was a potential demand for expansion on the periphery of the city, but it was not satisfied. Why not?
There is broad agreement that the poor performance of the national economy is one reason. Relatively underdeveloped anyway, China emerged from the 1940s with a decades-long legacy of foreign occupation and civil war. Central planning directed investments especially toward the heavy industries believed to be essential for national defense. Officials chose to repeat the Soviet Union’s strategy of redistributing resources to meet very basic needs for food and shelter but postponing “unproductive” investments in real estate and services. Failed experiments during the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1960, the “Black Years” from 1961 to 1963, and the Cultural Revolution further undermined development.
Beyond the overall lack of resources, the organization of the planned economy favored a continuing buildup of central cities. One factor is the refusal to treat land as a scarce resource. Urban land was allocated by the government at no cost to end users and without regard to the relative value of different locations. As a result, for example, large industrial zones continued to be built within the central cities. In Beijing, industrial plants were disproportionately located in the four central districts through the 1970s. Another is the centralization of fiscal resources in the hands of national ministries. Municipal officials did not have the means or authority to support large-scale construction of new residential districts, or of high-grade roadways to connect cities and satellite towns, or to create infrastructure that would bring standard public services to outlying areas. Consequently neither work unit leaders nor their employees perceived any benefit to relocating to suburbs and pressed instead to remain in central locations. A third factor is the treatment of housing as a welfare service. In urban areas most housing – aside from a leftover stock of private residences of generally low quality – was provided by work units or city housing authorities at rents that did not even cover basic maintenance costs. Consequently no investment in new housing could be self-supporting, and public housing in suburbs (because it required additional infrastructure investments and offered no savings in the cost of land) was especially costly.
Nevertheless suburbanization took hold in China’s major cities in the 1980s.The earliest studies identified this trend in Beijing ( Zhou, 1992; Zhou, 1995). From 1964 to 1982 the average annual population growth rate of Beijing was 1.1%, but only 0.2% for four central districts (Dongcheng, Xicheng, Xuanwu, and Chongwen). From 1982 to 1990, the core lost 82,000 population (-3.4%), the inner suburbs gained 1,149,000 (up 40.5%), and the outer suburbs gained 521,000 (up 13.1%). The trend intensified in the period from 1990 to 2000, as the core lost 222,000 (-9.5%), the inner suburbs grew by 2,400,000 (60.2%), and outer suburbs grew by 572,000 (up 12.7%). The inner suburbs became the main destination for movers from the central city, as well as the area where temporary residents from other regions were mostly concentrated. Both centripetal migrants and centrifugal migrants met in this zone. These shifts are mapped in Figures 1a and 1b.
Figures 1a and 1b about here
Similar results have been found other big cities, such as Guangzhou ( Zhou and Xu, 1996; Xie and Ning 2002), Shanghai ( Ning and Deng, 1996; Gao and Jiang 2002 ), Shenyang ( Zhou and Meng, 1997), Dalian ( Chai and Zhou, 2000), Hangzhou ( Zhou, M.1997; Feng and Zhou 2002), Suzhou, Wuxi, and Changzhou ( Zhang, Y. 1998). Our task is to understand why this happened.
The sources of suburbanization
Chinese suburbanization cannot be understood without reference to China’s market transition. Figure 2 reproduces a conceptual model that identifies several aspects of the process (drawn from Feng et al 2004). Feng depicts all of these as consequences of development of a market economy, but distinguishes processes “at the level of the economy” from processes “at the level of society.” Suburbanization itself is shown to include shifts in economic activity (industrial decentralization and development of large supermarkets, which represents the wider shift in retail services) as well as changes in residential locations (including both permanent and seasonal housing). The more “economic” sources of change involve urban land use transformation and the renovation of the inner city, on the one hand, and real estate investments (both domestic and foreign) and improvement of public transportation, on the other. Feng notes two types of social changes. One is in the class structure – the growing class inequalities that are manifested in spatial inequalities and represented in both practical and symbolic terms by growth in the use of private automobiles. The other is in residents’ attitudes toward the use of space, which provide support for a mix of high-class and moderate-income housing in suburbs.
Figure 2 about here
This illustration calls attention to the many components of suburbanization. Suburbanization can be indexed with population figures like the ones for Beijing presented above, but it is much more than a matter of numbers and locations. The issues are how and where people’s daily economic and social activities are carried out and how are these affected by China’s development of a market economy? In the spatial restructuring of the metropolis, what exactly does it mean to invoke market transition?
We analyze this question at three levels: the national economy and system of urban planning, the system of housing and real estate development, and in the composition of neighborhoods.
1. Processes at the national level
First, China has experienced two decades of rapid economic growth coinciding with the government’s decision to become more closely integrated with the global economy. Goods produced in China account for quickly growing shares of world trade, and by 2004 China had become the fourth most important country in the world in terms of volume of trade. China has also welcomed foreign investment, and investors have been especially active in real estate projects in major coastal cities. The average annual rate of increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was 10.8% in 1981-85, 7.9% in 1986-90, 11.6% in 1991-95, and 8.3% in 1996-2000. In 2003 per capita GDP exceeded $1000 for the first time. It has exceeded $5,000 in some major cities in the Zhujiang Delta, and reached $4,000 in the Changjiang Delta and $3000 in Beijing. The residents of these cities have become consumers at an unprecedented scale for houses, cars, and education. In this context, there are obviously new possibilities for urban development, and the trend toward suburbanization has been one result.
Besides sheer growth, the metropolitan economy has undergone a sectoral transformation. In Beijing, for example, during the period 1982 to 2000 the proportion of employment in primary industry decreased from 29% to 13%, and that in secondary sectors decreased from 39% to 29%. As the location of the national government, service sectors were traditionally stronger in Beijing than in most cities, but service employment is now dominant, having grown from 32% to 58%. Among service activities, banking, insurance, real estate and social services increased especially rapidly from 2% to 14%, and transportation, storage, postal and telecommunication services, and wholesale, retail trade and catering services more than doubled from 11% to 23%. This change does not have obvious implications for spatial shifts. Older heavy industries were good prospects for relocation to suburbs on environmental grounds, but if industry was not the main component economic expansion this might not have contributed much to suburban growth. The new service activities – especially business services – could have been concentrated in central cities, restoring to cities the “central place” functions that they would naturally have had earlier in the 20th Century. But they could as well have been shifted to outer zones.
In the era of the socialist planned economy the actual direction of urban development was governed by urban planning. The guiding ideology in the planned economy was strong controls by government and limitation of population growth, although specific sorts of development were expected and carried out. In the late 1950s, it was decided in the city’s master plan that Beijing should be developed into a modernized base of manufacturing. The city’s built-up area increased from 109 sq. km. in 1949 to 221 sq. km. in 1959. Emphasis was placed on construction in the industrial quarter in the northwestern and eastern suburbs. Later, the industrial base of the Capital Iron and Steel (Shougang), the culture-education quarter in the northwest and the embassy quarter in the central core were constructed one after another. Some satellite towns in the outer suburbs were also listed in the development plan at the time, but this aspect of the plan was not much implemented.
Although government has maintained weaker planning controls in the period of market transition, formal plans have continued to affect development. In the master planning completed in 1982, officials decided to reinterpret Beijing’s economic function, from an industrial center to a center of politics and culture (Beijing’s Planning Committee, 1982). This anticipated the restructuring of the labor market. In the 1993 master plan, more specific steps were taken to promote spatial restructuring: it was decided to promote dispersed clusters of growth (Fensan Jituanshi Buju) throughout the region, to invest in transportation systems to link the city with towns in the outer suburbs, to coordinate the development of new districts and the renewal of the old city, to protect and improve the urban physical environment, and to shift from heavy industry to new high-tech industry (Beijing’s Planning Committee, 1993). Without doubt these policies have facilitated suburbanization.
Finally perhaps the most important policy shift at the national level has been the accommodation of government to the reality of massive rural-urban migration. At one time the full array of state powers had been directed against migration, with strict enforcement of a household registration system and procedures for food rationing that made it difficult for unauthorized migrants to live or work in cities. The registration system has been in flux in China since the 1980s. For example, the external population(wailai renkou) in Beijing increased from 170,000 in 1982 to 600,000 in 1990, a growth rate of 255%. It then boomed in the 1990s, rising to 2,570,000, for a growth rate of 326%. As a result, in 2000, concentrated areas of external population have become a specific form of suburban settlement.
2. Reform of housing and urban land utilization system
The emergence of real estate markets, including a partial privatization of housing, has significantly altered the urban development process (Wu, 1995).
For the half century from 1949 to 1998, housing provision and allocation had been considered to be a kind of welfare, with the majority of housing owned by work units. Housing was constructed or purchased by work units near their premises and rented at a very low rate to their workers, thus, residential location was governed by the location of housing provided by the work units, often within or near them (Yeh et el., 1995). Some powerful work units, such as government departments and large enterprises, had the ability to construct large concentrative residential quarters for their cadres and workers, creating whole neighborhoods of relative privilege.
In the early years of market reform up to 1998, housing reform had led to some significant changes in the structure of housing provision. Only after 1998 did the role of working units in allocating housing change greatly. At that time the traditional system of housing allocation was cancelled, and a new housing allocation system, with subsidy by the nation and the working units, was established.
Residential mobility before the mid-1980s was low and insignificant in shaping urban social spatial structure, because of a housing shortage and a housing allocation system based on the construction and allocation of housing by working units.
With the abolishment of housing allocation by working units beginning in 1998, the working units are taking measures to encourage employees to buy their private housing through an accumulation fund of housing, loans for private housing, housing subsidies by the nation and by the working units, etc. As a result, the freedom of purchasing housing and the flexibility of selecting housing location are strengthened. It is not necessary for the employees in the same working units to live together, and for the new housing purchasers to live near their working units. Thus, the spatial separation between residence and employment appears, with more and more commuters in Chinese cities. The new housing system had played an important role in restructuring the social space in urban China,
As a result of innovation in the housing allocation system, the structure of construction of each kind of housing changed since 1998. The numbers of housing units built by the central government agencies or local units were decreasing, while the number of housing built by real estate enterprises was increasing. In 2000, the proportion of the housing built by the central units was only 18.6%, while in 1997 it had been 25.4%. The proportion of the housing built by local units in the total of city was 13.8% in 2000, compared to 26.6% in 1997. The proportion of housing built by real estate enterprises increased from 48.0% in 1997 to 67.7% in 2000.