Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard East Asian Monographs) - Hardcover

Baker, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674293819 ISBN 13: 9780674293816

Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024

Synopsis

China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.

Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Baker is Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Manchester.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Asia Center
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674293819
• ISBN 13: 9780674293816
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 366