In conventional ideas of modernization and development, both liberal and Marxist, national 'peasantries' are supposed to disappear, transformed into industrial workers through processes of enclosure and industrialisation. This hasn't always happened, however. Throughout the twentieth century, this posed a 'problem' for national policymakers bent on achieving the seemingly elusive goal of 'modernization'. In China, this notion that the 'peasantry' is destined to ‘disappear’ has continued to underpin development thinking and policies in recent decades. The post-2008 financial crisis recovery hinged on an astonishing urbanization drive which saw vast levels of rural-urban land conversions. This was fuelled by the needs of capital to find fixed assets, but ideologically it was underpinned by a belief in the inevitable transformation of China's many millions of rural villagers into urban citizens.

Yet, despite the extraordinary levels of urbanization witnessed in China in recent decades, the presumed rural-urban trajectory continues to meet multiple obstacles and forms of resistance, posing challenges for China's leaders who endeavour to transform China's population into an army of urban middle-class consumers.

In this panel chaired by Jane Hayward, King's College London, experts Hyun Bang Shin, London School of Economics, Olivia Cheung, School of Oriental and African Studies, William Hurst, University of Cambridge, and Yimin Zhao, Durham University will examine different aspects of this question in the context of China today, including, for example, the real estate crisis, ghost cities, hukou reforms, etc.

This event will be followed by drinks and networking.

Speakers

Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and the Head of the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Until recently, he directed the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre and was an Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Having more than 20 years of experience in researching Asian cities, Hyun’s work centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation, focusing on speculative urbanisation, gentrification, politics of displacement, mega-projects, mega-events as urban spectacles, and Asian urbanism. His books include Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement (Policy Press, 2015); Planetary Gentrification (Polity Press, 2016); Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (2021, Routledge); Covid-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (2022, LSE Press); The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (forthcoming, Routledge). He currently works on two other book projects, including a monograph entitled Making China Urban (for Routledge) and a monograph on the making of the speculative city of Seoul. 

Jane Hayward is a lecturer in China and Global Affairs at the Lau China Institute, King's College London. She researches China’s agrarian question (how rural land is organised, who controls it and who gets to profit from it). She teaches postgraduate courses on China and Globalisation, and China and Global Governance. Dr Hayward has a PhD from the East Asian Studies Department of New York University. She has held post-doctoral positions at the Oxford University China Centre and the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University in Beijing, where she worked at the Institute for Contemporary China Studies.

Olivia Cheung (DPhil, Oxon) is Research Fellow of the China Institute at SOAS University of London. Her latest major publications are The Political Thought of Xi Jinping (with Steve Tsang) (Oxford University Press, 2024) and Factional-ideological Conflicts in Chinese Politics: To the Left or to the Right? (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). Her current research project is on China’s Global Strategy.

William Hurst is Chong Hua Professor of Chinese Development in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (FAMES) and Co-Director at the Centre for Geopolitics. Bill received his PhD in 2005 from the University of California-Berkeley and, following two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, held tenured or tenure-track posts at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Toronto, and Northwestern University, in addition to a fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, before coming to Cambridge in January 2021.

Yimin Zhao is Assistant Professor in Department of Geography, Durham University. His research focuses on urban periphery and the state in China and East Asia, particularly through the analytical lenses of language, materiality and everyday life. After previous investigations of Beijing’s green belts and the Jiehebu area, his current research develops along two lines of inquiry, one attending to the infrastructural lives of authoritarianism and the other looking into the urban mechanisms of “Global China.” He is an editor of City, and a corresponding editor of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.