THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF URBAN POVERTY IN CHINA
Open Access
- Author:
- Chen, Guo
- Graduate Program:
- Geography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 04, 2007
- Committee Members:
- Amy K Glasmeier, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Lakshman S Yapa, Committee Member
Leif Jensen, Committee Member
Chris Benner, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Economic Reform
China
Deprivation
Spatial Inequality
Urban Poverty
Rural-Urban Migration - Abstract:
- This research explores one of the most important and yet under-researched topics shaping the contemporary urban geography of China—urban poverty. Since the mid 1990s, despite widely recognized success in economic reform and poverty alleviation, China has seen a rise of urban poverty in absolute numbers and in percentages. A close look reveals that the rise of urban poverty is a result of the state’s retreat from urban full employment and welfare provisions, multiplied by the effects of an exceptionally low urban poverty rate in the socialist era due to a manipulated class structure and maintained urban privileges. Along with the rise in rural-urban migration, this spatial relocation of poverty to urban areas has combined with the increasing heterogeneity among the poor, and both poor migrants and native urbanites face growing spatial isolation. This research responds to the “market transition” debate among sociologists such as Victor Nee and geographers, and it critiques structuralist perspectives on third-world migration and development and regional geographic studies on poverty and inequality. It proposes instead a multi-level and multi-actor approach, to analyze pre-existing socialist institutions and market-oriented changes as structures, and to analyze local governments, communities, and families as agents. This study examines how these structures and agents shape the urban poverty spaces in China. I address three questions: (1) how spatial inequality and deprivation in China are shaped at the national level; (2) how the spaces of urban poverty in China are shaped at the intra-city level by urban policies accompanying market-oriented social and economic reforms; and (3) how the livelihood and life chances of rural migrant family households compare with native urban family households. Through a national level census data analysis, a case study of Nanjing, and a case study of housing tenure for poor family households based on survey and interview data, this research explains the nature of urban poverty in China at three levels: (1) at the state level, urban poverty is emerging as a form of moving opportunities and relative deprivations across space; (2) at the city level, the (re)location and concentration of urban poverty is due to migration control and urban redevelopment in the local institutional context; and (3) at the community and individual levels, urban poverty is an outcome associated with individual characteristics and individuals’ connection with the state, conditioned by family and community-based support. These findings suggest that urban poverty exists not simply as the consequence of individual incapacity in the face of marketization or due to the existence of biased national policies towards rural migrants, but argues instead that rising urban poverty is largely a reaction to the emergence of transforming institutions characteristic of a hybrid economy with strong state and local interventions.