Urban shrinkage with Chinese characteristics

This study exposes and maps a hitherto little-known dimension of China's urban geography - that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political-administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty-eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north-eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make-up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state-incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state-propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state-sponsored mega-shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications.