Reinterpretation of China's under-urbanization: a systemic perspective

Under-urbanization, defined as the achievement of a high industrial growth without a parallel growth of urban population, can be plausibly viewed as a typical phenomenon of socialist economies and is widely recognized in the special case of China. This paper highlights the characteristics of China's under-urbanization and demonstrates system-related elements with specific linkages to the process of urbanization. In contrast to the thrust of the extant literature on urbanization in the context of socialist economies, where industrialization strategies alone ate taken as fundamental in explaining the nature of China's urbanization, we have focused, rather, on systemic characteristics to interpret China's under-urbanization. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.