This book provides first-hand, insiders’ perspectives on urban issues in China, aiming to provide a theoretically informed and empirically rich discussion of the new social landscape of urban China in the 21st century. The research reported encompasses both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, with the latter based on extensive and in-depth fieldwork. The authors, most of them being native Chinese, had distinctive advantages in gaining access to study subjects, and had intimate knowledge of the locations and people they studied. The book’s primary geographical focus is on southern China, especially Guangdong province. This region is in the forefront of China’s transition to a market economy, and therefore constitutes an ideal social laboratory to study the key urban issues that have emerged in the last two decades. Combining ethnographic research along with survey-based quantitative analysis, this volume will appeal to students of urban issues in contemporary China, and it will generate important and fresh empirical and theoretical insights for the broader scholarly communities of area studies, urban studies, and urban sociology. It will also serve as a useful text for graduate courses and advanced undergraduate courses on China and urban sociology.

Despite China's obvious and growing importance on the world stage, it is often and easily misunderstood. Indeed, there are many Chinas, as this comprehensive survey of contemporary China vividly illustrates. Now in a thoroughly revised and updated edition that offers the only sustained geography of the reform era, this book traces the changes occurring in this powerful and ancient nation across both time and space. Beginning with China's diverse landscapes and environments, and continuing through its formative history and tumultuous recent past, the authors present contemporary China as a product of both internal and external forces of past and present. They trace current and future successes and challenges while placing China in its international context as a massive, still-developing nation that must meet the needs of its 1.3 billion citizens while becoming a major regional and global player. Through clear prose and new, dynamic maps and photos, China's Geography illustrates and explains the great differences in economy and culture found throughout China's many regions.