earticle

영어

Urbanization has been a key component of China’s rapid development strategy over the past 20 years, and many studies have analyzed the process and the outcomes of this strategy in a case-by-case fashion. However, there has been little attempt to link this great urban experiment to existing political and economic development theory, and thereby assess whether the central government’s strategies will continue to set the country on the desired development path. We propose that state-centered development does not quite explain the Chinese case. The thesis in the West has been that China, as an authoritarian and highly centralized political system, must lead from the center, thus following the traditional model of the developmental state first proposed for East Asia. However, there is evidence that China's approach to development deviates from this model in important ways. One of the most important is the role played by local governments in providing opportunities for experimentation with different approaches to urbanization. We then test the validity of this claim by examining how Chinese urban governments allocate their resources, both fiscal and human, in key sectors, over time and place (sixty-nine cities from 2007 to 2014), to offer a different set of projections for urbanization and development in China. Using well-balanced panel data, we present the results of both a GLS and a fixed effects model, allowing for a direct comparison across cases and across time. We find that the developmental state models only explain part of the Chinese development story, and we find that investment in education and science and technology at the local level is related to increased urbanization levels. We also find that Chinese local governments are slowly transitioning from manufacturing to knowledge-based sector economies, allowing for the absorption of low-skilled labor from rural migration to the cities. This provides important support for the Chinese exceptionalism thesis: that urbanization is taking place at a pace that provides enough time for a transition to higher living standards with enough room for all. However, concerns remain over environmental degradation, especially air pollution, and the lack of provision of public services such as transportation that will need to be addressed as China moves forward. If urbanization in China is to truly be exceptional, then the local governments will need to take these issues under serious consideration.