Guest Editor's Introduction

The process of China's contemporary urbanization is being simultaneously driven by two forces possessing differing origins and vastly different consequencesâone that is found in the logic of a quasi-capitalist industrialization and modernization, and another that is a legacy of the institutions of the period of state planning as well as of those created in the post-Maoist era of reform. The first type of urbanization, and that most familiar to scholars of urbanization in other developing countries, is an organic, evolutionary urbanization relating to economic and social changeâindustrialization, the shift of labor from agricultural to nonagricultural industries, the marketization and commercialization of the economy, and the growth of the services sectorâthat both gives rise to and is driven further forward by the concentration of population and key production inputs in urban centers. The second type of urbanization is an administratively driven mobilization program with a specific set of statistical goals to be attained. It has virtually been forced upon Chinese planners by the continued operation of institutions and policies (some of which derive from the Maoist era) that place major impediments in the path of the first type of urbanization, distort its progress, and ultimately prevent urbanization from reaching its ultimate and logical conclusion.