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Against the backdrop of higher education expansion, studentification refers to a particular type of urban sociospatial restructuring resulting from university students' concentration in certain residential areas. Over the last decade, studentification has evolved into different forms and has spread to different locales. This study aims to provide a contextualised understanding of this distinct phenomenon in China so as to decode the complex dynamics of urban sociospatial transformation in the Chinese city. In this paper, I present a line of empirical evidence based on fieldwork in Xiadu Village and Nanting Village, two studentified villages close to university campuses in Guangzhou. These two villages exemplify different consumption and spatial outcomes of studentifcation, owing to different institutional arrangements, types of studentifiers and roles of villagers. Yet, in both villages, studentification has profoundly transformed the economic, physical, social and cultural landscapes. Notably, rather than the spatialisation of compromised and marginalised residential choices by higher education students, studentification in China is better interpreted as the spatial result of students' conscious residential, entrepreneurial and consumption choices to escape from the rigid control of university dorms, to accumulate cultural and economic capital, as well as to actualise their cultural identity. In the Chinese context, studentification provides a useful prism to understand a unique trajectory of urbanisation: re-urbanising the 'villages in the city' through bringing in urban living/urban consumptions. In the long run, studentification could provide a potential solution to sustain and upgrade the villages in the city.

Public services equalization is closely related to local economic and social development. Hence, it is crucial to explore the changing dynamics of public services equalization and its correlation with regional economic disparities. We first examine the changing spatiotemporal patterns of public services provision and local economic performance at the provincial level across China from 2003 to 2017, using a set of indicators and the Mann–Kendall test. It is found that different types of public services are divergent in both temporal trend and geographical locations. However, both income and expenditure have been significantly increased for all provinces during the study period. Second, we unravel the heterogeneous relationship between public services provision and local economy across time and space using the geographically and temporally weighted regression. Variance decomposition is further employed to quantify the relative contribution of public services provision to local economy. Results show that the impact of different types of public services on local economic system is divergent, which jointly affects local economy system together with political and other economic factors. Thirdly, we use the Theil index and traditional least square regression to further examine the relationships between public services equalization and regional economic disparities. We find that public services equalization is correlated with regional economic disparities at the national level, yet their interrelation varies significantly in different regions. Taken together, through revisiting the role of public services equalization in regional economic disparities and unpacking its geographical and temporal heterogeneity, this study fills salient research gaps and informs policymaking towards a long-term goal of social equalization.

The COVID-19 pandemic in many senses reconstructs social norms and reshapes social behaviour, which typically assumes a close correlation between mobility with a higher risk of COVID-19 infection. This may intensify the pre-existing discrimination against tenants and widen tenure-based health inequalities. Drawing on an online questionnaire survey conducted in five major cities in China in 2020, we employ multi-level regression models to examine the intensified discrimination against tenants during COVID-19 and its impacts on residents’ physical and mental health inequalities. Results show that the pre-existing inequalities have been intensified during COVID-19 and the perceived discrimination has rendered worsened self-rated health and mental health and enlarged health inequalities. The discrimination particularly affected tenants with better economic profiles or worse health conditions; by contrast, despite being exposed to more tenant-related discriminatory experiences, rural hukou holders suffered from less severe health inequalities. A clear linkage is found between renting in poorly-managed and larger health gaps generated by discrimination. The negative health impact of intensified discrimination is found to be more significant in communities with lower infection risk, which points to the necessity of understanding the long-term health impact of discrimination against tenants in a more holistic way. In terms of community environment, we discover a positive effect of community social capital, i.e., higher level social capital helps mitigate the health threat of discrimination against tenants during COVID-19. Besides, public housing tenants reported better health outcomes and were less exposed to intensified discrimination during COVID-19 than private housing tenants. These findings provide a nuanced understanding of variations determined by individual and territorial factors, thus present timely policy implications for promoting healthy and inclusive urban development in the post-pandemic era.

Background Patient satisfaction is a proxy indicator for evaluating the efficiency, equity and quality of healthcare provision. Recent years have seen increasing cross-boundary healthcare utilization worldwide along with enhanced population mobility amidst the globalization process, while empirical research on patients’ satisfaction with cross-boundary healthcare services is limited. This study aims to enrich the understanding of patient satisfaction with cross-boundary healthcare utilization, and provide policy implications for healthcare governance. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023. A total of 3500 Hong Kong residents were sampled in Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen proportional to the age structure, among which 1208 had cross-boundary healthcare experiences in mainland China. The PSQ-18 (Patient Satisfaction Questionnaire-18), a standard validated questionnaire with seven subscales was used to measure patient satisfaction. Satisfaction/dissatisfaction with cross-boundary healthcare was differentiated according to whether a patient’s PSQ-18 score for mainland China’s healthcare services was higher or no higher than that for Hong Kong’s healthcare services. Binary logistic regression models were run to explore the associations between satisfaction/dissatisfaction and patients’ socio-demographic characteristics. Results Among respondents, 19.3% expressed higher “general satisfaction” with healthcare services in mainland China than that in Hong Kong. The “interpersonal manner” of cross-boundary healthcare received the highest rating (83%) while “financial aspects” scored the lowest (67%). Mainland China’s healthcare facilities performed better in “interpersonal manner” and “accessibility and convenience” compared to Hong Kong, but improvements were needed in other subscales. Patients’ socio-demographic characteristics such as age (AOR: 2.62, 95% CI: 1.66–4.13), gender (AOR: 0.71, 95% CI: 0.52–0.98), children (AOR: 1.76, 95% CI: 1.10–2.81), employment (AOR: 0.52, 95% CI: 0.34–0.80), or duration of stay in mainland China (AOR: 0.62, 95% CI: 0.42–0.91) were associated with general satisfaction with cross-boundary healthcare. Household income, mainland China’s media use frequency, and health status significantly influenced multiple dimensions of patient satisfaction ( p  < 0.05). Age emerged as the strongest predictor across all seven PSQ-18 dimensions. Conclusion The level of patient satisfaction with cross-boundary healthcare and its influencing factors varies across different dimensions. Targeted interventions to promote cross-boundary healthcare utilization among Hong Kong residents should prioritize the elderly, males, employees, patients with dependent child(ren), and low-income groups.

Background: To investigate the multidimensional difficulties in accessing a definitive diagnosis of adult rare diseases and the associated impact factors in China. Methods: A total of 1010 adult rare disease patients from the 2018 China Rare Disease Survey were used for analysis. The Structural Equation Models examined the interrelationships among five accessibility indicators and the effects of three sets of impact factors. Results: (1) Accessibility: 72.97% of patients were misdiagnosed; they waited an average of 4.30 years and visited 2.97 hospitals before the definitive diagnosis; 67.13% were diagnosed outside the home city and traveled an average of 562 km. (2) Interrelationships among accessibility indicators: the experience of misdiagnosis significantly increased diagnosis delay and the number of hospitals visited, but had no significant effect on healthcare utilization across cities. (3) Impact factors: the rarity of disease only increased the number of hospitals visited and residence–hospital distance; high-quality healthcare distribution was key in determining accessibility; the older, disabled, poor, and less-educated individuals, and those in Central/West China were disadvantaged. Conclusion: The socioeconomic dimension of difficulties in accessing a definitive diagnosis of rare diseases should be attended, especially the uneven distribution of high-quality healthcare and those disadvantaged patients. More systematic rare disease surveys are needed in the future.

In the context of the reconfigured state-society relation, Chinese states’ modes of crisis management have profoundly transformed, featuring the state’s greater efforts in reconciling the conflicts among the state machinery of capital accumulation, political stability maintenance and the increasingly diversified societal needs. However, how the local state performs specific missions accordingly in handling day-to-day conflicts on the ground remains under-examined. Accounting for the mundane yet nontrivial conflict resolving strategies featuring ‘carrot and stick’ approach, this article aims to fill this gap by examining the underlying logic, the operational mechanism, and the socioeconomic implications of flexible authoritarianism at the local level, based on an empirical investigation on how local state handles nail households in housing demolition and relocation in Dalian, China. We define ‘carrot and stick’ approach as a manifestation of flexible authoritarianism on the ground, which employs a variety of formal and informal strategies as well as administrative and market instruments to handle nail households-induced conflicts that are constitutive of the renewed state-society relation. This study reveals that the ‘carrot and stick’ approach under flexible authoritarianism has been rationalized as an efficient way for the local state to maintain political and social stability whilst sustaining the momentum of economic growth, thus widely employed in China. This research deepens our theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamic state-society relation and flexible authoritarianism, and offers a detailed interpretation of why and how such hybrid and flexible ‘carrot and stick’ approach is rendered inevitable under the current politico-economic environment, power structure, legal and institutional configuration in urban China.

Spatial accessibility to medical resources is an integral component of universal health coverage. However, research evaluating the spatial accessibility of healthcare services at the community level in China remains limited. We assessed the community-level spatial access to beds, doctors, and nurses at general hospitals and identified the shortage areas in Shenzhen, one of the fastest growing cities in China. Based on hospital and population data from 2016, spatial accessibility was analyzed using several methods: shortest path analysis, Gini coefficient, and enhanced 2-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA). The study found that 99.9% of the residents in Shenzhen could get to the nearest general hospital within 30 min. Healthcare supply was much more equitable between populations than across communities in the city. E2SFCA scores showed that the communities with the best and worst hospital accessibility were found in the southwest and southeast of the city, respectively. State-owned public hospitals still dominated the medical resources supply market and there was a clear spatial accessibility disparity between private and public healthcare resources. The E2SFCA scores supplement more details about resource disparity over space than do crude provider-to-population ratios (PPR) and can help improve the efficiency of the distribution of medical resources.

It is widely documented that school quality has a capitalization effect on housing prices. However, existing literature has commonly reported a linear relationship between housing sales prices and the academic performance of nearby schools. This study challenges this prevalent understanding by examining how the entrance opportunity as an integral part of school quality affects both housing sales prices and housing rental prices, in response to the newly adopted point-based school enrolment policy in China whereby tenants are allowed to access local public schools but with fewer opportunities compared to homeowners. Employing machine learning algorithms, this study identifies which key school indicators and what ranges of these indicators have significant impacts on different housing sales and rental price segments in Shenzhen, China. Our results reveal that housing rental prices, particularly in the lower-priced segment, are more determined by the entrance opportunity than the academic performance, while the latter is the most important factor influencing housing sales prices. The nonlinear capitalization effect suggests that tenants and homebuyers are willing to pay more for school quality increases only within specific ranges, namely, from median to a relatively high level of school quality. These findings contribute to a more nuanced and updated understanding of the education capitalization effect and thus inform more inclusive and equitable urban planning and governance.

Despite the fact that virtually all urban growth is occurring, and will continue to occur, in the cities of the Global South, the conceptual tools used to study cities are distilled disproportionately from research on the highly developed cities of the Global North. With urban inequality widely recognized as central to many of the most pressing challenges facing the world, there is a need for a deeper understanding of cities of the South on their own terms. Locating Right to the City in the Global South marks an innovative and far reaching effort to document and make sense of urban transformations across a range of cities, as well as the conflicts and struggles for social justice these are generating. The volume contains empirically rich, theoretically informed case studies focused on the social, spatial, and political dimensions of urban inequality in the Global South. Drawing from scholars with extensive fieldwork experience, this volume covers sixteen cities in fourteen countries across a belt stretching from Latin America, to Africa and the Middle East, and into Asia. Central to what binds these cities are deeply rooted, complex, and dynamic processes of social and spatial division that are being actively reproduced. These cities are not so much fracturing as they are being divided by governance practices informed by local histories and political contestation, and refracted through or infused by market based approaches to urban development. Through a close examination of these practices and resistance to them, this volume provides perspectives on neoliberalism and right to the city that advance our understanding of urbanism in the Global South. In mapping the relationships between space, politics and populations, the volume draws attention to variations shaped by local circumstances, while simultaneously elaborating a distinctive transnational Southern urbanism. It provides indepth research on a range of practical and policy oriented i