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The business connections between Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai and other major world cities are investigated using the interlocking network model based upon the location strategies of advanced producer service firms. This approach emphasises non-hierarchical relations between cities. A key new finding is that city-dyad analysis enhances the prominence of these China cities compared with simple ranking by total global network connectivity. This suggests that Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing have developed more strategically important roles in the world city network than previously understood. Yet the geographies of these links are distinctive, with Shanghai shown to be better connected to the more important world cities such as London and New York than Beijing; and Beijing is found to be better connected to political world cities such as Washington and Brussels, and to other Pacific Asian cities, than Shanghai. The results are interpreted as suggestions for developing a new research programme.

This paper aims to contribute to existing literature on the effects of the built environment on bicycle commuting, examining the case of Beijing. A group of city-wide random samples is analysed. The analysis shows that bicycle commuting is significantly associated with some features of the built environment when many demographic and socioeconomic factors are taken into account. Higher destination accessibility, a higher number of exclusive bicycle lanes, a mixed environment and greater connectivity between local streets tend to increase the use of the bicycle. These effects differ across gender, age and income groups. However, residential density has no significant effects on the use of a bicycle for commuting, while higher levels of public transit services tends to decrease rather than increase bicycle commuting. The results imply that the drastic changes in the built environment are a major reason for the demise of 'the kingdom of bicycles' in China.

The urban sustainability agenda is engaged at some levels with the two concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism. While they share certain important commonalities (for example, the emphasis on what is normatively understood as 'right' policy-making), each has largely progressed on its own intellectual trajectory. It is suggested that the concepts of ecological modernisation and urban entrepreneurialism are crystallised and concretised in the idea(l) form of the 'eco-city' through the search for an 'urban sustainability fix' in urban China. Although the idea of constructing an 'eco-city' has been mooted since the 1980s, the concept remains somewhat elusive and controversial for a number of reasons. First, while its physical form and design appeal have often been promoted by urban planners, architects and government officials, the deeper normative tenets of building an eco-city are surprisingly ignored. Secondly, the lack of an 'actually existing' or successfully implemented eco-city project suggests the considerable amount of resistance and difficulties (in terms of planning, politics, economic costs, etc.) that the concept encounters in practice. To that end, the paper examines various green urban initiatives in reform China before focusing on the example of Shanghai's Dongtan eco-city project (an entrepreneurial urban prestige-project jointly developed by the British and Chinese governments) to examine the challenges and contradictions of an urban sustainability fix in the guise of eco-city building in China.

This article evaluates the impact of 'creative industry clusters' on urban entrepreneurialism in Shanghai. It aims to introduce the concept of 'creative industry clusters' into the discussion of the ' entrepreneurial city' in China by testing two main arguments regarding the role of creative industry clusters, and to develop the concept of entrepreneurial city in China. The major argument is that, although these clusters are playing an important role in upgrading the city's entrepreneurial features particularly in attracting business, they have made a limited contribution to fostering talent or boosting creative industry entrepreneurship. Three features of the entrepreneurial city of Shanghai are: the government's stance of attracting capital and professionals; the continuation of urban commodification in character; and, the innovativeness of diversified forms of urban commodities within current urban policies. Such new forms of commodities, however, do not serve as new strategies designed specifically for creative industries.

There has been a rapidly spreading meme in U.S. pundit and academic circles since 2010 that describes China's recent diplomacy as \"newly assertive.\" This \"new assertiveness\" meme suffers from two problems. First, it underestimates the complexity of key episodes in Chinese diplomacy in 2010 and overestimates the amount of change. Second, the explanations for the new assertiveness claim suffer from unclear causal mechanisms and lack comparative rigor that would better contextualize China's diplomacy in 2010. An examination of seven cases in Chinese diplomacy at the heart of the new assertiveness meme finds that, in some instances, China's policy has not changed; in others, it is actually more moderate; and in still others, it is a predictable reaction to changed external conditions. In only one case—maritime disputes–does one see more assertive Chinese rhetoric and behavior. The speed and extent with which the newly assertive meme has emerged point to an understudied issue in international relations—namely, the role that online media and the blogosphere play in the creation of conventional wisdoms that might, in turn, constrain policy debates. The assertive China discourse may be a harbinger of this effect as a Sino-U.S. security dilemma emerges.

This paper explores the development of migrant non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and their interactions with central and local Chinese state. The paper suggests that, while the central state is actively managing NGOs in Beijing and Shanghai with a strong regulatory framework, the urban local state, particularly at the district level, is increasingly an important actor in ensuring the effectiveness of migrant NGOs' activities. In this vein, the paper presents a model of state–migrant NGO relations, the subsequent informal rules that emerge from this reality and the implications thereafter for state-society relations in China.

Behind China's growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups.In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country's hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality.

China's fertility policy, a national priority for over two decades, has evolved to contain highly localized features, yet variation in fertility policy implementation by locality has not been well documented. Using data collected at China's 420 prefecture-level administrative units, this study provides a quantitative summary of fertility policy implementation and examines the localized nature of fertility policymaking in China during the late 1990s. The findings indicate that China's fertility policy encompasses much geographic and demographic variation. Nevertheless, the one-child policy remains a core element and exerts a substantial impact on China's demographic processes. The average total fertility rate targeted by current fertility policies for China as a whole (the \"policy fertility\") is estimated at 1.47 at the end of the 1990s, a rate far below the replacement level.

In this article, I analyse civil society development in China using examples from Beijing to demonstrate the causal role of local officials' ideas about these groups during the last 20 years. I argue that the decentralization of public welfare and the linkage of promotion to the delivery of these goods supported the idea of local government–civil society collaboration. This idea was undermined by international examples of civil society opposing authoritarianism and the strength of the state-led development model after the 2008 economic crisis. I find growing convergence on a new model of state–society relationship that I call “consultative authoritarianism,” which encourages the simultaneous expansion of a fairly autonomous civil society and the development of more indirect tools of state control. This model challenges the conventional wisdom that an operationally autonomous civil society cannot exist inside authoritarian regimes and that the presence of civil society is an indicator of democratization.

The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban–rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment ofchengzhongcunis an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods.