One of the most noticeable and significant transformations in China over the past three decades of the reform era is the rapid and massive urbanization of the most populous country in the world. Sprawling is a particularly appropriate word to describe China’s urban expansion. Chinese urban governments have rushed to set up new cities by annexing farmland. Over the past thirty years, 45,000 square miles (or 116,500 square kilometers) of farmland, or an area that amounts to half of Great Britain’s total landmass, have been turned into urban areas in China.1 In 1978, the year in which the reforms began, only around 18 percent of Chinese people lived in cities.2 By 2011, this figure had reached 53.7 percent,3 not including the hundreds of millions of migrant workers who work and live in Chinese cities without urban hukou. The process of urbanization is by no means over. In fact, Premier Li Keqiang has made urbanization one of the key driving forces in furthering China’s economic development and has accelerated the urbanization process. It is projected that by 2020 China’s urbanization rate will stand at around 60 percent.4
Much has been written about the consequences and implications of China’s impressive urbanization with regard to different aspects such as economic growth, population movement, pollution, traffic congestion, sustainable development, inequalities, loss of agricultural land, etc. Not enough attention has been paid to the political implications of China’s rapid and massive urbanization. Cities, as a result of their unique features, have historically played an important role in political change around the world. It is no coincidence that most contemporary revolutions, revolts and insurrections, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution and from the May 4th Movement in China to the recent “colored revolutions” in the Middle East, have first broken out in the cities. The success of the Chinese communist revolution resulted from the strategy of “encircling the cities from rural areas” was an exception and not the rule. The following factors have made cities the most probable places for political events. First, authorities, including both central and provincial governments, are located in metropolitan areas and they are in the grabbing range of urban populations. Second, urban areas are more densely populated and protests can easily gain momentum. Third, cities tend to have more sophisticated communication means for organizing political events. The fourth factor is the concentration of the urban poor, who can be mobilized easily.
It has been argued that the Chinese government has managed the process of urbanization better than many other developing countries by avoiding some of the typical problems associated with urbanization, such as the existence of urban slums, uneven development within cities, high unemployment rate, high crime rate and a severe lack of social and public services. In fact, some have contended that the relative success of the Chinese government in managing its urbanization process has contributed to regime stability in China over the past thirty years.5 One of the institutional measures that has been credited for promoting stability in China’s urban areas is the rigid hukou or household registration system, an urban-biased policy discriminating against rural residents in China. The limitation on the rural population’s ability to become urban residents with benefits has prevented the presence of slums and the urban poor in Chinese cities. Migrant workers in Chinese cities are mostly housed at their work site by their work units. Because migrant workers are only temporary residents in the city without social and educational benefits enjoyed by legal and permanent urban dwellers, they usually do not bring their families with them to the city. Therefore, there are no slums in Chinese cities.
According to Samuel Huntington, urbanization inevitably leads to social and political changes.6 Seymour Martin Lipset argues that urbanization leads to the expansion of interest groups due to close living proximity in the cities which results in increased political competition.7 Also as a result of close proximity, urban dwellers are said to be more politically tolerant than non-urban dwellers. Size of cities has also been cited as a major factor contributing to urban government decentralization and democratization.8 Urbanization is usually accompanied by industrialization and an expansion of the middle class, both of which have political implications. Can China be an exception to these changes? In recent decades, Chinese cities have experienced a proliferation of non-governmental organizations and urban governmental authorities have become more specialized and decentralized. Instead of studying institutional issues, this book, drawing on new survey data, takes a political cultural approach in studying the political implications of urbanization in China. Cities are resided by urban dwellers who are main actors and conduits for any political change and development in urban China. Studying the political attitudes and views of urban residents is a direct way to explain and predict the political trajectory of Chinese cities.
Culture and politics have long been believed to be intertwined. Culture or value as an explanation in the study of political phenomena can be found in the works of Hegel, Kant and Weber. Human beings are products of their cultural environment and their actions are often guided and influenced by their subjective cultural orientations. But the term “political culture” was first introduced into political science only in the early 1960s by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba in their seminal work The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations.9 There are several features associated with the traditional political cultural approach (even though the term “political culture” was not used until Almond and Verba) to study politics. First, it tends to focus on the macro (or aggregate) level of cultural traditions and context. Second, it adopts an idiographic approach in the study of the relationship between culture and politics that emphasizes cultural uniqueness. Yet another feature of traditional cultural approach to the study of politics is its non-empirical nature. The Civic Culture broke new ground for the study of political culture. My political cultural approach in this book is in line with Almond and Verba’s empirical political cultural study.
The role of culture in shaping political development in China is a factor agreed upon by most China scholars.10 There is, however, a debate over how to treat political culture or culture in general in China. One school of thought believes that Chinese culture is unique and that it differs radically from cultures elsewhere in the world.11 The old saying is “China is China is China”.12 Sinologists holding this view argue that China is not just another country and that the unique culture and history of China makes it almost impossible to compare China with another country. Their cultural explanation of Chinese politics is often tautological and non-falsifiable. Why has China had such a long history of authoritarianism? The answer is because China has an authoritarian culture. How do they prove that China has an authoritarian culture? The proof is the long-lasting history of authoritarianism in China. Another drawback of using cultural traditions to explain contemporary political phenomena in China is the underlining assumption that Chinese culture does not change. Culture is dynamic and does change. Chinese political culture on mainland China has arguably changed significantly, especially after the Cultural Revolution and thirty years of economic reform. The changes have been well documented in survey research findings in recent years.13 The opposing view contends that Chinese culture does differ from other cultures, but that it is not necessarily unique.14 “Uniqueness” goes against the rationale of social science research since science implies generalization and comparability. Of course, no two countries have identical culture or political culture. The difference is what scholars are interested in and, often, focal point of academic studies. Cultural difference only means one country may have more of a cultural trait than that of another country. In this sense, China should be studied as a normal country in the context of other countries. Harry Harding used the phrase “academicization of Chinese studies” to describe the “normalization” of Chinese political studies.15
Following the positivist tradition of The Civic Culture, this book is an empirical study of Chinese urban residents’ political attitudes and values based on random surveys conducted in large Chinese cities. Study of Chinese political culture utilizing survey research method has become fairly popular among China scholars16 for three important reasons. The first important reason is the belief that political culture ...