China's Urban Billion : the story behind the biggest migration in human history / Tom Miller

Asian Arguments; About the Author; Title page; Copyright; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; Map of China; Introduction: The Biggest Migration in Human History; 1 By the Sweat of Their Brows: The People Who Built Urban China; Box 1.1 Beijing's slum clearances; Box 1.2 School's out; 2 Passport to Purgatory: Fixing the Hukou System; Box 2.1 Down and out in Beijing; The Chongqing model: paying for the mayor's new clothes; Box 2.2 City livin'; Box 2.3 River town scrubs up; 3 Farm versus Factory: The Battle over Land; Box 3.1 Flogging the fields; Yours to sell: the great land-credit experiment. Box 3.2 The beginning of the end for traditional farming?4 The Construction Orgy: Paving the Fields; Box 4.1 Tier what?; Box 4.2 Scrabbling to fill the city coffers: the role of local government investment companies; Chengdu and Wuhan: hinterland dynamos; Box 4.3 Riding the stimulus express; Box 4.4 Home, sweet home; 5 Ghost Towns in the Desert: How China Builds Its Cities; Grey, ugly and congested: why are so many Chinese cities so horrible?; Box 5.1 Kingdom of subways; Box 5.2 Beijing: Urban squires, city paupers; Box 5.3 Hangzhou: preservation with Chinese characteristics. Box 5.4 Tianjin: scrubbing upBox 5.5 Zhengzhou: the beauty in the beast; 6 A Billion Wallets: What China's New Urbanites Will and Won't Buy; Box 6.1 Want not, waste not; Box 6.2 Village life; Conclusion: Civilizing the Cities; Bibliography; Sources in English; Sources in Chinese; Index.

Over the past thirty years, China?s cities became home to 500 million new residents. China?s urban population is on track to reach 1 billion by 2030. The rapid expansion of urban China is astonishing, but new policies are urgently needed to create healthier cities. Combining on-the-ground reportage and up-to-date research, this pivotal book explains why China has failed to reap many of the economic and social benefits of urbanization, and suggests how these problems can be resolved