Urbanizing China: Structures, Situations, and the Land-Sea Divide

This book explores how China’s cities have been shaped by the enduring tension between maritime and continental worlds, and how this deep structural logic unfolds within everyday urban situations. Rather than reducing urbanization to policy, markets, or rapid growth, Yanbo Li traces how multiple forces operate simultaneously in concrete settings—migration flows, administrative practices, redevelopment projects, community negotiations, and historical legacies. Within these situations, the contrasting pulls of coast and interior predispose distinctive patterns of expansion, transformation, and urban life. Focusing on Shanghai and the Yangtze River Delta—where China’s historical shift between land and sea has been most intensely negotiated and rendered visible— the book draws on historical analysis and detailed cases to show Chinese urbanization as a dynamic process in which deep structural tensions become visible through lived situations, continually reshaping cities across time.