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Forty years ago, China was “under urbanized’; less than 20% of the population lived in towns or cites and that percentage had not shifted for many decades. Today the majority of Chinese citizens live and work in urban settlements and China has more than 160 cities with a population of over one million. Market forces have fueled rapid urbanization but equally decisive has been a radical extension of city boundaries. As a result, urban “spaces” have expanded twice as fast as the urban population. Moreover, while half of the new urbanites are migrants who left their villages to seek their fortune in the cities, half are in-situ urbanites where the “city came to them.” In this lecture, Deborah Davis first summarizes the macrolevel shifts between 1980 and 2015 and then draws on current research to discuss multiple dimensions of “uneven urbanization.”

Deborah Davis is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai as well as on the faculty at the Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University. At Yale she served as Director of Academic Programs at the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Chair of the Department of Sociology, Chair of the Council of East Asian Studies, and co-chair of the Women Faculty Forum. Her past publications have analyzed the politics of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese family life, social welfare policy, consumer culture, property rights, social stratification, occupational mobility, and impact of rapid urbanization and migration on health and happiness.