China's restless urban landscapes 1: new challenges for theoretical reconstruction

The restless (re)formation of urban landscapes in Europe and North America since the mid-1970s has been the subject of extensive documentation and competing interpretations (Harvey, 1985; 1989a; Knox, 1993; Scott, 1988; 2001; Soja, 2000). By comparison, relatively little is understood about the dynamics of urban transformation on the other side of the Asia-Pacific where, despite its `distant' location in `the Far East', the restlessness of urban changes has been no less pronounced than its American and European counterpart. In terms of either the rapidity of changes or the scale of involvement, the formation, reformation, and transformation of urban landscapes in contemporary China really have little parallel elsewhere in the world, as the papers in this and the next theme issue will reveal. Such enormous urban changes in the most populous and yet poorly understood nation of the world pose great theoretical challenges to those of us trying to negotiate geographic knowledge in the era of intellectual globalization (Cartier, 2001). For China specialists working in the field of urban geography, there is no shortage of documentation on the Chinese experience of urban development and urbanization. In addition to a widely scattered corpus of literature generated by individual scholars within and outside China (Fan et al, 2002; Lin, 1994; Pannell, 1990; Tang, 1997; Wei, 1995; Yan, 1995), there have been occasions when major collective efforts were made to document and explain the unique features of China's urban development (Guldin, 1992; Kwok et al, 1990; Logan, 2002; Ma and Hanten, 1981; Ma and Noble, 1986; Sit, 1985; Yeung and Hu, 1992). Although these commendable efforts have shed important light on the dynamics of urban growth in China, the bulk of the extant literature has been, until recently, generated along the path of area studies in which the emphasis is placed on sorting out correctly the facts about a mysterious nation behind the `bamboo curtain'. If there is any gap between mainstream theoretical geography on one hand and the empirically rich branch of area studies on the other, such a gap is clearly noticeable in studies of urban China. Against the above intellectual backdrop, this and the next theme issue on urban China are organized for two objectives. First, we aim to provide a platform for a team of experienced urban China specialists to share with a wide audience their up-to-date accounts and interpretations of the different facets of China's urban transformation. To distinguish this and the next theme issue from what has been written, we have placed the emphasis on both collective expertise and timely contributions to the understanding of the complex and rapidly changing processes of urban transformation. The ten papers included in these two issues have been selected after rigorous anonymous reviews from those (altogether twenty-three papers) presented in the sessions titled `̀ China's Cities and Regions in Transition: Essays in Honor of Laurence J C Ma'' which took place at the 97th Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers in New York City 27 February to 3 March 2001. Each paper examines one of the most important and, in many cases new, components of China's urban development. Although we allowed for and indeed encouraged a great variety of different viewpoints about different facets of urban China, contributors to the two theme issues are all professional geographers so that methodological consistency and integrity are well preserved. Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2002, volume 34, pages 1535 ^ 1544