After millions of migrants moved from China’s countryside into its sprawling cities a unique kind of ‘informal’ urban enclave was born – ‘villages in the city’. Like the shanties and favelas before them elsewhere, there has been huge pressure to redevelop these blemishes to the urban face of China’s economic vision. Unlike most developing countries, however, these are not squatter settlements but owner-occupied settlements developed semi-formally by ex-farmers turned small-developers and landlords who rent shockingly high-density rooms to rural migrants, who can outnumber their landlord villagers. A strong state, matched with well-organised landlords collectively represented through joint-stock companies, has meant that it has been relatively easy to grow the city through demolition of these soft migrant enclaves. The lives of the displaced migrants then enter a transient phase from an informal to a formal urbanity. This book looks at migrants and their enclave ‘villages in the city’ and reveals the characteristics and changes in migrants’ livelihoods and living places. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the book analyses how living in the city transforms and changes rural migrant households, and explores the social lives and micro economies of migrant neighbourhoods. It goes on to discuss changing housing and social conditions and spatial changes in the urban villages of major Chinese cities, as well as looking into transient urbanism and examining the consequences of redevelopment and upgrading of the ‘villages in the city’; in particular, the planning, regeneration, politics of development, and socio-economic implications of these immense social, economic and physical upheavals.

The double-edged policy pursued by the Chinese government has created serious challenges for public health strategies implemented at national and local levels. As a result, the challenges created new research opportunities for Chinese and Western scholars, and this volume is a compilation of their work. The papers are organied within three main topics: health risks, health services, and health insurance for rural migrants in Chinese cities. The volume also includes two documentary contributions on migration regulations and civil society services for migrants suffering from occupational diseases and work-related injuries.

This book investigates the influence of self-organisation processes on the commuting of the poor workers in urban China. It suggests a new approach to investigate and measure individual access, and it argues that dynamic interactions between individual action and social structure influence individual’s access to transport, which cannot be measured using other traditional accessibility approaches.The overwhelming majority of models in transport research assume that socio-economic factors and the built-environment influence the accessibility of transport for individuals. This book provides evidence that individual decision-makings and actions are also vital factors to bring out changes in accessibility. Further, the study adopts a self-organisation process and structuration theory to illustrate that a significant proportion of travel problems of migrants are rooted in the interaction between actions and social structures. Any change in migrants’ actions or social structures in the self-organisation process would result in the production of complex and spontaneous travel behaviour. The self-organisation approach presented provides a new approach for urban transport planning in the future, particularly on the investigation of the accessibility of disadvantaged social groups. By using the social theories, transport research can have an effect on commuting behaviour and to improve poor workers’ quality of life.

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In 1915 Robert Park penned his seminal paper “The City: Suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the city environment”. This essay provided an agenda for the Chicago School of Urban Sociology, which formed the basis of urban research for decades. Given that China’s urban centres now occupy the spotlight that once belonged to American cities, Park’s essay is a platform and point of departure for this volume, which gathers together reflections from a broad range of urban China specialists to consider Park’s (ir)relevance today – for cities in China, for questions about the social life of the city and for urban research more generally. Essential for a broad range of urban studies scholars, this book is an invaluable teaching resource and a useful tool for policy-makers and planners.

The Routledge Companion to Career Studies is an in-depth reference for researchers, students, and practitioners looking for a comprehensive overview of the state of the art of career studies. Split into five parts, the volume looks at major areas of research within career studies and reflects on the latest developments in the areas of theory, empirical studies, and methodology. The book's five parts cover (1) major theoretical and methodological debates and approaches to studying careers; (2) careers as dynamic, ongoing processes covering such issues as time, shaping careers, career outcomes and patterns, and the forces shaping careers; (3) the local, national, and global context of careers, (4) implementing career research to design practical interventions in areas such as education, counseling, and national policy; and (5) a commentary on the current state of career scholarship and its future development as represented in this volume, by founding scholars in the field. This book will be a sourcebook for scholars studying careers, research students intending to take up the study of careers, and anyone – scholars and practitioners – with an interest not only in understanding careers, the factors shaping them and where they lead, but also in how this understanding might be used in practice.

Unprecedented urbanization is taking place in China and will continue over the next decades. China's level of urbanization rose from 18 percent in 1978 to 30 percent in 1995 and to 39 percent in 2002. It is expected that China will quadruple its total GDP and reach 55 percent of urbanization by 2020. Urbanization in China is a comprehensive process involving transformations in many areas, including the management of spatial expansion via modern urban planning, the administration of land use changes via land policy reforms, the process of rural-to-urban migration, and the development of public finance systems. All of these changes are part of China's transition from a centrally planned economy to a socialist market economy.

China's economic growth has transformed the country from one of the poorest in the world to its second largest economy. Understanding the drivers of growth remains elusive as the country is affected by both its transition from central planning and the challenges of a developing country. This book examines the main themes of growth, offering micro level evidence to shed light on the macro drivers of the economy. It also focuses on law and informal institutions of the economy to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship and the development of the private sector.

This edited volume provides an overview of inequality and stratification in contemporary China. A rare and timely resource, it presents key research on the topic published in Chinese Sociological Review from 2011 to 2023, using one or multiple waves of Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) data, reflecting the advancement of the field over the past decade. The CGSS, launched in 2003 and modelled after the US General Social Survey, is an annual or biennial cross-sectional survey of a nationally representative sample of the population from all provinces except for Tibet. Certain waves of CGSS data (e.g., 2003 and 2008) contain detailed retrospective information about education and job history, which can be analysed to address various issues related to educational stratification and career mobility in both the pre-reform and reform eras. At the junction of the 20th anniversary of the CGSS (2003-2023), this volume draws on CGSS data to uncover dynamic and evolving inequality in China by examining topics such as education stratification, income inequality, career and intergeneration mobility, and how they are shaped by the socialist/post-socialist institutional structure such as the household registration (hukou) system, the work unit (danwei) system. This collection significantly advances the understanding of Chinese social stratification, extending far beyond scholars’ initial interests in the social consequences of the market transition. This volume invites social scientists to think more deeply about how politics and economics interplay with other social and demographic trends in shaping the pattern of inequality and provides a rich source and foundation for understanding inequality dynamics in contemporary China.