Land development has become central to China's accumulation and distribution politics in the past three decades. This monograph is a major contribution to our understanding of this profound yet under-researched process in at least two ways.

First, this book provides an unprecedentedly comprehensive account of the changes in the land system in contemporary China. This project, however mundane it may at first sound, is in fact one of the most challenging tasks in the study of urban China. The difficulties of compiling a systematic data set and evaluating the credibility of official sources are not unusual in China studies. When it comes to data on land-use changes and land-use rights transfers, the challenge is even greater. The challenge is attributable as much to China's fragmented and localized surveys that use varied measurement parameters as to the discrepancies between reports and actual figures. These discrepancies are often created by local officials cooking the books, or in local Chinese parlance, “hiding the harvest,” a common practice in China's long history of centralized territorial governance. As land became the motor of local accumulation in the last two decades, the discrepancies grew even more pronounced. Modern technologies like satellite imaging help address these problems, of course. But technologically neutral devices are always adopted politically. The author has combed through a mountain of national aggregate data and local surveys, identifying discrepancies within and between official and non-official sources, and verified the figures through interviews as a way of “ground truthing.” Ultimately, we are presented with an admirably well-structured picture of the changes in agricultural, industrial and construction land in both urban and rural areas. With a geographer's sensibility, the author has converted key data sets into maps. The spatial presentations greatly help to visualize regional variations and the grand scale of the changes in China's land systems.

Second, the solid empirical data supports a series of insightful arguments. The author finds that, for example, under the state land tenure system, state agencies have the exclusive authority to appropriate cultivated land and profit from land rights transfer. As a result, state agencies have become the primary violator of land laws and the most active actor in both formal and informal land markets. This clarification is crucial for us to identify the political condition of China's land rights regime and the political logic of market regulation in China's transition economy. The author also proposes that there has been a shift from rural-based urbanization in the 1980s to city-centred urbanization since the mid-1990s. During the 1980s, it was the rural housing construction boom and small-scale township and village enterprises (TVEs) that were responsible for massive land conversion from agricultural to construction uses. From the mid-1990s on, it was the large-scale industrial and commercial projects initiated by urban actors that took the lead in urban expansion. This observation is fundamental to our understanding of the restructuring of territorial power in China. As I have pointed out in my own work, the shift of the motor of local development from rural industrialism to urban entrepreneurialism has profound implications for China's new territorial order, as the leading metropolitan regions emerge to become the primary sites of accumulation and contentious politics within the state and between the state and society.

As with most good books, Developing China raises more questions than it answers. One area that remains to be explored, for example, is how land development would shape the formation of the state itself, should such developments become the centre of territorial power restructuring. If spatial planning has replaced economic planning as the direction of the state's accumulation project, how would such a shift affect the relationship between the state and market in China's new political economy? If contestations over land have dominated contentious politics, how does land condition the formation of citizenship in China today? Finally, as a geographer, I wonder whether the analysis of the production of new urban spaces in China, as attempted in this book, could take us onto a different path of theorizing, in which the spatial is no longer treated as a passive “container” of political-economic activities, but as a primary structural/historical force in social transformation.