In one of the outstanding political economic studies of the 20th century, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944, second edition, Beacon Press, 2001), Karl Polanyi theorized that because a truly self-regulating market is socially destructive, a “double movement” consisting of marketization met by periodic regulation must characterize modern society. In a recent essay, Wang Shaoguang discussed “The great transformation: the double movement in China” (boundary 2, 2008) to explain the Chinese government's introduction of a suite of new social policies designed to reduce economic disparities generated in the first waves of modernization under reform.

Thus The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China invokes a considerable legacy of scholarship on socio-economic change. Yet in this book, You-tien Hsing accomplishes something different: by interpreting a double movement through power decentralization and recentralization, she introduces a spatial approach that discovers the land development dilemmas of economic growth, and social actions in response to their inequities. In eight chapters, the book examines dynamics of state–society relations and problems of property rights that widely characterize the rebuilding and expansion of cities. The treatment is comparative and draws on examples and fieldwork from Beijing, Changsha, Chengdu, Guangzhou, Jinan, Nanjing, Shanghai and Zhengzhou, which demonstrate variability in conditions and outcomes. Its highly readable narrative style alone makes this an important book: through diverse case studies, Hsing explains complicated development scenarios with clarity and insight.

Hsing's interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach reflects her background in planning, sociology and geography, while this treatment prioritizes the geographical process of China's contemporary transformation. The conceptual development of the book focuses on the role of the state in land and property development and pivots on “civic territoriality,” which Hsing uses to define collective action in response to state appropriation of land and housing. As a response to this general problem, the six empirical chapters of the book are paired in three sets: redevelopment in urban cores and “grassroots resistance”; expansion of land development on urban peripheries and “village corporatism”; and new urban growth in rural areas and peasant relocation.

The outstanding achievement of the study is its explanation of the processes of creative destruction that link urban cores and peripheries through relocations of urban residents, and officials' recognition of this dynamic. The demolition of housing in urban cores has forced out long time residents who typically cannot afford new housing in gentrified areas. Whether by relocation assignment or market cost, they are compelled to seek lower-priced new housing on the urban periphery, which is often lower in quality. They did not want to leave the city centre and they did not want to live on its periphery but their removals and relocations fuel the overall process of redevelopment. The book also gives attention to the holdouts, the nail households or dingzihu, which have sought increased compensation by refusing to leave according to plan, in recognition of the vast differential between proffered compensation, actual land values and new housing prices.

Ultimately, the question is whether “civic territoriality” proves to generate sustained and widespread property rights recognition, or whether it remains localized and epiphenomenal. Results of the empirical work show that urban residents and well-organized corporate villages have experienced the most positive outcomes in negotiating claims. Hsing chronicles the partial success of Beijing's biaozhunzu or standard-rent housing owners who brought property rights claims based on pre-revolutionary ownership, yet the relatively small size of this group was a factor in their success. The corporate villages in the analysis are the chengzhongcun or urban villages of Guangdong. Since they remain targets of state modernization, what does the future hold? The rural population has had the least success in gaining recognition and, widely discouraged, their relocations have weakened social structures. Overall, what proportion of relocated people have engaged in civic action, or is the real issue the circulation of knowledge about successful claims, no matter how few, and their potential to undercut the prevailing ideology of social harmony? The study's conceptualization of the state as “multitudinous power processes” and description of “socialist land masters” has the effect of eliding the role of the Party.

For historians of the present, the book's organization around space will prove both refreshing and challenging, since the study delivers processes of local change rather than a chronology. Proponents of redevelopment will ask about increases in relocation compensation and residents who desire to move. Nevertheless, Hsing's summary of land development over the 1990s and 2000s, from an era of industrial development zones or kaifaqu to one of building entirely new cities or xincheng, convincingly establishes the broader arguments. Yet again, as I write, a popular village director in Fujian was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “obstructing official business” and other charges associated with support of villagers who voted against land appropriation for a new city, sending the message that local officials, and apparently everybody else, are expected to co-operate with the power structure. Compounded by recent reports about repeat petitioners of land disputes held in mental institutions, the current outlook is sobering.