In recent years, a growing body of English-language literature has explored the politics and processes of Chinese urbanization. Li Yu's book is the first to offer a systematic overview of the planning institutions that guide such transformation. The book is thus a valuable resource for scholars in Chinese studies, urban planning and related fields. It offers an effective introduction to Chinese planning, and educators will find it useful as a reference text for courses on Chinese governance institutions and international planning systems. This is particularly true of the latter chapters, each of which is devoted to a different variety of plan: regional, comprehensive, regulatory, and strategic. Those more familiar with Chinese planning may also find fresh insights, particularly regarding the historical origins of specific planning institutions. In addition, the case studies that accompany each chapter offer an unexpected and rewarding introduction to Xiamen's planning history.
Throughout the book, Yu argues that contemporary Chinese planning has emerged in response to marketization, and its failures represent an inability to effectively adapt to the market system. As Yu describes, liberalization of China's land and investment regimes has introduced diverse economic actors and market behaviours that present Chinese planners with regulatory challenges resembling those encountered in Europe and America. Through reviews of the Chinese-language planning literature, extensive summaries of China's planning regulations, and explorations of their historical roots, Yu narrates what has become the dominant discourse within the Chinese planning community. At the same time, his book illustrates several of the problems inherent in using marketization as a privileged lens for interpreting Chinese planning.
For example, many would take issue with the claims that China has “more or less completed its transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy” and that “the social, economic and political forces driving its city and regional planning system are not significantly different to those in the West” (pp. 79, 248). The continuing prominence of state actors as both directors of and participants in China's economy suggests substantial hybridity and the emergence of a uniquely Chinese brand of state-led capitalism. These claims of convergence serve as the basis for the book's final chapter, which evaluates Chinese planning through the lens of European and American planning theory. The robust Euro-American literature has much to offer China's planners, but Yu uses it to implicitly judge Chinese planning's fidelity to Euro-American norms. Since Chinese planning is embedded in a substantively distinct social and institutional context, this normative comparison inevitably results in the perception of failure and the prescription of unrealizable solutions.
An example is Yu's treatment of planning politics. Yu confuses the marketization of China's economy with the pluralization of its politics, conflating the principles of free-market capitalism with those of liberal democracy. This leads Yu to recommend Western norms of participation and transparency as a panacea for planning failure. But in a state with strict limitations on democratic participation, such initiatives are unlikely to produce meaningful inclusion, at least in the near term. In the final sentences of the book, Yu comes to the unsatisfying conclusion that reform of the Chinese planning system cannot be achieved without first reforming China's overall political and administrative system.
Yu's detailed investigation of China's planning system thus represents a missed opportunity to develop more constructive recommendations for improving Chinese planning in its existing social and political context. Such an effort would need to move beyond the rhetoric of Chinese planning to engage with the ways in which planning is actually carried out. True to the book's title, Yu gives us an account of China's planning systems, but he says relatively little about planners' practices. The book's most revealing moments come in Yu's observations of system breakdowns, but they are only brief asides. For instance, Yu repeatedly refers to the importance of power in making planning decisions, but he does not explore the mechanisms by which such power operates. Similarly, normative references to international planning could benefit from empirical investigations of actual practices. For example, a comparison of international approaches to zoning would substantially enrich the chapter on regulatory planning. This might then enable a situated theorization of Chinese planning and a nuanced understanding of which norms do and do not fit its practices.
The case studies offer opportunities for such insights, but Yu does not provide the methodological precision necessary to destabilize planning's formal representations. Beyond summaries of municipal planning documents, the case studies rely on survey work and interviews that are rarely described or specified. Yu's book therefore points to a broader need for greater rigor in the use of qualitative methods in planning scholarship. Without it, we are left with China's planning ideology – a representation of how planning is supposed to work but that is rarely achieved in practice.
