In this compact and highly readable monograph, Xuefei Ren takes on a daunting task: systematically comparing the urban governance logics of China and India. Rejecting the idea that the two countries’ differences in regime type, state structure and social makeup rule out fruitful comparison of their approaches to governing cities, Ren stresses the similarity of China's and India's contemporary urban development challenges. At the same time, Ren emphasizes “how differently China and India govern their cities” (p. 12) – both when it comes to defining what is urban in the first place, and when it comes to specific policy arenas such as acquiring urban land, redeveloping informal settlements and mitigating pollution.
Ren's central claim is that, while China and India are urbanizing in parallel and grappling with similar problems, Chinese urban governance features a “territorial logic,” while urban governance in India's metropolises reflects an “associational logic.” In China, state power and social mobilization occur mainly along territorial lines, with citizens governed and socioeconomic cleavages maintained by institutions like the place-based hukou (household registration) system, the bifurcated urban–rural land ownership regime, and highly empowered municipal governments. In India, by contrast, local state actors are weaker and more fragmented than in China and urban politics and policymaking involve shifting coalitions of state and societal actors operating at different spatial scales.
After the introductory first chapter, chapter two of the book situates the study by tracing the different ways China and India have historically determined which people and places hold urban status. Ren then presents paired case studies from Chinese and Indian cities in chapters three through five to illustrate her argument across different issue-areas. The case-study chapters examine three key domains of urban governance: land acquisition, slum/urban village redevelopment, and air pollution mitigation. Each case chapter thoughtfully pairs an urbanizing Chinese locale with an Indian counterpart that has faced similar challenges. Chapter three compares conflicts over urban land acquisition in Wukan village (Lufeng, Guangdong) and Singur town (Hooghly, West Bengal), each a site of protests that grew violent and drew international media attention. Chapter four juxtaposes patterns of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou's Xiancun urban village and Mumbai's airport slum, contested urban enclaves near the hearts of their respective metropolises. Chapter five examines varying state and societal responses to air pollution in Beijing and Delhi, capital cities that have reckoned with grave environmental challenges.
While all three case-study chapters draw on both ethnographic and documentary research and provide helpful visual aids, chapter four is the richest and offers the clearest contrast between territorial and associational modes of urban governance. As Ren shows, urban district and street office authorities, on the one hand, and village company leaders and ordinary villagers, on the other, remained pivotal players in the multi-decade fight over redevelopment of Guangzhou's Xiancun urban village. By contrast, successive attempts at slum clearance around the Mumbai airport saw municipal, state-level and national-level authorities along with powerful developers contend with one another and with varying formations of non-governmental organizations, political parties and slum residents to shape the processes of redevelopment and resettlement. The weak coordinating role of municipal government in Mumbai lent itself to a far messier process, with more stakeholders and scales of politics involved.
With the study's main empirical work delivered, the more speculative chapter six draws on secondary literature to explore the historical reasons for China's and India's varied urban governance models. On the Chinese side, Ren discusses imperial precursors to contemporary institutions like the hukou system, and then describes how territorial modes of urban governance were employed in the early decades of the People's Republic of China and further entrenched in the post-reform decades. Turning to India, Ren outlines a very different tradition of pluralistic local governance in colonial and post-independence India. She also traces the contemporary weakness of the local state in India back to colonial-era British efforts to keep real power vested in state governments even as new municipal institutions were established. Given the important historical perspective it provides, this material – like the discussion of other potentially significant contextual factors that appears in the Conclusion – might have come earlier in the book and devoted slightly more attention to the recent past.
While the succinctness of the study is a strength, some readers may wish that methodological and theoretical considerations were discussed at greater length. Along these lines, Ren's decision to focus on some of the highest-profile cases and largest metropolitan regions in each setting raises the question of representativeness. One wonders how well the patterns of urban governance seen in and around mega-cities like Kolkata, Guangzhou, Mumbai, Beijing and Delhi generalize to the second- and third-tier cities that have accounted for a rising share of urban growth over the past two decades. Ironically, Ren's focus on such high-profile cases of urban political conflict makes her own argumentative task harder, insofar as high-profile cases involve a wider-than-normal range of actors. For example, the key role of the Guangdong provincial government in mediating the Wukan crisis complicates Ren's claim that land disputes in China stay localized.
Setting these minor quibbles aside, the book accomplishes a great deal in its main 141 pages and will be a valuable resource for both China and India country specialists and comparative urbanists. Ren succeeds in showing that rigorous comparisons of Chinese and Indian urbanism are not only feasible but necessary if scholars are to properly understand what makes each tick.
