Popular media abounds with dramatic depictions (and facile analyses) of China's and India's rapid urbanization and associated urban transformations. Among both cautionary and celebratory accounts, the assertion that one-sixth of humanity now lives in a Chinese or Indian city has raised concerns about the social and environmental consequences and questions about the institutions and politics underlying these shifts. But, surprisingly, limited efforts have been made to compare the respective models of urban governance, or to explain how urbanization in China and India is managed, how local power is organized, and what opportunities citizens and civil society organizations have to shape these developments. In some cases, comparison is explicitly avoided, as India and China are regarded by their respective scholarly communities as too unique or too exceptional to allow for meaningful comparison. In other cases, superficial comparisons may be attempted but rarely push past sweeping caricatures of China's centralized state and single-party rule and India's messy democratic rabble. In this important new book, sociologist Xuefei Ren sidesteps both tendencies to undertake a rich comparison of China's and India's respective models of urban governance, to detail their development over the longue durée, and to reflect on their implications for cities, citizens, and possibilities for democratic inclusion.

In Governing the Urban in India and China, Ren argues that distinct models have shaped urban governance in the two countries: the territorial model in China and the associational model in India. The territorial model, which Ren argues has its roots in the baojia system of the imperial period, utilizes institutions of localized control, such as the hukou and the cadre evaluation systems, to distribute rights, benefits, and responsibilities to populations within a given territory. In contrast, urban governance in India centers on associational politics, rooted in issue-specific alliances of state actors, the private sector, and civil society groups. Tracing associational politics from the zamindar system of rural landlords in the late Mughal period and the rais, or wealthy urban merchants who served as intermediaries during the British Raj, Ren shows that India's urban governing alliances typically come together when conflicts arise and then break apart once they have been resolved.

After outlining these two models, Ren demonstrates how they can help explain entanglements of citizens and the state in key urban policy fields, including China's and India's most fiercely contested sites of land acquisition, slum clearance, and air pollution control. Ren offers these models as alternatives to the two prevailing perspectives on urban governance in China and India: the state-capacity thesis and regime-type theory, which attribute differences to dichotomies between a strong and weak state and between authoritarian and democratic political regimes. Noting the inadequate explanatory power of these simplified dichotomies, Ren attributes India's and China's distinct governing models to their different modes of management and loci of control within territories and associations.

After a clear and informative introduction, the book is organized into five chapters. The first chapter denaturalizes the category of “the urban” and demonstrates its social and political construction across national contexts and over time. In the cases of China and India, Ren shows that definitions of urban and rural have been fiercely contested, as they have shaped the rights of citizens in particular geographies, the relative power of rural and urban governments, and the allocation of resources at subnational scales. This chapter helps establish Ren's argument by demonstrating how the countries’ respective models of urban governance are written into the definition of the urban and remain the subject of ongoing contestation.

In the next three chapters, Ren applies the framework of territorial and associational urban governance to analyze the political machinations and outcomes of conflicts over land acquisition, slum clearance, and the enactment of air pollution controls. The chapter on land acquisition juxtaposes two high-profile conflicts over agricultural land conversions in the Wukan village of Guangdong Province in 2011–12 and in the West Bengal village of Singur in 2006–08. The chapter carefully details the events as they unfolded in Wukan and Singur, resulting, in both cases, in residents claiming victory and disrupting governments’ development plans. Yet despite the similarities, the cases reveal distinct configurations of state power and modes of effective resident organizing.

The next chapter takes up the contested issue of slum clearance with case studies of urban village removal in Guangzhou and slum rehabilitation in Mumbai. The cases reveal similar market-based approaches to redeveloping “slum” lands; but, once again, key differences arise from localized state control in the Chinese case and tenuous associations of the local state, developers, and residents in the Indian case.

In the third case study, Ren details the ongoing efforts to improve air quality in the capital cities of Beijing and Delhi, contrasting China's public-sector Target Responsibility System to the seemingly less successful NGO-driven response in Delhi. Pushing past superficial analyses that have characterized Beijing's response as state-led and Delhi's response as market-led, Ren emphasizes instead absence of localized authority in Delhi that has constrained the government's effective intervention. Yet Ren is careful not to overstate the success of China's territorial approach, which she acknowledges has been more effective in Beijing in the short-run but has led to uneven local responses and pushed China's air pollution problem to rural areas that lack the financial resources and incentives to leverage its territorial power to address this complex challenge.

Ren's evaluative approach, presenting neither model as necessarily more desirable or effective, is carried throughout the book. This approach is clearest in the final chapter, in which she details how the two models emerged historically, shifted over time, and were institutionalized in postreform and postliberalization policy. Avoiding a deterministic or teleological perspective on historical change, Ren demonstrates how the organization of elite power, particularly in the context of colonial and imperial control, resulted in the distinct loci of control in territories and institutions.

Ren's historical grounding, her measured tone, and clarity of her argument make this book a valuable contribution to understandings of urbanization and urban governance in China and India and allows for its in-depth comparative analysis. However, it may have been useful to probe more deeply into subnational variations within China's and India's urban governance models. Particularly in the Indian case, where a strong federalist system vests control over urban affairs in state governments, it would have been helpful to better understand regional variations and state-level deviations from the national model. But with an explicit focus on the national level, subnational models of urban governance may be admittedly beyond the scope of this already impressive book.