Writing histories of Henan province has never been easy. It certainly has not been easy for Mark Baker, whose Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou unravels the turbulent modern history of its capital. Showcasing the rise of Zhengzhou from a deserted town in the 1900s to a regional economic core of north-central China and an intercontinental transport junction in 2020s, the book provides a unique perspective in understanding urbanization and economic take-off in the hinterland of modern China. Pivot of China shows that, in spite of deadly ecological impacts, state and political forces remained the primary factor in people’s lives in the space of Zhengzhou.

The book is structured chronologically, with each chapter discussing the effect of spatial politics in the multilayered spatial relationships of Zhengzhou: between Zhengzhou and its suburb, between the city and its rural hinterland and the intra-provincial relationship between Zhengzhou and neighbouring Kaifeng. Successive Chinese states have created an unequal distribution of resources and opportunities in the city. Chapter 1 shows that, following the meeting of the north–south Beijing–Hankou Railroad (Jing–Han Railroad) and east–west Long–Hai Railroad west to the old walled city of Zhengzhou, the western suburb rose rapidly as the city’s new heart. Yet this concentration of resources did not trickle down either to the old walled city or to the rural hinterland of Zheng County. The coming of the warlord Feng Yuxiang (1927–30) heralded attempts to solve the urban poverty and rural–urban divide through a series of political and environmental experiments. These included the removal of the city wall and formation of the city’s first municipal government. Yet these modernizing ambitions faltered as economic resources ran short, though the Bishagang memorial garden, a politicized project set by Feng in commemorating his soldiers lost in battle, became a lasting space at Zhengzhou’s urban fringe.

If Feng’s experiment in Zhengzhou demonstrated how state activity could reconfigure Zhengzhou’s space, Baker shows how, during World War II, Zhengzhou experienced the fatal effect of state inactivity due to spatial concerns. In 1938, with Japanese troops on the verge of seizing Zhengzhou, Nationalist troops broke the Yellow River dike at Huayuankou, 16 kilometres north of the city. The subsequent flood, although it halted the enemy, cost tens of thousands of lives while millions lost their homes. Floods and Nationalist sabotage isolated the city. Zhengzhou also received little state support due to the shift of Nationalist focus westwards. During the famine of 1942–43, military requisitioning of the Nationalist forces from Zhengzhou and its rural counties became one of the main drivers of the towering death toll. The ruthlessly unequal spatial politics sacrificed hundreds of thousands, and toppled the Nationalist hold of the city, leading to its occupation by the Japanese in 1944 and take-over by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the civil war.

Zhengzhou appeared as a regional winner in the first 10 years under the CCP’s rule. During the First Five-Year Plan, Zhengzhou became one of the centres of textile production, replacing Kaifeng as the new provincial capital in 1954. Pivot of China shows that, with the urban population in Socialist Zhengzhou almost tripling between 1952 and 1957, the rural–urban gap increased. The benefits brought by Socialist infrastructure projects and wage rises in the booming state textile industry remained inside the walls of the factories. Despite later efforts at unifying the city and the immediate villages, these spatial inequalities continue to the present day. The rural–urban binary household registration system, Hukou, means that workers from both Zhengzhou’s rural hinterland and other parts of the province receive lower pay and fewer securities compared to workers in urban Hukou. These factors all led to the success of the Foxconn plant in the Airport Economy Zone, which could exploit the cheap labour sucked from the vast rural part of the province.

Baker is skilled in interpreting the policy documents produced by the Communist Party. The book meticulously used local sources, ranging from historical surveys, press articles from local CCP outlets and data produced by municipal officials. Baker has successfully weaved this kaleidoscope of materials together by combining macro-level statistics and micro-level life stories, though it should be commented that the credibility and limitation of these sources may be worth discussing.

Encompassing almost 120 years, Pivot of China undoubtedly shows how continual ‘unequal spatial politics of the state’ (p. 288) led to a persistence of spatial inequalities. This overlooks the temporal dimension of inequalities that Zhengzhou and Henan face, especially when situated in the overall landscape of modern China: although Zhengzhou may be a regional winner in central China, it remains a loser when competing for state support with the economic forerunner of the south-east. The precarious central-local relations experienced by Zhengzhou may well exist because of the unequal deployment of state support across different regions, but they were also the result of a policy inertia that tended towards supporting the south-east that may date back to the late Qing rise of the coastal metropolis, if not further back to the twelfth century. Baker’s astute spatial perspective may be supplemented by discussing the temporal inequalities between the economic periphery of central China and the coastal economic core, which may lead to additional scholarship on Zhengzhou and Henan. As one of the 98,720,000 people of Henan, I would be glad to see this personally.