JANUARY 4, 2015 5:00 PM January 4, 2015 5:00 pm
Jeremy Wallace, 35, is a political scientist at Ohio State University. His new book, “Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China” (Oxford University Press), is a look at how China has avoided the instability that urbanization has brought to many other countries around the world.
Jeremy WallaceCredit Courtesy of Jeremy Wallace
In an interview, Mr. Wallace discussed why big cities pose a danger for authoritarian governments, what China has done to undercut those threats and whether the current push to create megacities might change all this:
Q.
How did you come to write “Cities and Stability”?
A.
I always wondered how China had avoided the slums that seem to dominate the large cities of other developing countries. When I started my research for this book, I heard that China was concerned about “Latin Americanization” — meaning megacities, inequality and instability. At the same time, the government was abolishing agricultural taxes that had been collected in some form for over two and a half millennia. These developments seemed important to understand.
Q.
In your book you describe how China escaped the usual social unrest that accompanies preferential policies for cities thanks to its hukou, or household registration, system.
A.
China’s household registration system separates its rural and urban populations. While those born in cities have a local hukou that gives them access to social services, those born in the countryside have a harder time getting access to services when they migrate to cities.
Most poor countries favor cities to promote development and ensure that people living in cities are pro-government. I argue that this kind of “urban bias” might tamp down protests today but also encourages more and more farmers to move to favored cities. These large cities, often full of slums, can explode. Urban protests can quickly overwhelm regimes, even seemingly stable ones like Mubarak’s in Egypt. China’s hukou system is a loophole to this Faustian bargain: favoring urbanites while keeping farmers in the countryside and smaller cities.
Q.
Do the new reforms change this?
A.
In early December, China’s State Council released plans for reforming the hukou system. The new reforms make it easier to move to small and medium cities but still maintain the system’s core: strictly controlling the population of large cities.
Q.
What’s the problem with big cities for an authoritarian government?
A.
Big cities are dangerous because they are more likely to produce economically and politically destabilizing protests. But it’s important to note that China hasn’t prevented urbanization. It’s managed it. It’s not that it’s anti-urbanization. It’s anti-concentration. Compared even to India, which is dominated by its biggest cities, China’s city system is flat. It has many large cities that are fairly anonymous.
Q.
Why does concentration matter politically?
A.
Having a flat hierarchy of cities doesn’t prevent unrest, but it makes it less likely for any city to be powerful enough to bring down the government. If, for instance, Zibo explodes in protest, China won’t collapse. But when one or two big cities dominate the urban landscape, big protests can end a government, as we saw in Tunisia and Egypt in the Arab Spring.
