Chinas modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas.
Pivot of China tells this story through the city of Zhengzhou, a dramatic urbanization success and National Central City that, due to spatial politics, concentrates resources at the expense of its peripheries.
Chinas modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. These inequalities have variously been attributed to the dualistic economy of semi-colonialism, ruralurban division in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker argues that different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.
Pivot of China tells this story through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of Chinas urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a National Central City of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhous twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.
