Weaving the Chinese Dream on the Ground? Local Government Approaches to “New-Typed” Rural Urbanization

The Chinese urban dream is not a sudden one. Long before the “National Urbanization Plan” was issued in 2014, planning had been underway for a new type of state-engineered in situ urbanization of the Chinese hinterland. Replacing the previous system of macro scale urbanization in favor of a more balanced dissemination of urban infrastructure and a socially more acceptable concentration of resources and the population has been on the political agenda since the mid-2000s. The evolution of smaller-scale “new rural neighborhoods/communities” is particularly illustrative of this trend.