Examining the Synchronization, Correlation, and Interconversion of Urban Growth and Shrinkage in China over the Past Decade: A Literature Review

A Literature Review

Abstract

The scientific inquiries into the shrinking cities of China have emerged quite recently and rapidly from the critical reflections on its rapid urbanization process since the 1980s. Comparing the demographic data collected from the fifth and sixth national censuses at various geographical scales, researchers (Wu et al., 2015a; Long and Wu, 2016) revealed that a large number of administrative units (about 180 cities or counties and 39,000 districts, towns, or villages) lost population between 2000 and 2010, in sharp contrast to the general image of China’s prosperity and growth during the same period. To uncover this so-called other facet of urbanization of China (Long and Gao, 2019), a loosely organized researcher group, the Shrinking City Research Network of China (SCRNC), was established in 2015 by young scholars enthusiastic about this topic. Their investigations identified multiple factors that have caused the depopulation of cities or regions in China, including (1) a slowing economic growth at both regional and local levels (Wu, 2019; Wu and Wang, 2020); (2) fluctuations in the global market caused by either financial crises or changes of supply chains (Wu and Wang, 2020; Li, Du and Li, 2015); (3) a sharp drop in the fertility rate as a result of the one-child policy introduced in the early 1980s (Zhou, Qian and Yan, 2017); and (4) uneven regional impacts of changing national, regional, or local development policies (Zhou, Yan and Qian, 2019). These studies predicted that maintaining the double-digit economic growth and rising population may be too optimistic for most areas in China. Regardless of a prevailing pro-growth mindset, the alternative development scenario featured by a stagnating or shrinking population in the near future seems inevitable for some big cities, many medium-sized and small cities, and almost all rural areas. How can academic studies and planning practices on shrinking cities of China contribute to the international shrinking city research? This research aimed (1) to provide an overview of the urban shrinkage in China; (2) to briefly review the literature of shrinking city studies of China, from which we argued: (1) China is an appropriate place to investigate the impacts of national policies and centralized planning power on the development of shrinking cities; (2) the partial, short-term, and periodic declines of Chinese cities against a general trend of rapid urban expansion in the last decades provides vivid samples for examining the synchronicity, correlation, and interconversion of growth and shrinkage; (3) shrinking rural areas and depopulating villages are other significant features in the Chinese context, especially in a time dominated by the prosperous urban economy, when rural areas and their settlements are becoming dilapidated in large parts of China.