Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China

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This powerful book presents a fresh and compelling set of portraits that bring to life the human dimension of the vast and growing social and economic divides in urban China. Leading scholars explore the increasing rigidity of class and social boundaries, focusing on two new castes in contemporary Chinas citiesthe immensely wealthy and the abjectly poor. Much has been made of the rise in incomes, the elimination of much rural poverty, and the expansion of an urban middle class over almost forty years of spectacular economic growth. But what often has been overlooked is the polarization, exclusion, and exclusiveness in cities that have accompanied this rise, along with the threat that these trends will extend to future generations. The book considers five cases that emblematize these castes and depict their varying degrees of agency. Highlighting the social groups at opposite ends of the social hierarchy, the contributors illuminate the growing inequality in urban China today.

Reviews

Dorothy Solinger, who has brought much attention to the plight of China's urban poor, here assembles a distinguished group of scholars to throw light on an underside of that country's vaunted economic miracle: the hardening of inequalities of income and wealth to form an increasingly polarized society. This revealing book explores the lives of both the ultra-rich and the destitute and makes clear that the state itself has played a large role in fostering polarization. -- Carl Riskin, Columbia University
Going beyond the statistics on expanding social inequality, this important book, authored by world authorities on urban China, provides a stunning account of drastic social contrasts. The portraits of the rich and poor reveal not only their monumentally disparate lifestyles but also variegated agencies and life opportunities. Solingers marvelous conceptual design brings the two social extremes under the same scrutiny. -- Fulong Wu, University College London
This richly researched volume shows that, even though China's four decades of economic growth have lifted tens of millions of Chinese out of poverty, they have also created rigid structures of inequality and diverging mobility opportunities. China has also been rapidly urbanizing in recent decades, and today more than half of all Chinese live in cities. The dramatic contrasts between the fabulous and flaunted wealth of urban elites and the struggles of rural migrants and the urban poor documented by researchers in this volume will add fuel to debates about whether socialism any longer has meaning in contemporary China. -- Martin K. Whyte, Harvard University
This is an important book, tackling the most salient feature of Chinese society today: its polarization between the wealthy and the poor. Solinger's insights into the caste-like hierarchy of agency in contemporary China are fresh and illuminating, and the case study chapters provide fascinatingand unsettlingdetails about the daily lives of Chinese citizens from across the socio-economic spectrum. -- Teresa Wright California State University, Long Beach

Author Bio

Dorothy J. Solinger is professor emerita of political science at the University of California, Irvine.