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This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political‐administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty‐eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north‐eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make‐up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state‐incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state‐propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state‐sponsored mega‐shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications. This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in ten of its cities. The paper also identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines dual-track urbanisation in China, consisting of spontaneous urbanisation and state-sponsored urbanisation. The paper first develops a consistent interpretative framework of urbanisation in pre-reform and post-reform China. The key components in the framework include the mode of industrialisation, central and local states, urban and rural economies, urban and rural citizens, the hukou system and global linkages. Dynamic changes in these components and their interactions drive the urbanisation process in China. The paper then examines how each of the two tracks of urbanisation contributed to the urbanisation process that occurred in China between 1982 and 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses issues related to social control in Great Britain during the 19th century. There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the social order in Britain was subjected to immense strains by the processes of urbanization and industrialization. It threatened at times to disintegrate into anarchy through the disruption of social ties and institutions, and the emergence of frighteningly large masses of apparently master-less men. In many ways this is a curious view, placing the working classes perpetually on the receiving end of outside forces and influences, and portraying them as so much putty in the hands of a masterful and scheming bourgeoisie, a remote and powerful state, and a set of technological imperatives. The history of the treatment of fairs is interesting in showing that there was a body of respectable, mainly middle-class, opinion expressing strong disapproval and pressing for suppression, which persisted from the eighteenth century at least until the 1880s, and which may be construed as seeking to impose a social control on one of the pleasures of the masses under the pretext of cleaning up petty crime and rather trivial disorders.

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