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Rural revitalization calls for a new type of urban–rural relations in urbanizing China. Although the importance of urban–rural dichotomy has received increasing attention by scholars interested in studying urban development and governance in contemporary China, their interpretations about the connection between urban and rural areas remain fragmented and ambiguous. This article seeks to trace the origin of the Chinese city and its relations with the countryside in the imperial era. It generates a more complete understanding of the rural–urban relationship in the traditional Chinese society and to appeal for a more rounded research agenda for the Chinese urbanization based on a sound historical perspective. The findings of this study explain why and how the traditional urban–rural continuum has disappeared in contemporary China, and identifies the key lessons and wisdoms that we can borrow from the imperial era when we come to tackle the present urban–rural development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses three machine learning algorithms including, support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF) and gradient boosting machine (GBM) in the appraisal of property prices. It applies these methods to examine a data sample of about 40,000 housing transactions in a period of over 18 years in Hong Kong, and then compares the results of these algorithms. In terms of predictive power, RF and GBM have achieved better performance when compared to SVM. The three performance metrics including mean squared error (MSE), root mean squared error (RMSE) and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) associated with these two algorithms also unambiguously outperform those of SVM. However, our study has found that SVM is still a useful algorithm in data fitting because it can produce reasonably accurate predictions within a tight time constraint. Our conclusion is that machine learning offers a promising, alternative technique in property valuation and appraisal research especially in relation to property price prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's urbanization has revitalized grassroots governance under which millions of villagers have become increasingly keen to participate in grassroots elections and influence decision making in their village affairs. To maintain its political legitimacy over a rapidly transforming society, the authoritarian party-state has progressively promoted open, competitive grassroots elections in response to the increasing demand by villagers for more public participation. Based on in-depth field research in urbanizing villages in southern China, this article provides an empirical analysis of how the local state has adopted different interventionist strategies in elections to support villagers' active participation while sustaining its direct leadership over daily village governance. Our findings explain why the recent development of open and transparent grassroots elections is reinforcing the ruling capacity of the socialist state rather than enhancing self-governance and grassroots democracy, although villagers now have more opportunities to defend their economic and social rights through elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China’s rapid urbanisation has prompted its government to explore new sustainable sources of public revenue to finance the continued demand for urban infrastructure and services. Property tax advocates have sought to take advantage of the real estate booms that have occurred since economic liberalisation by actively campaigning for a real property levy as an appropriate policy choice. Against this background, this study evaluates the prospect of implementing market-value-based property tax reforms in mainland China. Based on the new institutional economics perspective, it posits property tax as an institutional arrangement which requires complementary mechanisms in land registration, property appraisal, tax administration, social security and dispute resolution. Property tax reforms would not only necessitate technical changes, but would also have extensive social, political and legal repercussions for Chinese society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]