Group items tagged

Xuefei Ren's work on the high-end of the building boom in China brings together the sociology of globalization with the study of architecture and the built environment. Building Globalization treats architectural production as crucial to the material and symbolic ways in which global cities are made. Based on Ren's doctoral research at the University of Chicago, the book draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Shanghai between 2004 and 2008, covering the bull years leading up to the Beijing Olympics. China is now taken to exemplify the geo-demographic shift that has seen developing countries lead current processes of urbanisation. However the Chinese government's attitude towards quanqiuhua chengshi (global cities) and its support for rapid urban growth from the mid-late 1990s represented a striking reversal of official policy which had been to limit the growth of large cities and promote instead the development of small-medium centres (p.11). The re-scaling of state power to metropolitan level in the interests of enhancing urban competitiveness has been an international trend in recent decades. In China this has proved particularly effective in driving urban growth, given state ownership of land and government control over household registration, urban planning and development decisions. Metropolitan governments in China have the kind of ownership and discretionary powers of which the most boosterist western city mayors can only dream. Ren argues convincingly that the processes shaping these cities are increasingly transnational; in particular, the forces that make buildings 'operate beyond national boundaries, as seen in the circulation of investment capital, the movements of built-environment professionals, and the diffusion of new technologies' (p.6). However, while Chinese economic growth may have destabilized a global balance of power dominated by the triad of the USA, the European Union and Japan, Ren's analysis suggests that older core-peripher

Two events have taken place that will change the way the Chinese state tackles organized crime and corruption. Law reforms re-defining organized crime while strengthening judicial oversight and the apparent demise of 'hit black' (dahei) 'strike-hard' (yanda) style police campaigns of the kind practised in the Chongqing 'experiment' are new developments in China's evolving response to organized crime. The law reforms focused on enhanced punishments and new offences with respect to food adulteration, bogus medicines and criminal gangs, which had been at the forefront of public scandals that had threatened political stability and the legitimacy of police and judicial organs. The revision of Article 294 of the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China (PRC) specifically re-defined the elements of organised crime ('black societies'). It also addressed the role of public officials in the spread of such crime and was belated recognition that more needed to be done to reduce the penetration of business and the state by organised crime. The Chongqing approach to crime control was until recently touted as a model crime-fighting practice but is now criticized and in retreat, and its leaders are discredited. The widely publicized, Chongqing 'Red-Black' criminal 'gangland' trials involved high officials and high profile entrepreneurs mixed with vice and violence. The trials (2009-2011) became public spectacles that exemplified the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) determination to enhance public stability through clean government (Lam 2009, Liu 2011). In the vast municipality of Chongqing politburo member Bo Xilai and head of the municipal CCP had made "cleaning up the city" a key to his 'Five Chongqing' program that sought to restore party legitimacy in the face of massive inequality. Apart from a revival of Maoist values a major element was the relentless dahei anti-gang campaigns that exploited confessions to 'crack' cases. Many