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In one of the outstanding political economic studies of the 20th century, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Farrar & Rinehart, 1944, second edition, Beacon Press, 2001), Karl Polanyi theorized that because a truly self-regulating market is socially destructive, a "double movement" consisting of marketization met by periodic regulation must characterize modern society. In a recent essay, Wang Shaoguang discussed "The great transformation: the double movement in China" (boundary 2, 2008) to explain the Chinese government's introduction of a suite of new social policies designed to reduce economic disparities generated in the first waves of modernization under reform.
Thus The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China invokes a considerable legacy of scholarship on socio-economic change. Yet in this book, You-tien Hsing accomplishes something different: by interpreting a double movement through power decentralization and recentralization, she introduces a spatial approach that discovers the land development dilemmas of economic growth, and social actions in response to their inequities. In eight chapters, the book examines dynamics of state-society relations and problems of property rights that widely characterize the rebuilding and expansion of cities. The treatment is comparative and draws on examples and fieldwork from Beijing, Changsha, Chengdu,...