This research explores one of the most important and yet under-researched topics shaping the
contemporary urban geography of China—urban poverty. Since the mid 1990s, despite widely
recognized success in economic reform and poverty alleviation, China has seen a rise of urban poverty
in absolute numbers and in percentages. A close look reveals that the rise of urban poverty is a result
of the state’s retreat from urban full employment and welfare provisions, multiplied by the effects of
an exceptionally low urban poverty rate in the socialist era due to a manipulated class structure and
maintained urban privileges. Along with the rise in rural-urban migration, this spatial relocation of
poverty to urban areas has combined with the increasing heterogeneity among the poor, and both poor
migrants and native urbanites face growing spatial isolation.
This research responds to the “market transition” debate among sociologists such as Victor
Nee and geographers, and it critiques structuralist perspectives on third-world migration and
development and regional geographic studies on poverty and inequality. It proposes instead a
multi-level and multi-actor approach, to analyze pre-existing socialist institutions and market-oriented
changes as structures, and to analyze local governments, communities, and families as agents. This
study examines how these structures and agents shape the urban poverty spaces in China. I address
three questions: (1) how spatial inequality and deprivation in China are shaped at the national level; (2)
how the spaces of urban poverty in China are shaped at the intra-city level by urban policies
accompanying market-oriented social and economic reforms; and (3) how the livelihood and life
chances of rural migrant family households compare with native urban family households.
Through a national level census data analysis, a case study of Nanjing, and a case study of
housing tenure for poor family households based on survey and interview data, this research explains
the nature of urban poverty in China at three levels: (1) at the state level, urban poverty is emerging as
a form of moving opportunities and relative deprivations across space; (2) at the city level, the
(re)location and concentration of urban poverty is due to migration control and urban redevelopment
in the local institutional context; and (3) at the community and individual levels, urban poverty is an
outcome associated with individual characteristics and individuals’ connection with the state,
conditioned by family and community-based support.
These findings suggest that urban poverty exists not simply as the consequence of individual
incapacity in the face of marketization or due to the existence of biased national policies towards rural
migrants, but argues instead that rising urban poverty is largely a reaction to the emergence of
transforming institutions characteristic of a hybrid economy with strong state and local interventions.