China’s spectacular growth and poverty reduction has been accompanied by
growing inequality which threatens the social compact and thus the political basis for
economic growth and social development. The regional dimension of inequality—
rural/urban, inland/coastal and provincial—dominates in a country as large as China, and
especially with its particular history. The three of us have been researching Chinese
regional inequality for over a decade. In a series of papers which have been published in
peer reviewed journals, we have been involved in a systematic investigation into the
nature and evolution of regional inequality in China. The object of this volume is to bring
together a selection of these papers by us and our co-authors, so that researchers and
policy makers can have access to them in one place. This introduction provides an
overview of the volume.