Demolishing Partitions: Back to Beginnings in the Cities?

Abstract

Using euphemisms and albeit haltingly, the leaders of the PRC in its 40s began blasting the barricades their forebears had constructed to design what they had considered a fully pristine, orthodoxly socialist, separate urban realm. The result of this recent demolition is that, as the system turns 50, its political elite – along with the markets they have licensed – is remodelling the metropolises into places less distinct socially from the rural areas outside them and much less homogeneous internally than the urban areas from which they are metamorphosing.