1For the first time in history, more Chinese people now live in towns and cities than in rural villages. Reaching 51% in 2011, urbanisation in China is accelerating. Convinced that this holds the key to the country’s ongoing social and economic development, China’s leaders recently announced an urbanisation target of 70% (approximately 900 million people) by 2025. However, leaders including Premier Li Keqiang have emphasised that future urbanisation would be characterised not by an expansion of megacities (dushihua 都市花), but by growth in rural towns and small cities (chengzhenhua 城镇化). The Party is essentially seeking to take the cities to the rural populace rather than bring the rural populace to the cities. Following the policy announcement at the 18^th Party Congress in November 2012, a group of national ministries has been tasked with developing guidelines for promoting the urbanisation of rural China.

4The first three papers by Andrew Kipnis, Ben Hillman, and Tom Cliff are case studies of different types of county towns that have rapidly become cities. Andrew Kipnis’ paper explores urban-rural integration in a prosperous rural city in Shandong Province. Tom Cliff examines the Chinese visions underpinning city planning and the impact of urbanisation on local culture and ethnic relations in a small city in Xinjiang. Ben Hillman’s case study of a rapidly growing county capital in northwest Yunnan explores the impact of its expansion and explains how, in the absence of effective education and employment policies, urbanisation can lead to the economic marginalisation of ethnic minorities.

5The next paper examines a largely unknown but widespread type of urbanisation. Him Chung and Jonathan Unger present case studies of four villages in Guangdong that have urbanised while retaining control of their land and converting the village collectives into property companies. This stands in contrast to the most widely known form of urbanisation in rural China, which involves the forced acquisition of farmland by the local state before its conversion for commercial or industrial development.

6A third set of papers examines in situ rural urbanisation, in which villages in the countryside increasingly resemble the urban environment. A paper by Yu Zhu, Min Lin, Liyue Lin, and Jinmei Chen uses recent data to examine the extent of this process from a provincial perspective. David Bray’s paper examines the policies and thinking behind the state’s use of urban planning to remake villages in the national Building a New Socialist Countryside programme, and he illustrates this through case studies. In a related paper, Lior Rosenberg uses comparative case studies from a richer and a poorer province to examine different local government approaches to reconstructing villages in this programme.

7By examining the different ways rural China is being reshaped and urbanised, this special issue provides new insights into one of the most dramatic and important transformations now underway in China.