Changing urbanization processes and in situ rural-urban transformation: Reflections on china’s settlement definitions

China’s urbanization has experienced tremendous changes since the 1980s. One of the most important of these has been the emergence and development of in situ urbanization. Here the term ‘in situ urbanization’ 2 refers to the phenomenon that rural settlements and their populations transform themselves into urban or quasi-urban ones without much geographical relocation of the residents. This new urbanization pattern in China has been caused by the massive development of rural nonagricultural activities, and the permeation of urban and quasi-urban facilities into the Chinese countryside since the 1980s. A similar process has been identified in ‘Desakota Regions’ or Extended Metropolitan Regions in other Asian countries (McGee, 1991), but China’s in situ urbanization seems much more developed, as it is not confined to the surrounding areas of large cities (Zhu, 1999). Another important change has been the emergence and development of China’s ‘floating population’, which bears many similarities to circular migrants identified by Hugo (1982) in Indonesia in terms of their double (urban and rural) residential identities.