Winner of the Choice award for Outstanding Academic Title "A must-read book for those who want a critical and multifaceted examination of Chinese urbanization. The author is clearly at home in China and shares insights we rarely read about." Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, author of Cities in a World Economy 2012 "A significant contribution to introducing the process of China’s urbanization." The China Journal "The world is fascinated by the fundamental changes in China's cities and how they link to larger projects of national development and globalization. Few scholars have examined these questions with such a broad-ranging focus as Xuefei Ren does here, offering new insight into growing inequality, how shifting landscapes are transforming lives, and the implications of these dynamics for citizen protest, human rights, and new cultural practices." Diane E. Davis, Harvard University "By far the most comprehensive account of the changing Chinese urban society. Ren's critical reading of the current urban China research begins to reveal a new horizon of urban studies in a non-Western context – sweeping through specific configurations of hukou and 'villages in the city' to more general changes in social and spatial inequalities." Fulong Wu, University College London