Introduction

Urban China is experiencing tremendous change, inspiring an intensification of academic attention. While there is an emerging body of literature on gentrification in China (eg He, 2007, 2009; Song and Zhu, 2010), there is concurrently a wave of urban researchers critiquing the nature of ‘parochially derived’ urban concepts (Robinson, 2011, p 19). Similar to other researchers interested in theorising urban China (eg Fainstein and Logan, 2008), I have also struggled with the selection of urban concepts and theoretical framings to help interpret its various urban transformations. Like with ‘gentrification’, many urban concepts that might ease this task originate from empirical works done mostly in North America and Western Europe. In light of this reflection, this chapter questions the tendency to ‘stretch’ existing concepts such as gentrification in order to interpret urban change processes across a variety of cases and sites.

This chapter is framed by a twofold doubt. First, given the growing body of research on urban China, I examine whether gentrification is an accurate or relevant means to describe the changes it is undergoing. Reviewing some existing research provides certain insights into reasons for this interpretive choice. Studying gentrification in China produces an understanding of China as part of a global neoliberal system of urban development, but focusing on gentrification is also limited in its ability to account for major structural transformations in class structures and housing, as well as basic problems of urban governance, tax structures, land use, citizenship/property rights and housing shortages, which all play a part in displacement. While there is not enough space to go through these in detail, a brief overview will help to show the descriptive limits of the gentrification lens; the example of hutongs in Beijing will serve to illustrate the complexity that such interpretive determinism might efface.

Second, I am concerned about the embedded normative question: ‘Should urban change in Beijing be interpreted in terms of gentrification?’ There are perhaps some imperatives that help to answer this question. Of increasing urgency, there is a normative obligation to deal with the rapidly growing urban inequality in urban China. Many have argued that the strength of gentrification lies in its critical analysis of class inequality (eg Lees, 2007; He, 2009).