Over the past four decades, more than 400 million rural peasants in China have become urban residents. However, China’s pace of urbanization has not slowed down. As revealed by the official review on the 12th Five-Year Plan, urbanization continued to rapidly grow at the rate 1.2 percent per year during 2011 and 2015, leading 80 million more rural peasants to become urban residents.

This unprecedented process of urbanization presents both opportunities and challenges to scholars and policy makers. On the one hand, it offers numerous reflexive examples for the production of new theories about urban development and governance. On the other hand, it calls for rigorous, innovative studies which can generate effective solutions for policy makers and urban planners to tackle the economic, social and environmental problems of rapid rural-urban transformation before they turn into crises.

The goal of this symposium is to explore the interplay between urbanization and restructuring of local governance in China through analyzing locally specific experience of governance practices in different regions, such as Beijing, Chongqing, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and so on. On the academic front, this symposium is expected to generate new, critical insights about China’s unique patterns and latest trends of urban development, and discuss their implications on the existing and new theories in the field of urban studies. On the practical front, it provides significant references to inform policy making and administrative practices towards institutional capacity building, inclusive governance and participatory urbanization, in order to better equip the Chinese society to cope with the various challenges of unbridled urban growth.

It will cover several main themes as follows:

• Socio-economic transformation of peri-urban China: problems, opportunities and challenges

• Local state building and transformation of local governance

• Regional variations in local governance practices

• Capacity building and inclusive governance under rural-urban transition evolution 5. Transformation of rural grassroots organizations

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