Polarized Cities

Reviews / Votes

In this volume, Polarized Cities: Portraits of Rich and Poor in Urban China, the editor, Dorothy Solinger, employs a caste-like formation framework to examine the growing urban inequality in China. This book widens our understanding of rising urban inequality in contemporary China and would be an excellent teaching resource for China scholars who study social stratification, social mobility, and social inequality. * American Journal of Sociology * This book will be a good read for those who are interested in inequality and social mobility, China's post-reform transformations, or, more specifically, the daily lives of Chinese urban residents from across the socioeconomic spectrum. Hopefully this book will spur discussions on ways out of a polarized society among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners. * Eurasian Geography and Economics * Dorothy Solinger, who has brought much attention to the plight of China's urban poor, here assembles a distinguished group of scholars to throw light on an underside of that country's vaunted economic miracle: the hardening of inequalities of income and wealth to form an increasingly polarized society. This revealing book explores the lives of both the ultra-rich and the destitute and makes clear that the state itself has played a large role in fostering polarization. -- Carl Riskin, Columbia University Going beyond the statistics on expanding social inequality, this important book, authored by world authorities on urban China, provides a stunning account of drastic social contrasts. The portraits of the rich and poor reveal not only their monumentally disparate lifestyles but also variegated agencies and life opportunities. Solinger's marvelous conceptual design brings the two social extremes under the same scrutiny. -- Fulong Wu, University College London This richly researched volume shows that, even though China's four decades of economic growth have lifted tens of millions of Chinese out of poverty, they have also created rigid structures of inequality and diverging mobility opportunities. China has also been rapidly urbanizing in recent decades, and today more than half of all Chinese live in cities. The dramatic contrasts between the fabulous and flaunted wealth of urban elites and the struggles of rural migrants and the urban poor documented by researchers in this volume will add fuel to debates about whether socialism any longer has meaning in contemporary China. -- Martin K. Whyte, Harvard University This is an important book, tackling the most salient feature of Chinese society today: its polarization between the wealthy and the poor. Solinger's insights into the caste-like 'hierarchy of agency' in contemporary China are fresh and illuminating, and the case study chapters provide fascinating-and unsettling-details about the daily lives of Chinese citizens from across the socio-economic spectrum. -- Teresa Wright, California State University at Long Beach