From Chongli’s Olympic slopes to China’s borderlands, villages and platform cities, IJURR’s new virtual issue charts emerging directions in urban China research

Even if you’ve never been to China, you have likely encountered extensive discussion of its largest cities in this journal and elsewhere. China’s first-tier cities—Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Hong Kong—dominate economic life, political authority, technological innovation and cultural production, and they have accordingly attracted disproportionate scholarly attention. Far fewer readers will be familiar with places such as Huizhou, Chongli, Khorgos, Lijiang, Jiyuan or Shenyang—second-tier cities and small towns that have appeared in IJURR publications in the last two years. Yet while the “big five” absorb most anglophone research on urban China, only 6 percent of China’s population lives in these five cities. The focus on the largest cities represents a significant bias in the field—one that warrants redress.

In addition to this geographic skew, the urban China field has long been organized around a relatively narrow set of themes: (1) land and housing markets, (2) governance and local entrepreneurialism, (3) migration, (4) the environment and (5) the cultural economy. These areas have yielded important insights into China’s urban transformation, yet they leave many urban processes and places underexamined. As China’s urbanization enters a more differentiated and uneven phase, it is increasingly clear that analytic frameworks centered primarily on megacity dynamics and the political economy of land and housing are no longer sufficient on their own.

“Rice Field Art“ （稻田画） on the outskirts of Harbin in Northeast China, where multi-colored rice varieties are used to create large-scale images for tourists to take pictures and post on social media.” (Photo: Xuefei Ren)

This virtual issue brings together 16 articles on China published in IJURR during 2024–2025. While not exhaustive of the broader field, the collection highlights notable shifts in current scholarship. Three developments stand out: a widening of geographic focus, diversification of thematic concerns and a broadening of authorship.

First, the geographic scope of recent research has expanded markedly. Seven articles examine the “big five” cities, while the remainder engage with small towns, villages and borderland regions. These include analyses of Chongli, a ski resort area redeveloped for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics—where star athlete Eileen Gu won gold and silver in freeski events; Lijiang, a tourist city with a UNESCO designation in the southwest; Khorgos, a Sino-Kazakh border hub in Xinjiang in the far northwest; and Shenyang, the heartland of China’s northeast rustbelt that has seen a cultural renaissance. Such peripheral cities and towns draw attention to forms of urban change that unfold outside the metropolitan mainstream and complicate dominant narratives of Chinese urbanism.

Second, the thematic landscape has diversified. Emerging lines of inquiry include digital platforms (Xiaohongshu, Taobao, WeChat), regulatory ambiguity, rural revitalization and neighbourhood governance. Established themes have also taken new directions—through studies of socialist-era housing retrofits, state-backed venture capital, and the evolving roles of environmental NGOs in the era of “ecological civilization.” Together, these contributions signal an expanding analytical repertoire in the study of China’s urban present.

Third, authorship has broadened significantly. In addition to long-standing centres of expertise in Hong Kong and the UK, this virtual issue features contributors based in Europe, Australia, Singapore, Korea and a diverse range of mainland Chinese universities, including many early-career scholars. This diffusion of research sites and institutional affiliations reflects the increasingly global and multi-sited character of urban China scholarship.

We invite readers to explore this virtual issue and engage with the emerging agendas it brings into view. Collectively, these articles document the multiplicity of urban trajectories unfolding across China and illustrate how scholarship on Chinese urbanization is evolving—conceptually, empirically and geographically.

Xuefei Ren

IJURR Editorial Board Member