China's Troubled Urban Future
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.7 • 657 Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Joel Kotkin joins Seth Barron to discuss China's urbanization, class tensions in Chinese cities, and the country's increasingly sophisticated population surveillance.
Rapid migration from China's countryside to its cities began in 1980. Many of the rural migrants arrived without hukou, or residential permits, making it harder to secure access to education, health care, and other services. The result: the creation of a massive urban underclass in many Chinese cities. Rising tensions in urban areas has led Chinese officials to look to technology for alternative methods of social control, ranging from facial-recognition systems to artificial intelligence.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. |
| 0:05.9 | Coming up on today's show, my colleague Seth Barron, talks with the longtime contributing editor |
| 0:12.1 | and friend of City Journal social theorist Joel Kotkin. Joel's essay in our forthcoming issue |
| 0:19.8 | is called China's Urban Crisis. We're going to preview the |
| 0:23.4 | piece with a conversation on today's podcast. Speaking of the magazine, our listeners will be happy to know |
| 0:29.5 | that the spring 2019 issue should be arriving in your mailbox over the next several weeks. |
| 0:36.2 | In the issue, we have all sorts of fascinating things, |
| 0:39.3 | Kay Heimowitz, on the Plague of Loneliness, Ed Glazer on the Millennial Attraction to Socialism, |
| 0:47.3 | John Tierney on how technology could transform the way Americans buy prescription drugs, |
| 0:52.1 | and lots, lots more. Lastly, if you don't already, make sure you follow us on Instagram. |
| 0:57.3 | You can find us there at City Journal underscore MI. |
| 1:02.1 | That's it for me. |
| 1:02.9 | The conversation between Seth Barron and Joel Cochin begins after this. |
| 1:24.5 | Hi, everyone. |
| 1:27.2 | Welcome back to Ten Blocks, the podcast of City Journal. |
| 1:28.2 | This is your host for today, Seth Barron, Associate Editor for City Journal. Joel Kotkin is a contributing editor at |
| 1:33.6 | City Journal and the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, an executive |
| 1:38.9 | director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest piece in the spring issue of City Journal is called China's Urban Crisis. |
| 1:48.0 | Thanks for joining us, Joel. |
| 1:49.2 | That's my pleasure. |
| 1:50.8 | So China has the world's largest economy now, and it's growing at a rapid clip, so what's the crisis? |
| 1:56.5 | Well, first of all, there's a lot of debate whether it's actually the largest economy, |
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