Published in:
09-04-2022 | Book Review
Xuefei Ren, Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 208 p. $95.00 hardback; $29.95 paperback
Published in: Journal of Chinese Political Science | Issue 3/2022
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How do the world’s largest countries govern their urban areas? Xuefei Ren’s slim volume, Governing the Urban in China and India: Land Grabs, Slum Clearance, and the War on Air Pollution, attempts to tackle this gargantuan question. It is most successful in convincing the reader that this is a good question to ask even if it is one that no single book could answer in full. It does this by “defamiliarizing the Chinese city,” pushing China’s urban issues back into comparative context rather than seeing them as unique or exceptional by showing how cities in both India and China face similar challenges in grabbing land, clearing slums, and fighting air pollution. …Advertisement
