In the literature, community gardens feature as contested spaces: They are radical spaces used by grassroots movements to claim the “right to the city,” organized garden projects attached to neoliberal strategies, or physical breeding grounds for neoliberal citizen-subjectivity. Long established in many Western contexts, community gardens were not evident in China until a group of scholar-activists in Shanghai initiated the practice in 2016. Drawing on two flagship community garden cases in that city, we investigate the emergence and development of community gardens and discuss the ways in which they instantiate neither a radical nor a neoliberal political vision. Our observations show that a nonprofit organization—rather than the local citizenry or municipal government—proactively advanced the production of community gardens and the discursive construction of community participation over time. The rationale underlying this practice arises from organizers’ framing of the community gardens as an “experiment of governance innovation” that dovetails with a broader reorientation of China’s urban renewal agenda from demolition and reconstruction toward a people-centered incremental urban regeneration characterized by mass mobilization and social participation. We argue, therefore, that the community garden phenomenon reifies an alternative subjectivity—one that emphasizes the increasing visibility of social organizations as a state “flanking mechanism” to achieve extraeconomic objectives in urban governance. We also advance a pluralist understanding of China’s urban governance beyond a growth-chasing logic to embrace the increasing complexity of the state ethos and societal instruments at play in and associated with this sphere.

The strength of the government is no match for the dramatic changes taking place each day in urban China. Government-led governance in cities faces new challenges in the process of modernization and urbanization. Each city is looking for new solutions to the bottleneck in the city’s sustainable development under conditions of limited resources and fierce regional competition. Life circle construction action has emerged gradually, expecting to alleviate problems through cooperation. However, the idea and practices of the life circle vary in different cities. Through reviews of the life circle theory and life circle system planning in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, we describe how the life circle works in different circumstances and identify that the conception of the life circle occurs in accordance with collaborative governance. The different levels of social capital show a different focus on the overall goal, construction process and the collaboration framework. This article discusses the reasons for these differences by comparing life circle construction activities in the three largest cities in China.

This paper examines the causes and process of return migration from the coastal region to the inland provinces in China since the early 2010s, based on the case study of Zhumadian city in Henan Province. Surveys administered to both rural migrants from Zhumadian to Shenzhen and recent returnees to Zhumadian are presented. Industrial relocation and the development of inland provinces trigger the current wave of return migration. Family obligations, better prospects of the hometown, and barriers to settle in Shenzhen because of the hukou system are the principal reasons to return. Most of the migrants return to work in a factory or start a business. Some migrants purchase apartments in Zhumadian as a prelude to returning and starting a business at a future date. Returnees prefer settling down in urban areas rather than in their rural origins. In light of the empirical findings, the authors argue that return migration will ease the mismatch of labor supply and demand between the inland and coastal provinces, such that the Lewis Turning Point has not been reached yet. The continuing process of rural migrants returning to and settling down in Zhumadian suggests a way to achieve some of the goals in China’s new-type urbanization plan, as local governments may address the two major challenges of the plan, namely, local job creation and financing for increased demand for public services.

In public health research, the health issues of irregular and vulnerable migrant populations remain under-explored. In particular, while mainland China has become a new and popular job-seeking destination for Filipino domestic workers (FDWs), the health status of FDWs and their access to healthcare have been invisible to public and academic concerns. This paper fills this lacuna by conducting a qualitative study that investigates FDWs’ self-reported health status and their healthcare-seeking behaviors. The results show that: (1) respondents do not report significant abusive and exploitative experience because the scarcity of FDWs in China in relation to the high demand enables them a certain degree of agency in labour market; (2) while FDWs do report some health problems, they tend to resort to self-medication and food-healing; (3) the main factors influencing health-seeking behavior include the fear of deportation, language gaps, the lack of knowledge of the local healthcare system and dependence on co-ethnic networks which serves as a double-edged sword; (4) these factors also lead to hesitation in health-seeking choice between public and private hospitals, which sometimes result in delayed treatment. This paper contributes to revealing the health conditions of FDWs in mainland China and calls for more inclusive health policy to enroll foreign domestic workers into the local health system in China.