Chinese economic reforms have moved Mao's antiurban paradigm to an urban-driven paradigm. Since the late 1980s, modernist reforms have led to large scales of urbanization, particularly in the suburban rural zones. Extensive amounts of farmland in Beijing have been expropriated for conversion to urban use to bolster economic growth. Whilst market reforms have resulted in a substantial rise in land values, as the state is effectively the sole landowner, little of the ‘surplus value’ thus created has gone to the peasants who merely have user rights. In response, peasants have created an informal sales and rental housing market to make up for their loss in livelihood, and to meet the demand of Beijing residents and low-income migrant workers. Supported by site surveys, this paper examines peasants' rights to the city, other property rights, and the ways in which they exercise their ‘illegal’ rights and the mechanism by which the ‘surplus value’ is shared between the state, the developers, and, albeit limited, the peasants in the urbanization process. More intricate policy measures have since been taken by the Chinese government in pacifying the social tension arising from inequitable housing distribution.

From the 1980s, urban-led economic pursuits, city image building, and residency control of rural migrants have been three key elements which are complementary yet conflicting in China’s development path. Whilst the two former are pro-growth oriented, the “low-image” and “potential risk to slum formation” of rural migrants are found by the state to be incompatible with the modernist urbanism sought after. Under the state’s ambitious city branding and intensive-cum-high value operations, the paper revisits Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey’s notions on the “right to the city”. It highlights the social injustice issue of differentiated citizenship in terms of inequity of access to services and inequality between urban and rural origins. City-branding efforts have indeed contributed towards economic efficiency and land use rationalization but are characterized by an asymmetrical power and spatial redistribution process filled with inequalities against migrant workers and deprivation of rights. Recent developments have shown that the state has compromised and become more people-oriented and inclusive in its approach towards rural migrants.

We conducted a standardized spatial thinking ability test (STAT) to examine the spatial thinking abilities of a group of Chinese undergraduates with a focus on their spatial reasoning, which is a very important component of critical spatial thinking. The college subject of human geography in China is often geared toward the preparation of students for government consultancy and policy-making tasks, known as the “tasks leading disciplines” (renwu dai xueke), where the pedagogies are problem-solving based and sustainability centered. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) has become the universal tool for problem solving in geography and other areas, thus human geography in this situation gives us a context to test and investigate whether and to what extent GIS implementation is able to improve undergraduate spatial thinking levels. Our comparative analysis reported the marginally significant difference of STAT test scores between GIS application (geoinformation group) and its control group (geography group without GIS training). It was also found that the Chinese students performed the spatial reasoning better in this test than American participants as reported in prior study, displaying their higher spatial cognition in terms of problem solving and Boolean logics. Futhermore, a strong negative correlation was reported between STAT test scores and final exam rank. It is possible that the higher geography education in a context of China may not fully embrace the spatial thinking capacity as the strategic goal. The results can help us to better understand the Oriental and Western gaps in higher geography education. Policy suggestions are given in the conclusion.