China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a call for an open and inclusive (mutually beneficial) model of cooperative economic, political and cultural exchange (globalization) that draws on the deep-seated meanings of the ancient Silk Roads. While it reflects China’s rise as a global power, and its industrial redeployment, increased outward investment and need to diversify energy sources and routes, the BRI involves the establishment of a framework for open cooperation and new multilateral financial instruments designed to lay the infrastructural and industrial foundations to secure and solidify China’s relations with countries along the Silk Roads and to extend the march of modernization and poverty reduction to emerging countries.

In China the idea of common prosperity dates back to 1953. After 1979 China chose to let some people and places get rich first to accelerate economic development, with Deng Xiaoping arguing that public property could prevent social polarization. The result was extraordinary sustained economic growth but at the expense of large increases in urban-rural, regional and social inequalities in income and wealth themselves associated with the growth of private capital. In 1999 China started to address urban-rural and regional disparities in the name of common prosperity, while under the leadership of Xi Jinping the emphasis on common prosperity has increased markedly alongside domestic goals relating to innovation, improved governance and ecological and spiritual civilization. Starting in 2020, this course has seen strong government action against the disorderly expansion of private capital, monopolies, speculation and the costs of privately provided education, housing and potentially health, as well as the establishment of a demonstration zone in Zhejiang province to explore ways to address uneven development and reshape the primary, secondary and tertiary distributions of income.

Analysis of the latest census data for 2000 and 2010 shows that 88 out of 336 Chinese municipalities suffered combinations of total, urban and hukou population loss. A general ordered logit model examines the ways manufacturing decline, services growth and demographic vitality interact in a specifically Chinese context of population control, contributing empirically and theoretically to studies of city shrinkage. Chinese experience shows that while some cities act as growth engines in emerging economies, others may shrink, and this process may happen before the completion of a rural–urban transition. These findings call for a modification of China’s growth-oriented urban policy.

Uneven and combined development. Regional Studies. The concept of uneven and combined development (U&CD) interprets dynamic historical change and comparative geographical differentiation in terms of the co-existence of tendencies towards differentiation and equalization of the conditions of production, consumption, distribution and exchange, deriving from capital accumulation and political multiplicity. U&CD entails a conception of the global system as a constellation of interdependent, national institutional configurations and interests that shape international/national/regional trends. To explain geographies of industrialization and urbanization and current trends towards a pluri-centric world, U&CD requires, however, a specification of the underlying causal mechanisms, examined in economic geography, international relations and developmental state theories.

The recent experience of rapid economic growth in Chongqing Municipality in Southwest China shows that rural–urban integration can drive regional growth. In Chongqing rural–urban migration, rural–urban land conversion, infrastructure investment, agricultural restructuring, rural development and employment generation drive growth. These generic processes are profoundly shaped by the policy-driven investment dynamics and the specificity of the Chinese social model. Chinese specificity is reflected in Hukou reform, urban and rural rights, the Annual Land Use Quota system, the di piao, public assets and the local government finance vehicles.