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.

An emerging polycentric spatial structure in China’s mega cities has been confirmed in the literature, but few studies have addressed the linkage between the change in spatial structure and urban development policies. Using Beijing as a case study, this paper examines the role of urban polycentric planning in the polycentric evolution process from a morphological perspective. We observed that urban polycentric planning significantly promoted the emergence of a polycentric urban form in Beijing’s metropolitan area from 2001 to 2010. Firstly, most of the planned subcenters were identified as real employment subcenters by a relative threshold method in 2001 and 2010 and comprised the majority of the employment subcenters. Secondly, the planned subcenters significantly increased their employment share and influence on employment and population distribution from 2001 to 2010, and their performances referring to these aspects were much better than the unplanned subcenters. Thus, our findings provide evidence that changes in urban spatial structure can be strongly affected by urban development policies, although it is determined by market forces in theory.

Urban population during the daytime and at night and their spatial distribution are important bases for planning urban infrastructure, public services and disaster relief. As current population statistics cannot distinguish urban population during the daytime from that at night, existed research in this field are quite limited. This paper tries to advance studies at this aspect by establishing a relationship model for the three components of ‘population, land use and time (daytime or night)’ to explore the temporal and spatial characteristics of different types of population, which is aimed to estimate urban population during the daytime and at night and to analyze their spatial characteristics at grid scale. Furthermore, an empirical case study has been carried out at the Haidian District in Beijing, China to test the model. The results are as follows: (1) The spatial structure of urban population during the daytime is significantly different from that at night. The spatial distribution of urban population during the daytime is more extensive and more agglomerated that that at night. (2) Several types of spatial coupling relationship between population during the daytime and that at night have been identified, such as sandwich mode, symmetry mode, convergence mode and single mode, etc. (3) The spatial distribution of daytime and nighttime population also reflects certain factors during the development of China, such as the distribution of old residential areas, the construction of new industrial districts, and the differences between urban and rural areas, which can provide reference points for studies in this field and other regional research.

Rapid urban land expansion and the resulting arable land loss have put food security in China at risk. This paper investigates the characteristics and mechanism of arable land conversion in Beijing using a logistic model based on land-use data for 2001 and 2010. The results suggest that (1) arable land conversion tends to occur near built-up areas, city centers and major roads; (2) arable land that lies closer to irrigation canals and country roads is less likely to be converted to urban use; (3) arable land that is bigger in size and has a more regular shape has a lower probability of conversion to urban use; and (4) the Prime Farmland Protection policy and related land-use plan have played a positive role in preserving arable land, demonstrated by the probability for arable land conversion inside a prime farmland boundary is 63.9 percent less than for land outside the boundary. Based on these findings and on sustainable-development principles, we suggest that, rather than an exclusive focus on controlling the quantity of arable land, the location and characteristics of the arable land should be a primary consideration when designing urban policies and plans.