Introduction

China is entering a new stage of slower economic growth and the government's attention is gradually moving toward the social challenges that have built up over the past decades of rapid urbanization. Millions of rural migrants now live in urban areas, and large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen continue to attract hundreds of thousands of migrants every year who tend to congregate certain urban neighborhoods (Chan, 2009; Yue et al., 2010; Wang et al., 2016). Both scholars and the Chinese government are greatly concerned about their integration into the city (Liu et al., 2013; Yue et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2016). Additionally, the early work of Whyte and Parish (1984) found that the social life of urban residents in socialist China consisted mainly of localized social networks. However, since then China's transition to a market economy and the rapid rate of urbanization have allowed residents to create a less territorially bound social network based on family, kin, and work ties (Hazelzet and Wissink, 2012). These fundamental changes to Chinese urban society now call for more understanding of how urbanization has affected the social life of Chinese urban residents. It is at this point in time that the works of Robert E. Park and the Chicago School seem to be more relevant than ever. One of Park's key arguments is that the city should not be merely regarded as a congregation of people but rather as an institution that has its own concept and structure (1915: 577). Studying the Chinese city from a human ecological perspective is therefore of great value. Urban China research is not an underdeveloped field and, especially, empirical studies on the political economic structure have proliferated since the late 1980s. However, it is important to stress that the growing number of studies adopting a structural political economy approach should not be interpreted as a critique toward the human ecology approach. Instead, after establishing a general understanding of the political economic structure of China, Park's work should inspire us to think again about the nature of the city and how to study the city as an institution rather than a collection of people affected by political economic forces. One major concern of the Chicago School was how the moral order of urban society has been influenced by the peculiar characteristics of the city.