Introduction

The pace and extent of growth in Chinese cities since roughly the turn of the millennium have attracted the interest of scholars across a wide range of fields and disciplines. Archaeologists, historians, geographers, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, and specialists in cultural studies, literature, and film have produced many publications in response to this development.

This chapter traces the links between the Chicago School of urban sociology founded by Robert Park and urban sociology in China, and examines their historical and disciplinary connections. It analyses four dimensions thereof: (1) personal relations between Robert Park and the Chinese students and colleagues who enabled his visit to China; (2) institutional embeddedness of the sociology departments at both the University of Chicago and Yanjing University within the funding structures and strategies of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s; (3) empirical fieldwork and comparative community studies in the form of Fei Xiaotong's research on small towns in China (early 1980s) and his conceptualization of rural urbanization, which built on his earlier classic rural community study and has influenced official Chinese urbanization strategies to the present day; and (4) theorization of China’s “villages-in-the-city” (城中村) in light of previous debates inspired by the Chicago School on “cities within cities” (Park, 1915), the “slum” and “urban villages.” I will use these four perspectives to follow the trajectory of urban sociology from Chicago to China, and to address questions of legacy, creative impetus, and possible limitations arising from Park’s program vis-à-vis urban sociology in China today.

Park's research program in “The city”

When Robert Park arrived at the University of Chicago in 1914, the sociology pursued there hardly differed from self-reflective social work. Many of his colleagues came from families involved in Christian welfare work, or had otherwise come to sociology via social work. Their social analyses had a moral undertone. Park, by contrast, sought to develop sociology as a discipline rooted in neutral conceptual-theoretical understanding and empirical study of social realities (Christmann, 2007: 105). At this time he was already formulating his powerful research program in nuce in an article entitled “The city” (Park, 1915). It is divided into four sections.