Jeremy L. Wallace is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. He studies urbanization, regime stability, and data quality in non-democracies, with a particular emphasis on China. He is the author of the book Cities and Stability: Urbanization, Redistribution, and Regime Survival in China (Oxford, 2014). Wallace received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University.
Last Updated: July 22, 2015
Conversation
11.30.17
The Beijing Migrants Crackdown
After a fire in a Beijing apartment building catering to migrant workers killed at least 19 people on November 18, the city government launched a 40-day campaign to demolish the capital’s “unsafe” buildings. Many Beijing residents view the campaign...
Conversation
07.21.15
Is China’s Reform Era Over and, If So, What’s Next?
Fordham Law School professor and regular ChinaFile contributor Carl Minzner says we've arrived at “China After the Reform Era,” a development that’s “not entirely bad” but also has a “dark side.” Minzner’s conclusions, excerpted below, come...
Books
09.02.14
Cities and Stability
China's management of urbanization is an under-appreciated factor in the regime's longevity. The Chinese Communist Party fears "Latin Americanization"—the emergence of highly unequal megacities with their attendant slums and social unrest. Such cities threaten the survival of nondemocratic regimes. To combat the threat, many regimes, including China's, favor cities in policymaking. Cities and Stability shows this "urban bias" to be a Faustian Bargain: cities may be stabilized for a time, but the massive in-migration from the countryside that results can generate the conditions for political upheaval. Through its hukou system of internal migration restrictions, China has avoided this dilemma, simultaneously aiding urbanites and keeping farmers in the countryside. The system helped prevent social upheaval even during the Great Recession, when tens of millions of laid-off migrant workers dispersed from coastal cities. Jeremy Wallace's powerful account forces us to rethink the relationship between cities and political stability throughout the developing world. —Oxford University Press {chop}