Toward a sociology of urban knowledge: Reconceptualizing urbanization from contemporary China

Over the past two decades, scholars working on urbanization in China have grappled with a fundamental contradiction: the nation’s urban–rural binary simultaneously over-determines livelihoods and life chances and fails to capture the under-determined nature of urbanization as a set of social and material processes. In response to this problem, various strategies of reconceptualization have emerged, including the redefinition, complication, and recombination of China’s urban and rural categories. Nevertheless, the urban–rural binary and its misrepresentation of Chinese urbanization persists. Using the conceptual apparatus of science and technology studies, this article critically examines this literature as a basis for reengaging ongoing conceptual debates in the wider field of urban studies. Through a reading of the last 20 years of “Number One Documents,” which highlight the central government’s policy priorities for rural development, I argue that the apparent mismatch between categories and processes is not, in fact, a problem that is susceptible to conceptual resolution. By embracing the methodological principles of agnosticism, symmetry, and free association, a sociology of urban knowledge can help to expose the inherent politics of urban concepts.