Informal gathering
Thursday, October 9, 2025
10:30 AM - 11:30 AM
UCLA University Club (Faculty Club)
Playa Cafe
Come meet and chat with Mark Baker, author of Pivot of China: Spatial Politics and Inequality in Modern Zhengzhou (Harvard UP, 2024). Prof. Andrea Goldman (History) will be hosting a casual gathering at the Playa Cafe inside UCLA Faculty Club (University Club).
Author:
Mark Baker is Lecturer in East Asian History at the University of Manchester, UK.
About the book:
China’s modern history has been marked by deep spatial inequalities between regions, between cities, and between rural and urban areas. Contemporary observers and historians alike have attributed these inequalities to distinct stages of China's political economy: the dualistic economy of semicolonialism, rural-urban divisions in the socialist period, and capital concentration in the reform era. In Pivot of China, Mark Baker shows how different states across twentieth-century China shaped these inequalities in similar ways, concentrating resources in urban and core areas at the expense of rural and regional peripheries.
Pivot of China examines this dynamic through the city of Zhengzhou, one of the most dramatic success stories of China’s urbanization: a railroad boomtown of the early twentieth century, a key industrial center and provincial capital of Henan Province in the 1950s, and by the 2020s a “National Central City” of almost ten million people. However, due to the spatial politics of resource concentration, Zhengzhou’s twentieth-century growth as a regional city did not kickstart a wider economic takeoff in its hinterland. Instead, unequal spatial politics generated layers of inequality that China is still grappling with in the twenty-first century.
Sponsor(s): Center for Chinese Studies