Pivot of China: Spatial politics and inequality in modern Zhengzhou

Publication Type

Book Review

Publication Date

11-2025

Abstract

The sprawling inland metropolis of Zhengzhou owes its prominence almost entirely to the completion in 1906 of China's first north–south and east–west rail lines. The Yellow River north of Kaifeng (long the region's preeminent city) was deemed too wide for a bridge at the time. When the lines opened in 1906, the backwater town was suddenly transformed into a transshipment and warehousing center. Even as Zhengzhou has risen to prominence as a major manufacturing center—many of Apple's iPhones are now produced in a Foxconn factory here—the city has mostly eluded scholarly accounts. Two recent books add to our knowledge of the inland Chinese metropolis. Mark Baker's sweeping urban history tells the story of Zhengzhou's development across the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in The Pivot of China. Meanwhile, architectural and urban theorist Leonardo Ramondetti's The Enriched Field: Urbanising the Central Plains of China approaches the city from a planning and design perspective, focusing on recent efforts to integrate Zhengzhou and nearby Kaifeng, once an imperial capital, in a megapolitan region now referred to as the Central Plains Urban Cluster in Chinese national policies.

Discipline

Urban Studies

Research Areas

Integrative Research Areas

Publication

Journal of Asian Studies

Volume

84

Issue

4

First Page

1055

Last Page

1059

ISSN

0021-9118

Identifier

10.1215/00219118-12192628

Publisher

Duke University Press

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-12192628

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