China's urbanization is significant worldwide. This process is characterized by underurbanization of population and fast urban land expansion. The driving forces behind this expansion and their rationale are not fully understood and empirically tested. This study fills this gap by analyzing panel data from 1999–2009 for all 286 prefecture‐level cities in China. The findings reveal that land financing, using different measures, significantly contributed to land urbanization in China. Economically stronger cities with higher real estate investment more aggressively pushed for land urbanization. The true purpose of urbanization should be improving the living standard, not to generate revenue. It is suggested that urbanization can serve its justified goals only if fiscal and political relations between central and local governments can be adjusted. As more data become available, future studies are encouraged to further explore the subject by investigating additional factors and the latest trend of urbanization in China.

This article attempts to investigate the relationship between the massification of higher education, labour market and social mobility in contemporary China. Though only a short period of time has elapsed from elite to mass education, China’s higher education has been characterised as a wide, pervasive massification process. Similar to other East Asian countries/economies like South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, the expansion of higher education in China has also generated a great impact on labour markets and social mobility. The massification of higher education has increased college access and in general enhanced the extent of equity and equality in society. Nonetheless, the situation has become far more complex as returns of education have flattened out recently and social mobility has slowed down in general. University students have started to doubt the ability of higher education to improve their competitiveness in the job market. This, in turn, has led to a wide dissatisfaction with higher education development in China, particularly when higher education has experienced highly intensified competition in the context of world-class university movement. Realising that students from different family backgrounds may encounter diverse experiences in graduate employment and opportunity for upward social mobility, this article critically reflects upon how variations in social capital and cultural capital have impacted on graduate employment and social mobility as higher education has massively expanded in China

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The drivers of public support for redistributive policy have stimulated academic debate around the world. The majority of studies use cross-country surveys conducted in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries to contribute to the debate on whether self-interest or social values have more influence on public attitudes towards redistribution. Drawing on a phone survey conducted in 2013, this study advances the discussion by investigating public attitudes towards redistribution and social policy changes against the backdrop of buoyant government revenues in Hong Kong. The Hong Kong welfare model, best seen as a parallel to the liberal welfare state, is selective and residual. Contrary to the usual assumption, the social values hypothesis, viewing poverty as societal problems instead of individual reasons, has been supported in the Hong Kong context. It lends support to greater redistribution in a residual welfare state. The policy implications of the findings are also discussed.