Book Review
American Studies in China




A FINE WORK IN US URBANIZATION STUDY




HUANG Keke



Wang Xu, American Cities along the Pacific Coast (Northeast Norma
l University Press, 1994)






Study of American cities began in the 80s in China. Though 
three decades later than in the United States and Great Britain, it 
fully indicates that the scope of American studies in our country is 
being expanded constantly. Among the small number of pioneers, 
scholars in the Institute for American Studies under the Northeast 
Normal University have displayed great potential. They were the first 
to start this research and have turned the institute into a base for 
the study of the subject. Professor Ding Zemin, having studied the US 
immigrant and border question for years, inspired his students to take 
an interest in the US cities and included the subject in the bigger 
scheme of ¡°The American Civil War and the Gilded Age,¡± a national 
research subject under his direction. Wang Xu is a student of his and 
has received his meticulous help all along. Wang has become a 
professor himself and assumed the directorship of this institute.

      American Cities along the Pacific Coast (American Cities, 
hereafter), published by the Northeast Normal University Publishing 
House in 1994, is the fruit of Professor Wang Xu¬ðs research of over 10 
years. Preceding the publication of this book, he had issued scores of 
essays on the question of American cities, and American Western 
Cities and Exploitation of the West (1860-1910), with which he won his 
doctorate, was perhaps the first dissertation on this question in 
China. In this article he expounds his academic views in clearª²cut 
terms and uses an abundance of material to support his points. It can 
be said that this article was, in fact, the embryo of American Cities. In his visits to the United States later for attending meetings and 
making investigations, he continued to glean data, called on scholars 
specialized in the history of American cities and did field work 
in cities along the Pacific coast, bringing back abundant information 
for his book. 

      The most conspicuous characteristic of this work is that a 
basic view of his runs throughout the book: the development of the 
American cities along the Pacific coast has followed a unique road, 
very different from those of the East and the Mid West. This view 
is contrary to the general conclusion drawn in the United States. 
Historians of the American Western cities headed by Richard Wade, one 
of the founders of the history of American cities, maintain that 
urbanization in the West began later than other parts of the country, 
but it soon transplanted the pattern of the East and followed in its 
footsteps on the whole. Wang Xu points out that this view 
overemphasizes the similarity between the West and the East, thus 
neglecting, and even impeding, the study of the individuality of 
urbanization in the West.

      Wang Xu refutes this view in his book with convincing 
arguments. As a Chinese scholar, he is in no position to compete with 
his American colleagues in data and onª²theª²spot investigation. It is 
indeed no easy job to treat history as it was and arrive at objective 
and fair conclusions. It is perhaps because he has such a scientific 
research attitude that he has earned the appreciation of his 
American colleagues. Professor John Findlay, Director of the Center 
for the Study of Pacific Northwest under University of Washington, and 
some other scholars read an outline of this book and raised wellª²
founded opinions on it. A concerned department even presented him to 
the then President Ronald Reagan.

      American Cities points out that the peculiarity of the Western
 way lies in the fact that cities and towns played a pioneering and 
dominant role in its development. Proceeding from the local historical 
and geographical conditions, the trailª²breakers had not treaded in the 
footprints of the Easterners, who followed the traditional way of 
reclaiming wasteland and going for agricultural production at first 
and gradually taking up industrialization and urbanization. They 
simply bypassed the stage of agricultural development. This view has 
the backing of the objective conditions in the West. First of all, the 
development of the West began with mining for minerals, and the camps 
around the mines were the embryonic form of cities and towns. 
Investors, miners and merchants converged here, and all sorts of 
trades sprang up to serve the mines subsequently. To maintain order 
and security, diverse administrative organs emerged successively. A 
rudimentary urban civilization thus took shape. There is no denying 
that most camps vanished gradually with the exhaustion of the mining 
resources and only a small amount of them developed into towns and 
cities later. The urban civilization, however, has not vanished in the 
process; it sublimed in the flow and people multiplied, laying a good 
foundation for the largeª²scale development of cities in the years that 
followed.

      Secondly, after the Civil War, the US government worked out 
various preferential policies to encourage railway corporations to 
build westward railways. These corporations, using the land and loans 
the government gave them, set up companies under them to select sites 
to develop towns. Within a short period, a series of cities sprang up 
along both sides of the United States¬ð five main railways running from 
east to west. American Cities points out that railway corporations, 
which form a relatively independent economic sector, brought about the 
allª²round development of the West on the basis of the achievements 
made by the mining industry. Their role was particularly conspicuous 
after the 1880s. All the big cities playing an important part in the 
West today excelled themselves in the railway epoch.

      The strength of American Cities lies not only in the fact that
 it puts forward a view. What is even more significant is that it has i
nduced some valuable rules from the deepª²going analysis of the Western road. 
They can be summed up into the following four points:

      1. The urbanization of the West is characterized by a sort of 
jumpiness. The West, due to unevenness in the development of different 
regions of the country, had only a sparse population at first and was 
far from the economically developed regions. What it urgently needed 
then was building some ¡°pivotal points¡± to link it to the East, not 
reclaiming wasteland over scattered areas and going for agricultural 
production. So, with the backing of the East, which preceded it in 
industrialization, the West developed its cities at redoubled speed. 
Some big towns soon grew into mediumª²sized cities and then into 
regional central municipalities without showing different stages of 
development. The author of American Cities chose several cities 
in different parts of the United States for a comparative study and found 
that the development of a town of 2,000 inhabitants into a city 
with a population of 200,000 took the Mid West (exclusive of 
Chicago) 50 to 70 years, the Northeast 130 to 170 years and the West 
30 to 40 years. So the West is the fastest in the development of 
cities of the same size.

      2. Cities are concentrated reflections of regional economy. 
They are joined together through the areas of their ¡°economic 
radiation¡± and form a network of regional productive forces. The rise 
of several regional central municipalities in the West undoubtedly 
raised the overall level of its urbanization. At the beginning of the 
twentieth century, the basic structure of urbanization of the region, 
with the cities along the Pacific coast as its backbone, took shape.

      3. Development of big cities is related to the degree of 
concentration of monopoly corporations. American Cities enlists the 
¡°bank kings¡± and the ¡°big four¡± in the railway industry in San 
Francisco to show that the position of this city has been consolidated 
as a result of the development of big monopoly corporations. Using San 
Francisco as their headquarters, these corporations controlled the 
mining industry, key communication lines and even the financial and 
monetary world. The high society made up of consortiums bribed members 
of the local parliament, bought over the news media and suppressed the 
public opinion, manipulating the political situation behind the 
scenes. The association of the monopoly groups with the state and 
municipal authorities was an outstanding feature of the economic 
system with cities as its centers in the formation period.

      4. Governmental investment has played an important role in the 
development of big cities. This book, in accounting the stimulation 
the two world wars gave the industries of the Western cities, deals in 
great detail the investments of the federal government after World War 
II. It holds that the production of ammunitions and warª²time 
necessities altered the structure of the industry along the Pacific 
coast. The tremendous national defense expenditures of the federal 
government and its policy of encouraging the development of highª²tech 
industries bore noticeable results in the cities along the Pacific 
coast. The rapid growth of the aircraft, shipª²building and missile and 
astronautics industries and the rise of the microelectronic industry 
in Stanford University and the Silicon Valley have enabled high 
technology to become the leading factor in the economy of the Western 
cities.

      A profound conclusion has been drawn from the book¬ðs 
elucidation of the features of the urbanization of the West: Even if 
the economy of a country, particularly a big country, has developed to 
a certain extent, its remote and border areas should not merely copy 
the urbanization experience of the developed areas; they should 
proceed from the actual conditions and choose their own road of 
urbanization to develop the economy, so long as regional difference 
exists. This conclusion is undoubtedly of great reference value to the 
onª²going urbanization in China.

      It should be said that the challenge this book poses to an 
American school of thought on the question of the peculiar road of the 
West proves to be successful. Apart from this, the author has 
corrected some views in various parts of the book.

      It is generally acknowledged that industry and trade are 
lumped together in the Western cities. Numerous American scholars 
maintain that this is because these cities are nothing but ¡°agents¡± of 
the Eastern cities and occupy only an inferior position in the echelon 
of US cities. Some even put the West and the South on a par, saying 
that the West is the colony of the East. Professor Wang Xu points out 
that these views may have their bases, for the Western cities are 
younger than the Eastern ones on the whole and, being situated in 
areas producing raw materials, can not shake off their dependence on 
the manufactures and capital control of the East. However, this does not 
mean that the above conclusion is valid. Firstly, it is not scientific 
to use the concept ¡°colony¡± in analyzing the relationship between 
different parts of a country. Discrepancy in economic development of 
the two regions can only be the reflection of the fact that they are 
at different stages of specialized production. Secondly, the process 
San Francisco, Los Angles and Seattle have undergone shows that, by 
the end of the nineteenth century, the economy of the Western cities 
had matured and the independence of regional economy had been greatly 
enhanced. Thirdly, the economy of the South is different essentially 
from that of the West. The Southern cities are purely commercial in 
nature, counting on the link with the big Northeastern cities for 
their survival and therefore relying heavily on them, whereas the 
Western cities have formed a horizontal cooperation among themselves 
and manifested a tendency of independent development.

      It is widely held in the Chinese and foreign academic circles 
that the gold rush in California set off urbanization in the West, 
particularly along the American Pacific coast. Wang Xu maintains that, 
though this is an undeniable fact, the role of the gold rush should 
not be overrated. What it aimed at then was the alluvial gold in the 
rivers. The shallow mining brought in just a limited amount of gold 
and lasted a very short period, its influence on the urbanization of 
the West being far less significant than the deep seat mining that 
came later. The discovery of deepª²seated gold, silver, copper, lead 
and zinc mines led to largeª²scale mechanized mining. The sweepwashers 
working on their own could move conveniently after exhausting the gold 
mineral resources along certain rivers, but they could not afford the 
capital and technology needed in the deep cutting. The mining 
corporations, therefore, emerged to meet the requirements. They 
industrialized the mining processes, promoted the development of the 
machineª²building, energy and service industries and developed towns 
and cities near the mines.

      American Cities points out that Chinese scholars still confine
 themselves to the study of the American suburbanization at present. 
The concept ¡°suburbanization,¡± in fact, can no longer explain 
satisfactorily the development of American cities following the end of 
World War II. Metropolitanization, not suburbanization, is the leading 
trend in the current development of American cities. The book says 
that suburbanization consists of three stages: the appearance of new 
residential areas in the suburbs; the outward shifting of retail 
shops; and the constructing of new enterprises in the suburbs. Around 
World War II, American central cities linked up with the subª²centers 
emerging in their suburbs, forming the complex central structure of 
metropolitans. The book deals in detail the causes leading to the high 
speed development of the metropolitans along the American Pacific 
coast and explains the land annexation, communications and 
transportation, invigorating the central parts of the cities and other 
important questions. The author says with foreª²sight that the future 
trend of urban development will be the forming of megalopolises on the 
bases of metropolitans.

      American Cities, as the first Chinese book on the history of 
American cities, unavoidably contains some inadequacies.

      A more obvious case in point is the difference in structure 
between the fourth part and the first three. It enlists in the lexical 
style such items as geographical environment, population, economy, 
culture and education, scenic spots and city layout under Los Angles, 
San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle, thus resulting in a disharmony 
with the argumentative style of the preceding parts. In fact, these 
four megalopolises have been the main objects of study throughout the 
book; the content of the fourth part could have been included 
naturally in the first three. If it should remain as it is for the 
sake of emphasizing their position and function at present, a 
horizontal comparative study would also be better than the caseª²study 
fashion of presentation. A comparative study of such questions as 
these megalopolises¬ð function in the regional and national economy, 
their complementarity and perspectives of development (this section 
can be shifted from Chapter Sixteen in Part Three) would have brought 
about the good results of illustrating in depth the argumentation of 
the first three parts.

      It goes without saying that great emphases should be given to 
certain sections of a monograph, and less to others, and some points 
have only to be touched upon briefly in passing. However, an insufficient 
account of important questions closely related to the subject of a 
book will make one feel it lacks depth. American Cities points out 
that the development of communications and transportation has promoted 
urbanization in the West, but it says little about the role of autos, 
much less than that of railways. Railways played a tremendous part in 
the development of the American economy and the rise of cities. 
However, when expressways were built one after the other in the 60s, 
railways and trains had fulfilled their historical task, and 
increasing mileages of them were being demolished. The auto, with its 
characteristic convenience and nimbleness, has completely changed the 
face of the cities of the railway era and is performing a far greater 
function. In dealing with the urbanization of the contemporary times, 
more space should be devoted to such modern means of communications as 
the auto and airplane and the modern equipment of telecommunications.

      All in all, American Cities is a book of considerable academic
 value. Professor Wang Xu, on the basis of the research achievements he 
has attained, has begun a comparative study of the American cities 
along the Pacific coast and the Chinese coastal cities. We are looking 
forward to the publication of his new work.


(Translated by Wang Huaiting)