Do Chá à Soja: processo de urbanização na China sob um olhar brasileiro

Abstract

This study investigates contemporary Chinese urbanization from a historicalcritical and comparative perspective, articulating theoretical contributions from Chinese and Brazilian thought. It is grounded in the premise that categories traditionally mobilized to explain urbanization—such as rural and urban, countryside and city, advanced and backward—should not be understood as fixed oppositions, but rather as contradictory expressions of a single historical process. From this interpretive standpoint, both the Brazilian experience of urbanization dissociated from industrialization and the Chinese trajectory of industrialization pursued without full urban expansion are understood as specific forms of socio-spatial organization, each marked by distinct patterns of inequality. The analysis integrates theoretical reflection, allegorical reading, and empirical investigation, enabling an understanding of Chinese urbanization as a process characterized by the coexistence of heterogeneous temporalities, spatialities, and social forms. These formulations are articulated with classical categories developed in Brazilian interpretations of peripheral urbanization, particularly those proposed by Milton Santos (1993) and Francisco de Oliveira (1982; 2003). The comparison reveals that, although Brazil and China did not follow the historical trajectories of the Global North, their development paths display distinct combinations of state action, territory, and labor. In the Chinese case, public policies such as the household registration system (Hukou), the Third Front strategy (三線建設), the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), the regionalization guidelines of the National New-Type Urbanization Plan (NNUP), and state control over land emerge as central instruments for regulating population mobility, territorial use, and the reproduction of labor power. These mechanisms enabled rapid industrial accumulation while simultaneously producing asymmetries between urban and rural areas. The lived dimension of these contradictions is examined through the analysis of four Chinese cinematic works—Shower (1999), Dead Pigs (2018), Last Train Home (2009), and Whose Utopia (2006)—treated as analytical devices rather than mere illustrations. Across different scales, the films reveal the impacts of accelerated urbanization on migrant labor, family ties, land commodification, and the reorganization of social time, highlighting the porous boundaries between urban and rural spaces and challenging interpretations based on fixed notions of marginality. This theoretical and allegorical reading is further deepened by an empirical analysis of the space–time distribution of economic and demographic variables in Brazil and China, demonstrating that urbanization cannot be understood as a simple outcome of economic growth. The findings indicate that Chinese urbanization, like its Brazilian counterpart, should be understood as a contradictory, historically situated, and territorially produced process, in which different ways of life, labor regimes, and uses of space coexist unevenly. By integrating theoretical reflection, symbolic analysis, and empirical investigation, the study reinforces the need for non-universalizing approaches to urbanization in the Global South—approaches capable of articulating public policies, political economy, and the production of space, while recognizing contradiction as a constitutive element of concrete reality.