New cities in China: Tracking urban projects in the city fringe

In recent decades, hundreds of new cities have been built in China with a notable acceleration of this trend in the 2000s. Yet despite their numbers and variety, China’s new cities remain marginal to a wave of popular and scholarly attention directed at new towns and new cities globally. This article brings China’s new cities into these conversations through review of extant literature on the topic. Research on China’s new cities has focused on their functions as sites of accumulation, economic restructuring, globalization, territorialization, and innovation. In this article, we introduce these themes in the literature and show areas that remain ripe for future study.