About Sinocities

Sinocities

Sinocities is an English-language Substack newsletter about Chinese cities, written by Andrew Stokols, an urban studies scholar whose research examines the political economy of urban development in China. The newsletter explores the intersection of cities, urban technology, China, architecture and design, and the global and geopolitical implications of China's urbanisation and infrastructure development, both within China and abroad. It was rebranded from Stokols' earlier newsletter, A Space Between, into Sinocities, a name that announces its method: to use specific places, a new district in Chengdu, a data centre in Xiong'an, a Belt and Road project overseas, as a lens into the complexity and variety of China's development. Stokols describes the gap it fills precisely: there is a great deal of good English-language China content, but very little that focuses on specific locales and specific places, and that place-based niche is the one Sinocities aims to occupy. The Sinica podcast recommends the newsletter to its audience of China specialists.

The author: Andrew Stokols

Andrew Stokols completed his PhD on the political economy of urban development at MIT in 2024, in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and was a research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer at MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and his current Substack biography lists him as an assistant professor of urban studies at Singapore Management University's College of Integrative Studies. Before the doctorate he was Director of Research and Partnerships at the ETH Zürich Future Cities Lab in Singapore and Director of the Peking University–Harvard Ecological Urbanism Collaboration in Beijing, and he held a Fulbright Visiting Research Scholarship in China at Xi'an Architecture and Technology University. He holds a master's degree in urban planning and design from the Harvard School of Design and a bachelor's degree in history and urban studies from UC Berkeley, is fluent in Mandarin, and has training in Korean and Thai. Few newsletter writers on China bring a comparable combination of academic credentials, China-based research experience and language skills to the subject of Chinese urbanisation.

From A Space Between to Sinocities

The newsletter began under another name. In his post "Welcome to Sinocities," Stokols announced the rebranding of A Space Between into Sinocities, a Substack focused on cities in China. The older title was not discarded so much as folded in: Sinocities, he wrote, would continue to be a "space between" varied but related ways of looking at the city and, more broadly, at space in China. He also clarified the name's reach. The "Sino" in Sinocities connotes not just China but the broader Sinosphere, East Asia, Southeast Asia and beyond, so a China focus does not preclude attention to related places where there is a China angle, such as Belt and Road projects abroad or the impact of Chinese migration and investment in other cities globally. He was careful, too, to distinguish the newsletter from the broader "Sino-themed" Substacks he admires, such as Sinocism and Sinica: Sinocities is deliberately narrower, a specialist publication about place, where those are general ones about China.

Why cities: the urbanisation argument

The newsletter's founding argument is that the story of China's rapid economic boom is, in many respects, the story of urbanisation. Stokols notes that some might think that story is over, given slowing growth and a sinking real estate market, but he points out that 35 percent of the country, 477 million people by some measures, remain rural, and that policy efforts continue to urbanise the country toward the roughly 80 percent urbanisation rate of developed countries, a level forecast for 2035. Over 800 million people already live in Chinese cities. Whatever happens to the headline numbers, he argues, the role of place and space, urban, rural and in between, remains central to understanding China, with implications for technology policy, economic growth, domestic stability and international relations. Sinocities is written from an academic perspective in urban studies and planning but, its author insists, attuned to broader conversations, and aimed at specialist and generalist readers alike.

Domestic themes: land, districts and ecological civilisation

The domestic agenda Stokols sets out for the newsletter reads as a map of how Chinese cities are actually made and governed: local development, land finance, new urban districts and new economic zones, infrastructure, migration, hukou reform and ecological protection, including the official concept of shengtai wenming, "ecological civilisation." Land finance, the system by which local governments fund themselves through land sales, and the new districts and zones through which cities expand, are recurring structural subjects, as is Xiong'an, the new city being built near Beijing, to which Stokols has devoted extended first-hand reporting. His Xiong'an writing, based on a visit in June 2023 and updated as construction progressed, describes a city conceived as three cities at once, on the ground, underground in utility corridors, and in the cloud, and records the slow arrival of state enterprise headquarters, research parks, hospitals and schools, alongside flooding in the summer of 2023 that underscored the challenges of its low-lying site.

City reports and fieldwork

A signature format is the city report: a long, place-specific dispatch combining history, policy and on-the-ground observation. His Chengdu report, for example, moves from the city's relaxed teahouse reputation and its giant panda mascots to its position as China's fourth-largest city and an economic engine of western China contending to become the first first-tier city in inland China. It traces the reorganisation of Chengdu's urban space in the 1950s and 1960s to suit the planned economy, examines a 1989 CIA map of the city's industries, and reports from Chengdu Science City, where a branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a national supercomputing centre and state-enterprise research institutes cluster around Xinglong Lake, noting that the newer development is dominated almost entirely by state capital. The same fieldwork method appears in his writing on data centres, where a visit to the Xiong'an Cloud Supercomputing Center, opened on 14 November 2022 and nicknamed the Xiong'an City Brain, grounds an argument that cloud computing centres have become iconic representations of high-tech progress, the digital age's equivalent of the city god temples of imperial China.

Research behind the newsletter: smart cities and digital nations

Sinocities is the public-facing companion to a scholarly research programme. Stokols' dissertation, Building Digital Cities and Nations, asks why and how nations increasingly turned to smart cities and the Fourth Industrial Revolution as a strategy for national development in sectors including the Internet of Things, 5G, cloud computing and artificial intelligence, and it continues as a book project. He is also working on another monograph analysing China's approach to cyber-physical infrastructure, with cases on data regulation, data centres, connected vehicles, smart cities and smart infrastructure. His research draws on urban studies, the political science of late development and science and technology studies to explore the political economy of emerging urban technologies and the geopolitics of infrastructure in the context of United States–China competition. His work has been published in the Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Geography, the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, Environment and Planning A, the Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia and by University of Pennsylvania Press. Newsletter essays on data centre architecture or Chengdu's science city are thus distillations of peer-reviewed research lines, not detached commentary.

The wider Sinosphere and Belt and Road

Although its centre of gravity is China, Sinocities follows Chinese urbanisation beyond China's borders. Its remit explicitly includes Belt and Road projects abroad and the impact of Chinese migration and investment in cities globally, and its author's career, spanning the Future Cities Lab in Singapore, ecological urbanism collaboration in Beijing and a Fulbright in Xi'an, equips it to treat those projects comparatively. The framing concept is geopolitical as much as architectural: China's infrastructure development at home and abroad is presented as a single phenomenon with shared finance, shared state enterprises and shared planning ideas, whose implications run from Southeast Asian capitals to the new districts of Chengdu. This outward dimension distinguishes Sinocities from purely domestic urban blogs: a Chinese-built district overseas is, for this newsletter, evidence about China itself, about how its model of urban development travels, and about the responses it provokes in the places where it lands.

Presentation, identity and readership

Even the newsletter's visual identity is argued rather than decorative. Its logo's green-blue colour scheme is inspired by Qinglü, a genre of traditional Chinese landscape painting often used to suggest mythical or historical landscapes, and its image combines repeating mountain forms with iconic Chinese buildings from the Hall of Supreme Harmony in the Forbidden City to Shanghai Tower, the tallest building in China. It was also inspired by the classical line about Hangzhou, "mountains beyond mountains, buildings beyond buildings," evoking the infinite space and wealth of the city. At the time of its rebranding the newsletter was free, with its author flagging that special content or reports might eventually move behind a paywall to support the work. Its readership is the internationally minded China-watching community: it is recommended by the Sinica podcast, and its tagline, "Cities, China, Geopolitics, Technology, and everything in between," accurately describes a publication that treats a supercomputing centre, a land-finance mechanism and a landscape painting tradition as parts of one subject: how China builds, and what that building means.