This comment discusses the contribution of population movement to the spread of COVID-19, with a reference to the spread of SARS 17 years ago. We argue that the changing geography of migration, the diversification of jobs taken by migrants, the rapid growth of tourism and business trips, and the longer distance taken by people for family reunion are what make the spread of COVID-19 so differently from that of SARS. These changes in population movement are expected to continue. Hence, new strategies in disease prevention and control should be taken accordingly, which are also proposed in the comment.

Using a localized perspective, this paper explores the gap between the eligibility criteria for a Beijing hukou (household registration) and the reality of successfully acquiring one. By comparing those who are eligible to apply with those who actually succeed in gaining a hukou, it reveals that hukou practices are operated locally to serve the city's development needs. It also reveals huge gaps between migrants, eligible applicants and hukou winners. Most migrants in Beijing are not eligible to apply for a local hukou. However, among those limited applicants who can apply, those with a postgraduate education and who serve the capital's political functions are more likely than others to win a hukou, an advantage not pointed out in government documents. These “hidden” rules are most likely set intentionally by the city so that it can maintain absolute control over hukou transfers; however, at the same time, they frustrate migrants who meet the stated requirements but who are in reality still unlikely to ever acquire a Beijing hukou. These findings open up a novel perspective for exploring the people–city nexus in China during the migration process and highlight the gaps between policy and reality for those who can apply for a Beijing hukou and those who actually win one.

The monocentric city model has been challenged for its predictive power in urban spatial structure as multiple centers rise from the spatial expansion and functional diversification of modern cities. To overcome the deficiency of the model in explaining contemporary cities, this study takes Haikou City in China as an empirical case to develop an integrated city model that depicts the urban spatial structure by combining multiple monocentric city models, the basic unit in analyzing an urban space. The applicability of this integrated city model in Haikou is also examined in return by using the measure of floor area ratio and the method of geographical weighted regression. Results show that the traditional spatial structure of Haikou as a provincial capital where production activities are concentrated in the city center has been challenged by the emerging tourism function along the sea coast over the past decades. Compared with the long-existing monocentric "city" model around the city center that exerts a strong, asymmetrical, and unevenly distributed marginal effect on the urban space, the newly developed monocentric "city" model along the coast has a weak, one-sided, and evenly distributed marginal impact on its urban spatial structure. Therefore, the current spatial structure of Haikou City can be depicted by an integrated city model composed of two monocentric "city" models based on different "centers" with distinct urban functions. In this sense, this integrated city model developed on the monocentric city

The floating population is a major source of social inequality in China and a direct target in its new-type urbanization plan. Although this population spread very unevenly both within and between provinces, and the responsibility for their citizenization lies mostly with local authorities, their geographical distribution and representation in the total population below province level remain understudied. This paper fills the gap. The county-level census data in 2010 were analyzed with the help of the cartogram technique. Results showed that the floating population was concentrated predominately in three key coastal regions and moderately in inland provincial capitals, with great variation both within and across key regions and provinces. Their share in the total population was also very high in the concentrations, closely followed by many counties along the coast and inland borders. Hence these 'hot spots' are very crucial for addressing social inequality and materializing the new-type urbanization plan in China.

The 2019 novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has quickly swept through China, and mass internal migration during the Chinese Spring Festival is now widely blamed for this. This statement, we argue, is misleading. Internal migrants should not be held responsible for the initial spread of COVID-19, as those cities first affected are megacities that connect with the epicentre Wuhan more with regard to business and tourism than migration. The scale of the epidemic can only be partially explained by internal migration. Severe outbreaks are not limited to cities that neighbour Hubei Province and that have large migration to Wuhan. They also occurred in provincial capitals that are neither contiguous with Hubei nor connected with Wuhan in terms of migration. Even though a few cities far away from the epicentre were hit severely by COVID-19 due to migration, the major contributor is not the migrant job seekers but business people. The responsibility of spreading COVD-19 so fast, on such a large scale and so far is by no means fully on internal migrants.

Recent studies on the social structural change in global cities have recognized globalization, migration, and institutional factors as three main forces underlying this process. However, effects of these factors have rarely been synthetically examined and the social structure of emerging Chinese global cities under typical influence of all these factors has yet not been systematically scrutinized in previous literature. To fill these gaps, we firstly established an encompassing framework to incorporate the effects of these logically interconnected factors and then applied it to Beijing, the capital and an emerging global city of China. Using the economic and population census data, we investigated the social structural changes of migrants and local residents separately over the past decade. The results demonstrated a clear trend of professionalization with a considerable growth of 'the upper class' coupled with relative shrinkages of 'the middle and lower classes' in Beijing. In this case, economic globalization and the large immigration did not result in social polarization as conventional wisdom suggested because the localized welfare system successfully prevented local residents from engaging in 'the lower class' on the one hand and the developmental state intentionally upgraded the occupational structure with a selective openness regulation on the other. Beneath this overall professionalization trend, the social gap between migrants and the locals was not reduced but widened despite their

Two competing forces are traditionally considered to be responsible for the formation and expansion of metropolitan areas. One is urban spillover, which stresses the dispersion of residents from the city centre; the other is rural industrialisation, which focuses on in situ industrialisation in peripheries. The traditional idea that these two forces are geographically incompatible and temporarily unchangeable is challenged by this study. By analysing the development trajectories and growth drivers of Beijing Metropolitan Area (BMA), the study shows that the development of this area between 1995 and 2010 was driven jointly by both forces. For counties that were already part of BMA in 1995, the dominant growth driver in the following years has shifted from rural industrialisation to urban spillover. For counties joining BMA after 1995, much of their incorporation was first driven by rural industrialisation and later by urban spillover. For all the counties in 2010, those closer to the city core were generally dominated by urban spillover but those farther away were largely by rural industrialisation. These findings confirm that urban spillover and rural industrialisation are neither geographically incompatible nor temporarily unchangeable but can co-shape one metropolitan area.They also suggest that the two forces are actually contingent on local conditions that can vary both across space and over time.

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