The View from the County: China's Regional Inequalities of
Socio-Economic Development

Peng Zhang

and

Mann Xu

The central contribution of this paper is to provide a description and analysis of spatial inequalities in China at the county scale. Previous accounts have concentrated primarily on crude provincial level economic data. By using data from more than 2000 counties, and in focusing on socio-economic agendas, it is the aim of this paper to provide a more nuanced and sophisticated account of China's inequalities in the 2000 decade. The result shows that fiscal revenue/expenditure, financial loans, education (proxies by school enrolment rate), health care (proxies by hospital beds) and social welfare (proxies by beds in social welfare nursing centres) are the cause of major inequality when analysed from the county point of view.