Examining the nature of the planning system in pre-reform China, this book relates China's planning system to planning systems in other parts of the world, and to theories of planning and governmentality. It considers how the Chinese planning system worked in practice, exploring in particular the spatial planning of Beijing in the years 1949 to 1958. The author argues that Chinese planning used a range of technologies of government to exert central state control over all resources in time and space, that it organized these resources in a programmatic form in a series of plans which concentrated on industries, and that, compared to other countries, the Chinese system was particularly centralized.