In 1996-97, Harvard's graduate students studied China's Pearl River Delta (PRD), a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million that will probably reach thirty-six million by the year 2020. The establishment in the PRD of Special Economic Zones - "laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism" - has hastened an unprecedented experiment in urbanization on an astonishingly large scale. Great Leap Forward contains essays that explore, in a theoretical and statistical context, the results of this rapid modernization, which has produced an entirely new urban substance.