Abstract The unbalanced urban-rural relationship has been gradually becoming a serious problem and severe challenge to china. Administrative division is a local performer of state's power and interests. The research of integration and transformation of metropolis in administrative divisions based on the changes of urban-rural relationship is of great significance in understanding the complex correlation between the transition of urban-rural relationship and the readjustments of administrative divisions in different development phases of china. This paper focuses on the different mode of administrative division readjustments by analyzing the urban-rural relationship in different phases of development, based on the case of shanghai. The results show that a) Strategies of readjustments in administrative divisions, such as municipally administered county system, municipal districts sliced expansion, townships adjustment, and changing counties into districts,were always used as important policy instruments in promoting urbanization and industrialization, and integrating the urban-rural relationship in rights and interests; b)The adjustment process of the administrative division for metropolitan area is also the process of urbanization for rural areas, and the process of coordination between urban and rural relationship is directly related to the process of urbanization and industrialization, and which have a tendency to urban centralism; c) the administrative region, as the organizational system for Chinese local government, is a legal platform for cities and rural areas in collaborating governance, as well as a "pushing hands" for urban and rural government in implementing "dual system"; d) the urban centralism is still dominating and restricting the process of modernization in China.
2012, Vol. 27 
