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The organisation of a chinese town before 1979 was based on principles of collective life and economic and social structures as they related to the socialist system. It appeared as a unitary, organic and solidary structure with neither visible interior social frontiers nor the existence of minorities. In chinese towns today socialist inheritances and new urbanities create dualities, fragmentations and overlappings in social and economic spaces of unequal legitimity and producing multiple inequalities. Continuities and discontinuities are now appearing between the urban worlds where invisible towns are being born. The process of transformation and of globalisation of chinese metropolises is producing simultaneously new interior frontiers and cosmopolitan economics.