With rapid urbanization and population growth in urban areas, urban development is necessary and urgent. However, with tight land supply from expropriating new farmland, redeveloping urban villages at central urban area would be full of potential. Basically, an urban village is the byproduct of rapid urbanization, with collective-owned non-agricultural use land surrounded by a state-owned urban area. Because of the particular land ownership structure in urban villages, conventional urban redevelopment methods are not suitable for the redevelopment of urban villages, public-private partnerships had been introduced into urban redevelopment to integrate the power and resources of private sector into the process of urban redevelopment with a legal contract, to form a collaboration between public and private sections, and to share the profits and benefits. A study on such partnerships in the redevelopment of urban villages could be instructive and enlightening for the future redevelopment of rural non-agricultural land in China. The major aim of the research is to discover the conditions under which partnerships for the redevelopment of urban villages could be established in China. The redevelopment of three urban villages in Shenzhen, namely the villages of Yunong, Gangxia and Huanggang, were thoroughly studied. A research framework has been established by examining the power relations of such partnerships and has been tailored to the scenario of redevelopment of urban village in China. The partnership synergy between local government, urban village communities and private developers, and role conflicts of each participants have been analyzed by considering the impact factors inherent in the institutional context of municipal government and the cultural context of urban villages in Shenzhen. These factors affect the composition, the process and the outcome of partnership in redevelopment of urban villages. The study found that because institutional support and land resource are exclusively and irreplaceably provided ...