Territorial Urbanization and the Party-state in China

China's recent rapid urban growth has embraced city peripheries, with such great expansion occurring that polycentric city-regions have been created. Recognizing that multiple levels of government are entangled in this process our paper attends to multi-scalar state interactions in the process of city-region formation. Using two cases from Jiangsu province in China's east, we demonstrate that as a consequence of urban expansion the scale of urban politics is shifting from the intra-urban to the metropolitan, involving processes such as annexation and the selective mapping of governance under a city-administering-county system. Additionally, the scalar relations between the different levels of government, which centre on land interests and the corresponding redistribution of fiscal revenue and social provisions, play an important part in the formation of city-regions. We argue that the state-scalar politics involved in peri-urban development demand more attention and theorization in future studies of Chinese urbanization.

A human geographer and China specialist introduces perspectives on territory in China from the vantage of guowai (outside the country) and guonei (inside the country). This relational comparison extends analysis of Chinese geopolitical narratives to current questions about state power in China, and opens up the geopolitical perspective to recalibrate analysis of territory and territorial boundary formation inside the nation-state. Territorial change is particularly significant in China because subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed and state development strategies regularly depend on strategic boundary changes to form new governing spaces. The article introduces the concept of the "administrative area economy" from the Chinese literature to explain how the Chinese political economy crucially depends on reterritorialization to establish and promote contemporary urbanization and achieve political and economic goals. This analytical approach, based on the international scholarship and the Chinese-language literature, also reflects Agnew's incorporation of methodological advances from new area studies in political geographical analysis.

2025

The book investigates urban development and governance in China and introduces China perspectives to the understanding of governing urban development in the 21st century. Building upon a rich and burgeoning literature on China, the book explains major changes in governance, offers a well-synthesized account of state-centered governance, and provides in-depth discussions on urban governance, city and regional planning, financing and financialization, urban redevelopment, local economic development and innovation, and environmental governance. The book bridges theoretical concepts in critical urban studies and empirical research on China and thus depicts a fuller picture of changing and variegated urban governance in the contemporary world. The book theorizes Chinese urban governance from the ground up and derives a concept of state entrepreneurialism as a framework for narrating urban governance in China. Following this framework, each chapter begins with a brief introduction to key concepts in urban geography and then depicts the urban development process on the ground in China. Then, the chapters discuss these concepts and explanations because many are derived from a different context, often in Western economies. At the end of each chapter, the phenomenal urban changes are evaluated with their theoretical implications. This book offers contextualized insights into critical geographical studies of urban governance and is the first essential complementary reading for both urban scholars and those exploring the geography of China. It will be of interest to students and researchers in Urban Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Sociology, Political Science, and China Studies. The book can also be complementary reading in China Studies, especially in governance and politics.

Progress in Planning, 2010

Progress in Planning, 2010

This article seeks to understand China's new urban space production and associated state space rescaling through a microscopic investigation of urban investment and development corporations (UIDCs), based on a case study of Shanghai's Songjiang New Town Development Corporation (SNTDC). It argues that the introduction of UIDCs as both developers and managers of designated urban regions is a creation of institutional reformation to accomplish customized place-and scale-specific spatial projects under the state strategy of new urban spatial development, playing an essential part in the rescaling of state space. UIDCs are economically independent of other social groups, politically bonded with the local government, and assume entrepreneurial and administrative functions within designated areas, acting as intermediary agents to enable local states greater capacity in governing new urban space production, engineering social change, and propelling economic development.

Environment and Urbanization

This paper explains the reasons behind the growing social tension and increased number of conflicts in China after a good performance in meeting the Millennium Development Goals. In this paper, we map out the issues with old urbanization (1978–2014) and the problems unsolved by past policy, and analyse whether the new policy changes introduced by the New Urbanization Plan (2014–2020) may help to deal with those problems. We argue that the tensions that evolve into conflicts are often a result of unaddressed social anxiety. Using money to purchase social stability can only be part of the solution. There need to be more serious attempts to improve governance, which involve: improving multi-level governance and inter-regional coordination, enhancing policy transparency and rule by law, adjusting the level of redistribution, and integrating rural and urban community governance structures.

Overlooked Cities: Perspectives from Medium Sized Cities of the Global South, 2020

A new trend is emerging in China that categorises cities according to economic conditions and political statuses and that formulates a new urban hierarchical system. This urban hierarchy has historical echoes from several decades ago, when the country was divided into three “fronts” for geopolitical concerns. Ironically, the Chinese character of “tiers” and “fronts” is identical: “线” (xian). By referring to Luzhou, a medium-sized city in Western China that bears the same label as “三线” (“third tier” / “third front”) in different periods, we explore the change of urban political economy and governing techniques that are underlying these two different (yet at the same time identical) labels of a city. It turns out that the two labels of Luzhou indicate dissimilar logics of the state. The “third front” in the Maoist era, with centrally-dominated redistribution of resources, rendered the local state a passive political subject. In contrast, the recent rise of “tiers” discourse has a lot of purchases from the local state. Situating in inter-city competitions, they are empowered yet also impelled to be more active in promoting the urbanisation process and boosting “urban-ness” in partnership with capital. Here, between the territorial logic of the planned economy half century ago and the ongoing entrepreneurial local governance at present, we are invited to further reflect on how the development trajectory of an ordinary (and even overlooked) city could contribute to more global urban studies.

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2009