‘Emptying the cage, changing the birds’: state rescaling, path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicisation of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustrate the dynamic entwinement between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency: the Wang administration launched this industrial policy in spite of potentially destabilising effects on the prevailing national structure of capital accumulation. This foregrounds, in turn, the constitutive and constraining effects of established, national-level policies on local, territorially specific restructuring strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• State rescaling
• Guangdong
• double relocation
• industrial policy
• Wang Yang
• institutional path-dependency

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Trevor Barnes and Jamie Peck for very helpful feedback on the pre-submission draft. The anonymous reviewers provided stimulating comments that improved the paper during the review process. My deepest gratitude goes to Stephanie Lim, my dearest wife, whose support has encouraged me to keep exploring and believing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kean Fan Lim is Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at the School of Geography, University of Nottingham, UK. His primary research examines the relationship between place-specific policy experimentation and the structural coherence of the Chinese political economy.

Notes

1. The socioeconomic statistics – including GDP – of Hong Kong and Macau are calculated separately from mainland China.

2. It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss the emergence of these territories known officially as ‘nationally strategic new areas’. In summary, Wang pushed for the designation of these territories as delimited zones of policy experimentation. The policies are to be of significance to both the Chinese central government and the economies of Macau and Hong Kong SARs. A key point to be made in this paper is the constitutive role of the ‘double relocation’ policy in the designation of these three territories. For an overview of the broader significance of spatially targeted experimentation in these ‘new areas’, see Lim (2014a).

3. Officially, given the lack of inter-provincial coordination, it has to be stated that relocation policies remain within the province so that the government appears to prioritise the provincial interests. This is an extension of the protectionist, inward-looking tendencies of the Mao era. In reality, however, given the huge difference in infrastructural facilities between the PRD and the rest of Guangdong province, the Guangdong government in fact did not mind if undesirable industries leave the province altogether rather than attempt to upgrade these industries within the province (Interview, academic and regular consultant to the government, January 2013).

4. The empirical materials presented in this paper draws from fieldwork conducted between February 2012 and January 2013 on a broader, multi-sited project on policy experimentation and the shifting logics of socioeconomic regulation across China. Discursive materials from key political actors were sourced and translated by the author; supporting materials were drawn from direct interviews with CPC cadres, planners and scholars in several cities in the Pearl River Delta. Often on the advice of these interviewees, further follow up work was done to derive supporting evidence. The field research was supplemented by archival work conducted in Beijing, Shenzhen and Chongqing. The materials were then triangulated to align to the analytical approach, which is similar to what Zhang (2012: 2855) terms ‘a social constructivist approach’ that ‘brings to the foreground the constitutive socio-spatial context or unique historical–geographical conjuncture of policy-making activities’. Adopting this approach entails juxtaposing a range of information to present a multi-perspectival narrative on the connections between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency.

5. This, incidentally, is the rationale for the ‘shock therapy’ approach to reforms in the former Soviet bloc, that is, to incapacitate defenders of the old regime. Geographically targeted policy experimentation is an alternative to ‘managed’ transformation in which everything changes at once.

6. Ratios for both Guangdong and China determined by author's calculation.

7. The official term of this transformation project in Mandarin is <珠江三角洲地區改革發展規劃綱要2008-2020年>. The cited content is printed on page 7 of the original document; translated by author.

8. This term that would subsequently be widely used to characterise Guangdong's province-wide restructuring approach.

9. The official term of this policy in Mandarin is <關於推進產業轉移和勞動力轉移的決定>.

10. Hu's support was important at both the personal level and in terms of national economic-geographical reconfiguration. In 2007, when Wang was Party Secretary of Chongqing, Hu approved a series of nationally strategic socioeconomic policies aimed at bridging the urban–rural divide caused by the Mao-era household-registration (or hukou) institution of population control. That Hu would approve these major reforms during Wang Yang's term was a glowing recognition of the latter's efforts at initiating institutional reforms. Ironically, it was precisely the institution Wang tried to reform in Chongqing – the hukou system – that enabled the Guangdong government to effect labour force relocation at will (ref. Lim 2014b).