Bayspeak: Narrating China’s Greater Bay Area

ABSTRACT

China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative is the latest and most ambitious attempt to “regionalise” the development process in the Pearl River Delta, promising to accelerate political-economic integration via an innovation-intensive model of growth. Drawing on the techniques of critical discourse analysis, this article presents a deconstruction of the GBA’s emergent spatial imaginary – “bayspeak” – and the rescaled mode of governance that it portends. By way of an interrogation of texts and contexts relating to the GBA initiative, it is suggested that the plan should be taken seriously, if not literally, in its projection of an encompassing and assimilative, if somewhat intransitive, mode of governance. An effort to constitute a mega-region “for itself,” rather than simply “in itself,” the GBA programme has opened a new space (and scale) for co-ordinated development and growth-coalition building under the auspices of the decentralised party-state. As an emergent discourse, bayspeak can be read as hyperbolic, aspirational and symbolic, but as the benign and developmentalist face of the Communist Party line in this economically important but politically stressed region, it may yet prove to be significant.

KEY WORDS:

• economic development
• regional governance
• critical discourse analysis
• Greater Bay Area
• China

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Acknowledgment

We are grateful to George Lin for his advice and guidance, to Eric Leinberger for graphical assistance and to Rachel Bok, Ngai-Ling Sum and anonymous reviewers for their probing critiques and constructive suggestions. An early version of this article was presented at the Fourth International Conference on Cultural Political Economy at Staffordshire University. Responsibility for the arguments here remains ours alone, however.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research grant 430-2018-00468, “Hong Kong at the edge.”