Greening China’s urban growth machine: The micro-politics of growth and environment protection in Wuxi, China

ABSTRACT

This article examines the micro-politics of the Chinese state’s environmental turn and its effects on the urban growth machine. It details how several state-led attempts to fix ecological crises in Wuxi reconfigured power relations between state units and pushed local authorities to re-assess the costs of economic growth. The heightened stakes of environment protection interventions intensified tensions among subnational officials in the fragmented bureaucratic field and made it difficult to approve growth-oriented projects with potential negative environmental externalities. This article calls for a micro-level approach that goes beyond the political economy of land-centered urban growth and instead considers the complex rationalities, entangled logics, and structures of interest shaping the development and governance of Chinese cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Fragmented authoritarianism
• environmental governance
• socio-ecological fix
• state politics
• China

Introduction

China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization came at a high environmental cost. However, since the late 2000s, and especially after Xi Jinping’s rise to power, the Chinese state has promoted green development to address the country’s alarming ecological crises (Kostka & Zhang, 2018; Xu, 2017). Scholars have yet to fully unpack this environmental turn in Chinese urban development and governance. Therefore, this article examines the effects of state-led environmentalist interventions on accumulation models and urban governance. It explores how local urban authorities in Wuxi navigated the changing rationalities, power, and interests within the bureaucratic field and untangles the shifting relationship between economic growth and environmental protection.

Many observers of Chinese politics and China’s socio-spatial transformations believe that the state’s pursuit of economic growth and productivity will likely compromise environmentalist agendas and encourage technological solutions to socio-ecological challenges (Hansen et al., 2018). This view persists despite recent slowed economic growth in China. Chinese experiments with eco-cities and sustainable urbanism are greeted with similar skepticism. They are often seen as real estate projects in disguise, allowing local governments to extract revenues from real estate development (Caprotti et al., 2015; Chien, 2013).

Following Wu et al. (2021), we adopt a cautionary but hopeful stance, arguing against the quick dismissal of extra-economic rationalities, logics, and interests in shaping urban governance in China. Environment protection and conservation have gained considerable influence within and beyond the state, allowing state units responsible for environment management to create new barriers for accumulation strategies promoted by growth-oriented state units that rely on the exploitation and exhaustion of “cheap nature” (Moore, 2017, p. 595). As we illustrate using the case of Wuxi, the dissemination and normalization of environmentalist visions and mandates made subnational state officials realize the significance of environmental protection and the severe consequences of weak enforcement. Some local officials made it difficult to approve growth-oriented land projects due to their concerns about possible environmental damages and the potential negative repercussions for their careers.

By drawing out the micro-politics of urban economic growth and environment protection within the bureaucratic field, this article answers Ekers and Prudham’s (2018) call to excavate the extra-economic processes of implementing socio-ecological fixes on the ground. Joining recent work on socio-ecological fixes in China (Chung & Xu, 2021; F. Zhang, Wu & Lin, 2022), our article will show that socio-ecological fixes are not simply mandated by the Chinese state but also recursively affect power relations between state units and the incentive structures of state officials. The outcome of green initiatives then are contingent upon power plays and political bargaining within the state. The fragmented nature of the Chinese state (Lieberthal, 1992) thus lies at the very core of our article. Complementing this literature on fragmented authoritarianism, our article unravels intra-state tensions and conflicts at the local level—local officials do not always share interests, values, or visions, either.

In the next section, we introduce the conceptual debates that helped us grapple with competing logics and interests governing and developing Chinese cities. After discussing the methods, we examine how state-led socio-ecological fixes imposed limits on land-driven urban growth. We then show how pro-growth actors in Wuxi tried to overcome these growth barriers but were blocked by other local officials who felt the heightened stakes of recent measures to protect environment.

Politics of urban growth and the Chinese state’s environmental turn

Rapid urban growth in China for the past 3 decades has been a key theme of the extant literature. The notion of urban growth machine has been mobilized to unravel the relations of actors and interests behind the process. According to Logan and Molotch (1987), who introduced the notion based on the observation of North American cities, the urban growth machine is driven by property owners—the rentier class—who seek to maximize the exchange value of their properties. Their chief allies are government officials, whose decisions affect public resource allocation and land use plans. This coalition is reinforced by an array of auxiliary actors (e.g., developers, financial institutions, local media, businesses, universities, and cultural organizations) who may (in)directly benefit from urban growth and land development. These urban actors’ shared interests motivate a collectively manufactured consensus about growth and create favorable conditions for capital accumulation.

Alerting to the effects of different institutional contexts and power structures on the urban growth machine, urban China scholarship underscores the central position of the state, especially the local states, in urban growth machine (Chien & Woodworth, 2018; T. Zhang, 2002). This is partly because the state still controls substantial resources, despite its retreat from many economic spheres in the post-reform era. In particular, the state owns urban land and dominates the conversion of rural land for urban construction and land use management. Moreover, because local public financing largely depends on land revenues, local states are incentivized to stimulate urban-centric land-based economic growth (Hsing, 2010).

Local states not only serve as “instigators, regulators and participants (profit makers) of urban growth” (Sun & Huang, 2016, pp. 918–919), but also mediate growth-related conflicts. Two such conflicts have received considerable attention. The first arises from land expropriation and property dispossession, especially in relation to unfair compensation and the use of excessive violence (Hsing, 2010). The second concerns homebuyers’ discontent with planning and development of low-quality housing projects and disputes with property management companies (Sun & Huang, 2016). Although these conflicts can hinder the state-led growth machine, they do not necessarily challenge the growth imperative itself.

Socio-ecological fixes on the other hand present a more substantial challenge yet their significance has only begun to receive critical scrutiny (but see Chang et al., 2016; Pow & Neo, 2013 on sustainable cities). The notion of socio-ecological fixes is indebted to Harvey’s famous concept of spatial fix, which seeks to explain how the production of the built environment temporarily resolves capitalist crises of over-accumulation (Harvey, 2001). Socio-ecological fixes recognize the interdependence of the social and the natural, and are concerned with both economic and environmental crises (Ekers & Prudham, 2015). They refer to crisis management strategies that rechoreograph “capital’s circulation in, through and around ecological processes and landscapes” (Ekers & Prudham, 2015, p. 2439). Thus conceived, the production of space and the production of nature are brought together. Examples of socio-ecological fixes may include renewable energy infrastructures or environmental projects that directly change built environment/landscapes, or regulatory and institutional changes that indirectly shape capital flows into socio-ecological spheres (McCarthy, 2015; F. Zhang, Wu & Lin, 2022). Socio-ecological fixes emerge from, and are mediated by, social struggles, and the state is believed to play an important role in regulating and performing the fix (Ekers & Prudham, 2017, 2018). Yet, the extant literature pays more attention to the logic of capital than the logic of the state (F. Zhang, Wu & Lin, 2022).

China provides a useful vantage point to address this lacuna. Although economic growth has been an important goal of the Chinese state, it has repeatedly promoted and led the implementation of socio-ecological fixes in material or symbolic forms over the past 3 decades (e.g., stricter regulations, increased environmental spending). The outcomes of earlier fixes were far from satisfactory. As earlier research on environmental governance shows (Kostka & Hobbs, 2012; Kostka & Zhang, 2018), local states often weakly enforced or simply circumvented existing regulations in order to stimulate local economic growth and protect local interests. The central government traditionally lacked the capacity to monitor local compliance (Kostka, 2016; Mol & Carter, 2006).

Recent socio-ecological fixes seem to have changed the central-local dynamics. Ideologically, under the official narrative of ecological civilization (see, F. Zhang, Wu & Lin, 2022), environmental protection has been elevated to a new height. This marks a shift away from older narrative that considered the discrepancy between people’s material/cultural needs and backward productivity to be the main contradiction (Han, 2018). According to Xi Jinping, this is more than a change in rhetoric—it reflects a shift in development philosophy and models. Rather than pursuing growth in numbers (e.g., GDP), the state is now committed to growth in quality, which is healthier, more efficient, and more sustainable (Xi, 2022).

This shift in official narratives in enacted and supported by a host of institutional reforms. In 2018, the Chinese state created the Ministry of Ecological and Environment, an overarching agency responsible for the management and protection of the country’s environment. The new ministry and its six regional inspection centers monitor local state officials through unannounced inspections, covert field visits, interviews with local citizens, and investigations of citizens’ complaints (Shen & Jiang, 2021). In the event of ad hoc environment-related problems, national or provincial environment agencies can summon high-ranking sub-provincial officials to inquiry meetings (Shen & Jiang, 2021). When misconduct is confirmed, disciplinary procedures or even criminal investigations would follow (Shen & Jiang, 2021). If ineffective socio-ecological fixes were caused by non-complaint local state officials in the past, recent socio-ecological fixes have partially dealt with this problem by streamlined the chain of command and intensified central government’s control over local officials.

However, much literature on urban development and environment governance tends to approach the state as an ensemble of formal institutions and foreground the tensions between central and local states. This risks over-simplifying intra-state relations, especially on the local level. In reality, some local state officials may (at least partially) identify with the central government’s interest in some policy areas (O’Brien & Li, 1999). Additionally, state units on the same administrative level are also not a united block (Ran, 2013). To address this problem, we adopt a micro-level approach to state politics and consider “how the state actually exists and operates, on its own terms and in its wider political and social contexts” (Jessop, 2016, p. 18). We reveal the constitution of the state through the interests, aspirations, emotions and experiences of state officials and the interactions between them. Seeing the state in this way provides an entry point to understand how different logics shape the actions of state officials and decision-making processes. Specifically, inspired by the work of Qu et al. (2022), we consider two intersected logics—the state logic (referring to policies and institutionalized arrangements) and the bureaucratic logic (referring to state officials’ response to policies and regulations based on personal careerist interests and everyday politics of the state bureaucracy). Understanding them will cast light not only on the outcomes of socio-ecological fixes but also the working of local states in China. This understanding will contribute to theorizing the “informalisation of the state” (Boudreau, 2017), a global trend in urban politics.

Methods

This article is based on data collected for a think tank project, commissioned by Binhu District’s land department. Binhu is a relatively young district in Wuxi, a municipality in the Yangtze River Delta. It is well-endowed with natural resources, including many lakes, forests, and mountains. Taihu Lake, the third largest freshwater lake in China and a key source of drinking water for 10 million people, is in close proximity. Protecting Taihu Lake has been a political priority since the late 2000s and the efforts were doubled down in recent years. Thus, local governments face considerable challenges to promote sustainable transitions.

Against this backdrop, our think tank project was expected to identify ways to optimize land use structures and improve urban spaces in Binhu. We came to understand the land department’s failed attempts at land consolidation and farmland reclamation. Since the extant research tends to evaluate “successful” urban projects, these failed projects in Binhu offered a unique opportunity to unravel conflicting rationalities and interests driving the politics of urban transformations in China. We positioned ourselves as “expert consultants” who were embedded in universities and could make practical contributions to policies. This strategy allowed us to build rapport and trust with state officials. Using preexisting networks and contacts from the think tank project, we obtained access to otherwise difficult-to-reach officials. As our research interest revolved around inter-/intra-departmental conflicts, we took great care to avoid revealing the interviewees’ identities to prevent undermining their careers. In interviews, we reemphasized our measures to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. These strategies proved effective in helping us maintain candid dialogs with those officials and gain insights into state officials’ experiences, backstage political bargaining, and the rationales behind administrative decisions.

We interviewed a total of 13 state officials. Most interviews were carried out in 2018 and 2019 (the duration of the think tank project). Additional interviews were conducted in 2022 while revising this article. At the district level, we interviewed four officials from the Binhu District Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning (including the department responsible for land management) and one senior ranking official from each of the following agencies: Binhu District Bureau of Water Resources, Binhu District Bureau of Forests (now incorporated into the Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning), Binhu District Bureau of Ecology and Environment, and Binhu District Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs. Above the district level, our interlocutors included two officials from the Wuxi Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning, one official from the Nanjing Branch of State Natural Resources Inspection, and two officials from the Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Natural Resources. We approached two interviewees (from the Binhu District Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning) for follow-up questions.

The interviews centered on the officials’ perceptions of tightening environmental regulations, political bargaining surrounding the failed land projects, and tensions between different departments at different levels. We sought to understand how actors inhabiting the bureaucratic field perceived the changing logics and values of the state. Interview accounts were complemented by an analysis of official documents (e.g., environmental regulations and laws, especially on water management; plans for land use and ecological protection; and development rights transfer schemes) sourced from government websites or provided by state officials.

The local urban growth machine in Wuxi and its socio-ecological limits

This section examines the development trajectories of Binhu to contextualize the local politics of urban growth and environmental protection. Wuxi is a birthplace of rural economic reforms in China. Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs; Wei, 2002)—market-oriented firms controlled by rural collectives and township governments—were the main driving force of its economic growth in the early decades of China’s reform. In Wuxi, TVEs were also a major source of pollution.

Beginning in the 1990s, in line with nationwide economic reforms, TVEs in Wuxi underwent ownership restructuring and experienced a rapid decline. Local governments began pursuing entrepreneurial strategies oriented toward foreign direct investments, high-tech industries, and land development (Yuan et al., 2014; F. Zhang & Wu, 2022). As extensively discussed in the literature on land-based accumulation (Hsing, 2010; Lin, 2014), this shift not only realigned the relationships between state units around the extraction and distribution of landed revenues but also fostered local development dependence on external capital—hence, the alliance between agents of the state and capital in promoting economic growth.

The land-driven growth is best exemplified by Binhu’s emergence as a new administrative unit. The new district-level administrative unit of Binhu was formed from several towns and some former districts in 2001 to accommodate Wuxi’s southward expansion and, eventually, to become the new urban center for public administration, leisure, business, research, and innovation. It was part of the municipal government’s territorial strategy to restructure the organization of urban spaces and urban economies. Land and real estate development based on land clearance and redevelopment was indispensable to this territorial strategy. By 2013, nearly half of the original households in Binhu had been resettled in planned settlement apartments to make way for real estate projects (Yuan, 2013).

Underlying this shifting accumulation strategy is the imperative of competitive growth, which is built into the state system through the personnel review system. This system enrolls career-oriented state officials at different levels into a political tournament to receive high performance evaluations and qualify for promotion (Chien & Woodworth, 2018; He et al., 2016). Leading officials in Binhu were not immune from this institutionalized pressure. According to available internal documents, economic performance indicators (such as GDP per capita and the output value of high-tech industry) were weighted at 27% of the review score in 2018. In addition to these universal indicators throughout Wuxi, leading officials in Binhu were also evaluated against district-specific economic performance indicators. In 2018, those indicators included accelerating the development of emerging industries (e.g., the medicine and healthcare industry, culture and creative industries) and expanding industrial production spaces. As Binhu’s economic performance trailed behind other districts’, growth-oriented district-level state actors were strongly incentivized to stimulate economic growth through land development. However, this growth strategy faced three constraints.

The first constraint is a lack of cheap land. A perpetual supply of cheap land is a prerequisite for the land-based accumulation strategy. The state-led urban growth machine typically expropriates farmland from rural households, often with inadequate compensation (Hsing, 2010). However, this strategy has become increasingly difficult in recent years as the central government increased the compensation standards. In Binhu, though, the biggest challenge was the lack of land available in its territorial boundaries. Only 28 km² of Binhu’s 628.15 km² administrative area was farmland, and only a small portion of this land could potentially be expropriated for construction projects (internal document, 2019), a relatively small coverage by China’s standards.

The second constraint for growth via land development was China’s strict land use planning and management system. The system dictates the amount of farmland that can be expropriated for urban construction and the amount of farmland that must be conserved within the same planning period. This is enforced using remote sensing, routine inspection, and an administrative approval process (Du, 2021). If farmland is used for urban development projects, local states must find ways to compensate for the loss of farmland through farmland consolidation or farmland reclamation projects, often within their own jurisdictions (Du, 2021).

This land management strategy can be seen as a conservative socio-ecological fix. It seeks to conserve farmland and protect the country’s fragile ecological system. However, at the same time, it creates a regulatory opening for growth-oriented local states, especially those with a short supply of land, to sustain land-centered accumulation and, in fact, capture greater revenues from land development. This occurs because new farmland can be placed where the costs of resettlement and/or farmland reclamation are low, while urban construction booms in places with high land values. Local governments can thus acquire additional land to accommodate urban growth and capture differential rents emerging from locational differences. This calculus underlies the development rights transfer schemes proliferating across many Chinese cities (Tian et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2010).

The Binhu District government historically utilized this instrument; however, the shrinking amount of land suitable for cost-effective farmland conversion in Binhu’s territorial boundaries makes this method increasingly difficult. As of 2018, only about 0.66 km² of land had potential for farmland reclamation (interview with Binhu District Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning official, August 2018). Thus, pro-growth state actors ultimately set their sights on the areas surrounding Taihu Lake, one of the few places with land suitable for farmland reclamation.

This brings us to the third constraint facing the local growth machine—the legacy of several rounds of state-led socio-ecological fixes. Economic growth, especially from highly concentrated and polluting industries in textiles, medicines, and chemical products, has caused severe environmental damages. The environmental crisis culminated in 2007 when a cyanobacteria bloom in Taihu Lake caused an acute drinking water crisis in Wuxi (Qin et al., 2010).

In response to the resulting environmental and legitimacy crises, state authorities at different levels mobilized a wide range of socio-ecological fixes (see also, F. Zhang & Wu, 2022). The Jiangsu provincial government amended regulations to better coordinate the municipal governments surrounding Taihu Lake to prevent pollution and improve water quality. It also introduced new, targeted regulations to protect Taihu Lake and forced industrial operations near the lake to relocate or close (The Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Jiangsu Province, 2007). Moreover, it demarcated protection zones. Existing tourism and catering businesses and livestock and poultry farms within the Class I Protection Zone (i.e., a five-kilometer radius around the lake, 10 km up any waterways into Taihu Lake, and a one-kilometer radius surrounding these) to install wastewater treatment facilities and discharge processed wastewater into government treatment plants, not the lake (The Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Jiangsu Province, 2007). Beyond the protection zones, heavily polluting industries in sectors like textiles, chemicals, printing and dyeing, and pharmaceuticals were required to upgrade their production processes to reduce pollution or close completely (The Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Jiangsu Province, 2007).

To ensure local officials’ compliance, the regulations added protecting Taihu Lake’s water quality to leading officials’ performance evaluations. Fifteen high-ranking government officials (led by the Jiangsu provincial governor) joined local municipal leaders from the cities surrounding Taihu to become the chief officers for 15 major waterways running into the lake (Department of Environment Protection of Jiangsu Province, 2009). Making individual government officials responsible for water quality improvement overcame the problem of “floating responsibility” (Bauman, 1989, p. 163) that can plague bureaucratic organizations. In addition to regulatory and organizational adjustments, governments at all levels also invested billions in protecting water quality. In 2008 alone, provincial and municipal governments committed 13.9 billion CNY to protect the lake (Department of Environment Protection of Jiangsu Province, 2009).

Since the 2010s, environmental protection has been elevated to a new height by the introduction of a new urbanization strategy (The State Council, 2014) and the incorporation of ecological civilization into the Chinese constitution. Although the former has been widely criticized (Chen et al., 2016), it has contributed to greening the urban growth machine by normalizing environmental values and ecological redlines (inviolable boundaries for economic growth). Subnational governments are required to delineate ecological redlines, expand green spaces, increase forest, lake and wetland coverage, and construct green corridors in urban areas (The State Council, 2014). Therefore, the Jiangsu provincial government mapped the ecological spaces within its boundaries and strictly restricted development activities in these spaces.

Seven provincial and national ecological redline zones were approved in Binhu, consisting of about 432 km² (68.8% of the total administrative area). The most strictly protected areas surround Taihu Lake due to its fragile ecological environment and the political memory of the water crisis. In 2018, all territorial state units around Taihu Lake were instructed to gradually phase out agricultural activities and fish farms, to expand forest, wetland, and lake coverage, and to construct an ecological protection and buffer zone (The Standing Committee of the People’s Congress of Jiangsu Province, 2018). Following this mandate, the Binhu District government persuaded households and businesses to give up agricultural activities in the ecological redline zones.

These socio-ecological fixes, in the forms of stricter environmental regulations, organizational reshuffling and additional financial investments in water quality improvement, responded to the environment and legitimation crises caused by past industrialization and significantly affected the ways in which natural resources and economic activities surrounding Taihu Lake were governed. In the next section, we examine how pro-growth state actors sought to push growth-oriented projects forward, but failed to receive support from, and in fact, were challenged by state officials responsible for environment management and protection out of their departmental and personal interests.

Reconciling growth and environment protection in a fragmented state

District-level pro-growth state actors—spearheaded by the land department—felt pressure to meet growth targets and were determined to place farmland reclamation projects in protected ecological zones. Their proposals targeted three types of land in the ecological redline zones—fishing farms that were abandoned or “illegally” used by local households after compensation; ponds set aside to deposit algae; and reclaimed farmland. In total, these land parcels covered about 0.13 km².

According to an official from the district Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning (August 2018), three rationales motivated their proposals. The first rationale was cost: it was cheaper to convert the aforementioned land parcels into farmland than to displace and resettle rural communities through farmland reclamation projects, especially since some were already converted into farmland. The second reason was strategic: as another official from the same bureau (September 2018) explained, the proposal was put forward during the third national land survey. This survey would eventually mark the land parcels in question in the land management system, so the land department needed to propose a farmland reclamation or land consolidation project before the opportunity to exchange the farmlands for urban construction development rights was “wasted.” Thirdly, these small portions of land were an important litmus test: if the proposal was approved, the land department could roll out additional farmland reclamation projects within the protected area, which included up to 1 km² of suitable land (interview, September 2018). The precedent could be further exploited to legitimatize additional projects in the protected zones (including classic development rights transfer, i.e., converting rural homestead land into farmland to release land for development elsewhere).

In 2018, the Binhu District land management department submitted an application to its superior, the Municipal Bureau of Natural Resources and Planning, for approval. The application proposed two farmland reclamation projects in the protected ecological redline zones that would release development rights elsewhere. Rather than conducting a simple procedural compliance check, the municipal agency reviewed the substance of the application and, eventually, rejected the application. As the official in charge explained:

I decided to reject the application because it did not comply with the current ideology of ecological protection nor the plans for ecologically protected zones in Binhu. Even if I approve it, my superior, i.e., the deputy director of the bureau, may still reject the application if he thinks that the land use conversion contradicts the current policies and regulations related to Taihu Lake. I may be criticized and leave a bad impression on him for supporting the application. (Interview, September 2018)

This explanation testifies to the changing state logics brought about by previous socio-ecological fixes and the effects on the mentalities of local state officials, especially their sensitivity to ecological protection. It also shows that environmental protection is no longer confined to environmental agencies but affects the operation of other state units and, in this case, the land management agencies. This is notable since land management agencies have conventionally enabled land development projects. Yet, at least for the municipal agency in Wuxi, growth was no longer the overriding logic (unlike at the district level).

It should be noted that conflicts inside the Chinese state are not new. Within a nested state structure, subnational state units are subject to professional supervision from upper-level authorities in the same functional line and to the leadership of territorial state units (e.g., municipal governments, provincial governments, etc.). So, when the interests of functional and territorial state units are misaligned, conflicts are bound to emerge. In fact, for many authors, this nested structure and fragmented authority is to blame for compromising environmental agendas for the sake of territorial development and growth interests (Kostka, 2016; Kostka & Hobbs, 2012). However, in Wuxi, such intra-state conflicts are (notably) not caused by the distribution of land rent nor control of land. Rather, concerns about environmental damages and the consequences of weak environmental enforcement weighed heavily in the municipal state official’s decision.

The bureaucratic logic and embodied experiences of local officials are also relevant here. Public administration is both about formal procedures and rules and state officials’ emotions, desires and practical sense of power relations in the state bureaucracy (see, Qu et al., 2022). Tensions may emerge from differences in departmental and personal interests (e.g., the municipal government official’s decision to reject the district land management agency’s application for fear of leaving a bad impression). A similar calculus was described by another official from the municipal land agency:

Maintaining water quality is a hard target and a one-vote veto indicator in the cadre performance evaluation in Wuxi … The algae bloom is a sensitive issue. Once the algae blooms in the lake, it will affect people’s everyday life and attract media attention. Then there will be investigations from provincial or national government. Some officials will be held accountable. I don’t want to be disciplinarily punished or worse, end my political career because I approved the application. So many high-level officials had been investigated and punished for issues related to ecological protection such as in Qinling in Shanxi Province, and Qilianshan in Gansu Province. These are very explicit warnings. (Interview, August 2019)

The interviewee alluded to two tactics deployed by the Chinese central government to restore accountability within a fragmented state. The first is the personnel review system organized by the Communist Party to evaluate local state officials. GDP growth rate (Chien & Woodworth, 2018) and social stability (Lee & Zhang, 2013) have been two decisive performance indicators. In Wuxi, the socio-ecological fixes added a new target to protect Taihu Lake’s water quality. According to internal documents, environmental protection performance indicators were weighted at 15% in 2018 but increased to 20% in 2019 and stayed consistent in 2020. Furthermore, incidents of severe pollution or environmental damages would result in demotion or dismissal. The personnel review system was reinforced by the second instrument—making examples of good practices and demonstrating the severe consequences of violating regulations, abusing power, or negligence. The two cases mentioned by the interviewee—illegal mining in Qilianshan and illegal real estate development in Qinling—were widely circulated by the central government as bad examples. In both cases, the central government removed a group of local state officials. Given the fact that central government officials frequently inspect Taihu Lake, declining water quality could easily make national headlines (interview with an official from the Provincial Bureau of Natural Resources, September 2022).

These instruments seemed to allow upper-level authorities to both command and control local officials (in Wuxi), resolving the problem of “command without control” (Kostka, 2016, p. 58) that had long plagued China’s environmental governance. The younger cohort of state officials, who now dominate leading positions in local agencies, are particularly responsive to the changing bureaucratic ethos and the normalization of environmentalist values. One official from the Nanjing Branch of the National Natural Resource Inspection, a state unit based in Jiangsu province overseeing natural resource policy implementation and environmental protection under the Ministry of Natural Resources, further explained:

Many leaders in the bureaus (for land management) are young (in their 40s) and have a promising political future. It’s impossible for them to defy the prevailing ideology on ecology and support land consolidation projects in protected zones … . If they use these land parcels for farmland reclamation and if there is any pollution, they will for sure be held accountable. (August 2018)

These excerpts highlight the increased stakes of environmental protection, which was achieved mostly through “sticks,” namely punishment for (the threat of) environmental damages. This said, it is important to note that some officials identified with the environmental agendas and interventions promoted by the central government and believed the efforts were long overdue for sustainability transitions. Approving the application also seemed to be at odds with the municipal government’s decade-long investments to improve water quality in Taihu Lake (an official from the Provincial Bureau of Natural Resources, September 2022).

Rejection by the municipal government land agency did not stop the district land management agency from pursuing its agenda. In response to upper-level authorities’ concerns about environmental damages, the district land management agency put forward two revised land reclamation project proposals. The first proposal outlined a land consolidation and reclamation project that would use consolidated or reclaimed land for wetland and forestry and thereby, fulfil the farmland replacement requirement. This proposal aligned with the top-down agenda to increase green space. However, the municipal land agency considered the idea too “innovative” within the existing regulatory frameworks on land management and development rights transfer.

The second proposal sought official approval for previously reclaimed farmland in the protected ecological zone before the completion of the national land survey. After administrative recognition, the farmland on these land parcels would be left idle to avoid concerns about pollution. Surprisingly, this proposal was also rejected. The municipal land agency cited the proposal’s incompatibility with the current regulations on development rights transfer—reclaimed farmland needed to be used for agricultural production to release development rights for urban construction.

In 2019, after several rounds of intensive lobbying, officials from the district government’s land agency eventually secured a concession from municipal officials. The municipal land agency agreed to consider endorsing the proposals and seek approval from the provincial government’s land agency on the condition that the district land agency received endorsements from the other district departments involved in land management and environmental protection around the lake. This condition was necessary since regulation of the ecological protected zones around Taihu Lake falls to several departments. The 2017 plan to improve water quality in Taihu Lake outlined the following regulatory allocations: agriculture departments and development and reform commissions were responsible for controlling and preventing pollution from agricultural activities; forestry and housing departments oversaw the creation and maintenance of green corridors; environment protection departments led the reduction of nutrient pollution; water resources, housing and construction, agriculture, and marine fisheries departments jointly tackled pollution from agricultural and fishing activities along tributary rivers. Because of this fragmented authority, consensus and permission from all these agencies was required for projects within the protected zones, especially those with potential negative externalities.

It is tempting and convenient to assume that intra-state bargaining on the district level would be less strenuous. Yet, in Binhu, this district level intra-state consensus-seeking proved difficult since officials in the other functional state units prioritized environmental protection. As one official from the district Bureau of Water Resources explained:

Our department is administratively responsible for the water quality. If the request came in several years ago, I might open one eye and close the other. I might approve this project because the local government was more interested in economic growth than environmental protection. The situation is completely different now. (Interview, September 2018)

Sharing this view, an official from the Binhu Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs revealed a more nuanced calculus that centered the uneven distribution of credit and blame, even far into the future:

Economic benefits of growth will be shared among all departments. But only one person will take the fall [in the case of environmental damages] … . If land use conversion resulted in a decline of water quality in Taihu Lake, and if I were the one who signed off the paperwork, I would be held accountable for this decision even if by that time I would already be in another department or in retirement. (Interview, September 2018)

The remark foregrounds the problem of asynchronous timeframes between growth strategies and negative externalities. The bureaucratic rhythms of personnel review and cadre appointment strongly incentivize local state officials to focus on measurable and demonstrable outcomes within their tenures in order to stand out in the competition for promotion (see, Chien & Woodworth, 2018). Environmental damages, in contrast, may not manifest during an official’s tenure. Holding state officials accountable throughout their lifetime discourages short-termism, a longstanding problem with environmental governance in China (Eaton & Kostka, 2014). While the values and priorities of different departments certainly played a role, as the quote above shows, state officials’ self-serving interests and attempts to preemptively shift and avoid blame factored into their departments’ decisions to not cooperate with the land agency (also see, Ran, 2017).

Officials from these functional state agencies felt secure rejecting the land agency’s request since they were at the same administrative level and insulated from its political influence. The elevated importance of environment protection also allowed otherwise subordinated agencies (in growth politics) to impose their positions. With multiple state units involved, many refused to take the lead after considering the potential personal and professional consequences.

The district government of Binhu eventually intervened to break the bureaucratic impasse. Limits imposed by socio-ecological challenges did not mean that district government officials would be evaluated less critically on the economic development front. Instead, the district government was confronted with pressure for competitive growth from within Wuxi and the wider Yangtze River Delta. As a district government official explained:

if we attribute the poor economic performance of Binhu to the task of protecting Taihu Lake, so can Yixi or Jiangyin (both are counties of Wuxi). They are also close to Taihu Lake or Yangtze River, and had to protect the water quality … . Every district can simply blame environment protection for poor economic performance. (Interview, December 2022)

The official’s remark brought the competitive nature of the evaluation system to the fore. Although state officials may not necessarily be demoted for not achieving targets, as the district government official added, simply meeting the targets or poorer performance in comparison to peers will definitely not bring opportunities for promotion (interview, December 2022). In view of the enduring significance of economic performance, the district government wielded its influence over subordinate functional agencies responsible for water resources, environment protection and agriculture and attempted to reconcile conflicting interests. After reaching a district-level consensus, the land agency resubmitted its proposal to the municipal agency in 2019. Despite the district land agency’s lobbying and attempts to manufacture consensus, the municipal land agency still rejected the proposal due to concerns over possible pollution and possible violation of existing regulations.

The municipal land agency’s decision presented challenges for the Binhu District government. The municipal government made no concession in land use planning while continuing to expect Binhu authorities to deliver economic growth targets. In fact, according to internal documents, the weight of economic performance (e.g., GDP growth, fiscal revenues, output of industrial production, and foreign investments) was increased to 36% in 2020. Pressure of competition from other districts, especially those facing similar challenges, did not leave Binhu much room for negotiation, either. The lack of land use quotas and, by extension, the lack of developable land, forced the district government to find alternative means to accommodate growth. First, it attempted to purchase quotas from outside Wuxi through the provincial government’s cross-locality transaction system. However, this attempt was unsuccessful, according to the data from Jiangsu Real Estate Development Center, a subsidiary of the provincial Bureau of Natural Resources. Second, the district government became stricter in allocating land uses, only assigning its limited land use quotas to projects and industries with strategic significance. It also focused on densifying land development, improving land use efficiency, and, ultimately, boosting growth in existing built-up areas. Internal data shows that 4.87 ha of land in 2019 and 54.4 ha in 2021 were redeveloped.

In 2022, the district land agency’s proposal to restore land for forestry or wetland within the ecological redline zone surrounding Taihu Lake was finally approved by the municipal land agency. However, the increased ecological space must be used to settle the land quotas advance (guagou zhouzhuan zhibiao in Chinese: extra-land-use-plan land use quotas pre-allocated to local authorities to allow construction projects to proceed first but must be settled in future to fulfill regulatory requirements). According to an official from the municipal land agency (September 2022), this helped the reclamation project align with the prevailing ideology of ecological civilization and avoid potential pollution from farming activities. Moreover, it found space to accommodate growth since “after all, Binhu belongs to Wuxi,” meaning Binhu’s growth would reflect in evaluating municipal governments.

The long delay accelerated industrial upgrading and economic transitions in Binhu and contributed to general economic restructuring in Wuxi. Strategic high-tech industries (e.g., Internet of Things, integrated circuits production, software) became the new growth engine of Wuxi, while highly polluting industries (more than 13,000 businesses) were forced to relocate or completely shut down (internal document, 2022). An official from the municipal land agency described this transition as “difficult” but “necessary” since “the old growth model can no longer sustain economic growth in the long run” and creating a greener environment is essential to attract high-tech industries and their workers (interview, September 2022).

Heightened awareness of environmental protection led to continuous spending to improve the water quality in Taihu Lake. In 2022, the municipal government planned to spend over 10 billion CNY to protect the ecological environment surrounding the lake and further improve water quality (Chen & Li, 2022). Water quality in Taihu Lake has improved considerably due to these substantial investments and strict regulations. In July 2022, Taihu Lake’s water met the standards for drinking, swimming, and fisheries (cf. 2007, when it did not even meet landscaping or irrigation standards; Jiangsu Development & Reform Commission, 2022). It appears that efforts in protecting Taihu were paying off and environmental protection will continue shaping Wuxi’s development models in the coming years.

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the changing relationships between urban growth and environmental protection in China through the case of Wuxi. We sought to show how the Chinese state carried out socio-ecological fixes to protect Taihu Lake and tackle environmental crises in general, including tightening regulations, ecological zoning, and improved accountability systems. These fixes have significantly increased the costs of distorting, abusing, or ignoring environmental regulations. Within a fragmented state system, these fixes not only empowered some state units vis-à-vis pro-growth state actors; they also exacerbated tensions within the growth machine. The latter is exemplified by the municipal land agency’s reluctance to approve the district government’s growth-oriented land projects.

Though broadly welcome, such socio-technological fixes are not without concern. Green, sustainable urban development is currently dependent on a highly pressurized bureaucratic system that requires constant and effective monitoring. Measures such as incorporating environmental targets into the personnel evaluation system or holding state officials accountable for environmental damages over their lifetime seem to have created a clear chain of command and induced local compliance with the central government’s environmental ambitions. However, they also risk diminishing local state officials’ autonomy to make informed decisions based on local conditions, which is sometimes required for progressive change.

Moreover, these measures created what Ran (2013, p. 17) calls a “perverse incentive structure” that leans more on penalties for noncompliance or environmental damages than rewards for proactively promoting sustainable transitions. This incentive structure carries profound implications for bureaucratic culture. As Kostka and Goron (2021) note, officials may adopt a one-size-fits-all approach or use false evidence to fulfill assigned targets, because environment protection responsibilities are inequitably distributed across localities. For instance, even though the Binhu District land agency eventually changed its position—only seeking official recognition of converted land or to use reclaimed land for forests and wetlands—officials from other state units initially refused to approve or endorse the proposals.

Such decisions were not based on environmental impact assessments but instead on concerns about potential environmental damages and the resultant costs to their departments and political careers. From these officials’ perspectives, leaving land in the protected zone intact, both in practice and in the land cadastral, was a safer option than approving projects that might implicate their departments or themselves at a later stage after environmental damages. Following the central government’s rules to the fullest extent, or even adopting stricter rules, outweighed the benefits of not doing so. Such bureaucratic culture may prevent local state officials from applying their judgment and adopting rules to better suit local conditions and changing dynamics, which can be problematic given China’s heterogeneity and the ambiguities of many policy texts. Over time, as Shen and Jiang (2021) argue, this can further undermine the trust between the central government and local governments. More worryingly, politicizing the implementation of socio-ecological fixes deflects attention from the substance, appropriateness, and efficacy of these fixes. Therefore, much work is needed to make environmental protection a value to pursue in and of itself. Although independent environmental impact assessments of development projects are not a panacea, they do help state officials make their decisions.

The impacts of socio-ecological fixes are likely to be uneven in China. In Binhu, proposing land projects in designated protected ecological zones affected how the politics of urban growth and environment protection unfolded. Evidence from elsewhere seems less promising. For example, Song et al. (2022) show how, in a medium-sized city pseudonymized as Yongcheng, local authorities path-dependently followed the dominant, unsustainable development model and prioritized growth goals, despite awareness of environmental agendas. The variegated politics of sustainable urban development in China calls for more research on how state-led socio-ecological fixes are performed in practice. Doing so can help disentangle the multiple logics shaping urban processes in China (Wu et al., 2021) and answer Wu’s (2020) call for new narratives about urban China studies.

This study has three additional implications for research on urban development and sustainability transitions in China and beyond. First, if the state is to play an important role in socio-ecological fixes (Ekers & Prudham, 2018), more research should examine state politics and how socio-ecological fixes affect state power relations. Scholars must move beyond formal state structures and functions to consider the situated practices of state officials. Second, we agree with Shen and Jiang (2021) that fragmented state authority is neither unique to China nor necessarily a problem. The imperative question is how to hold state actors in a fragmented state system accountable for environmental crises and alternative futures (Shen & Jiang, 2021). In this regard, societies can learn from each other to improve accountability when designing socio-ecological fixes to deal with environmental crises. Third, our research did not explore how green transitions impacted workers, especially those who lost their livelihood in the process of forced relocation or the closure of industrial production facilities. Understanding their experiences can further contribute to our understandings of the politics and human costs of green transitions in China.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all interviewees who candidly shared their knowledge. We would like to thank for the guidance and constructive comments of Dr. June Wang and the anonymous reviewers. We also greatly appreciate the suggestions of Manuel Aalbers, Veronica Conte, Zac Taylor, Tobias Klinger and Ivana Socoloff on an earlier version of this article. All remaining errors are ours.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 71904087], and the “111” project [Grant No. B17024].

Notes on contributors

Zinan Shao

Zinan Shao is an associate professor at College of Finance and Public Administration, Anhui University of Finance & Economics. He holds a PhD from Nanjing Agricultural University, and is a PhD candidate at Utrecht University. His research focuses on land economics and land use policy, especially in China. His articles have been published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, Growth and Change and some Chinese journals.

Yunpeng Zhang

Yunpeng Zhang is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Environment Policy, University College Dublin. His research has received funding support from the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek—Vlaanderen (Grant No. 12T2421N). He focuses on the political economy and politics of urban-centric transformations and the consequences for citizens. His work has been published in Antipode, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, and Geoforum.

Yongle Li

Yongle Li is a professor at College of Public Administration, Nanjing University of Finance & Economics. His research areas include land economics, urban renewal, real estate management and governmental relations. His work has been funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Education, and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province. His articles appear in Land Use Policy, Habitat International and some Chinese journals.