Scale-building in the party-state: the governance of China’s metropolitan regions

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the emerging governance patterns in Chinese metropolitan regions (城市群 chengshiqun). In the scholarly debate on city-regional governance in the West, a prominent position holds that governing large urban regions entails a rescaling of state territories. In China, the central government plays a prominent role in the scale-building of China’s metropolitan regions. This is not only evident in the first stage of the post-reform policies, involving major reforms of state scales for the purpose of economic and urban development. Drawing on three case studies (the Yangtze River Delta, Guanzhong–Tianshui and Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei metropolitan regions), it is shown that the Chinese central government also plays a strong role in the current stage of metropolitan regional development. It is argued that the trajectory of metropolitan scale-building in China is a result of the hierarchical administrative system impeding horizontal cooperation between subnational entities of the party-state.

KEYWORDS:

• metropolitan regions
• governance
• state rescaling
• People’s Republic of China

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Previous versions of the paper were presented at the following conferences and workshops: (1) Governance Issues in Megacities: Chinese and International Perspectives, organized by the Graduate School, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Department of Political Science, University of Zurich, 9–10 October 2012, Beijing, China; (2) Quality of Government: Understanding the Post-1978 Transition and Prosperity of China, organized by the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, 16–17 October 2015, Shanghai, China; and (3) Colloquium, Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu, 13 September 2017, Tartu, Estonia.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The figures date from 9 April 2017 (Ministry of Civil Affairs, 2017). The administrative divisions below the provincial level do not include those for Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao.

2 Beijing’s current territory of 16,000 km² came into being in 1958 when it received nine counties and one city from Hebei province. From 1997 to 2001, Beijing converted six remote counties to districts. By December 2015, with the two most remote counties becoming districts, Beijing has been a complete urban metropolis. However, the municipality still had a 15.6% rural population in 2016. Shanghai gained its current administrative territory in 1958 when 10 counties of Jiangsu province were put under its jurisdiction. In 2016, Chongming, the last county administered by Shanghai, was turned into a district. Xi’an acquired its current territory in 1983, when four counties of the surrounding two prefectures were put under its jurisdiction. From 1997 to 2014, Lintong, Changan and Gaoling counties were converted into districts. In 2016, Huyi district was set up from the former Huxian county. In April 2017, Shaanxi provincial government formally entrusted Xixian new district to Xi’an municipality. This district with a territory of 644.56 km² and a population of 670,000 is situated between the two cities of Xi’an and Xianyang. It was designated by the central government as a national new district in 2014. For more on this topic, see Dong (2011).

3 We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer who pointed out that there is an increasing debate on the ‘promotion tournament thesis’ (e.g., Li & Zhou, 2005), suggesting that local state leaders’ motivations are actually more complex than GDP targets (Landry, Lü, & Duan, 2018). While empirical evidence in this debate is mixed, the importance of vertical pressure as well as the competitive nature of horizontal relations is generally not contested.

4 For reasons of space, we do not elaborate this issue here. For a discussion, see Tang (2016) and Zhu (2017).

5 As widely used in China, a metropolitan region (城市群 chengshiqun) incorporates several metropolitan areas (都市圈 dushiquan). Owing to disagreements over the definition, some Chinese scholars give different number of metropolitan regions, from 10, over 22 to 32. In general, most scholars accept 10 with the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji as the mature metropolitan regions and the other seven as in early stage (e.g., Research Group of Territorial Development and Regional Economic Development, 2009; Wan, Wu, & Zeng, 2015; Tang, Yu, & Lu, 2015).

6 This involved a total of 21 interviews with middle-ranking and ministerial-level officials from the relevant party and government institutions at the national level, as well as officials in provincial and municipal government. In the case studies, references to these interviews, as well as other field documents and sources, are inserted as numbers in brackets; for more details, see in the supplemental data online.

7 They are Shanghai, Jiangsu province’s Suzhou, Wuxi, Changzhou, Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Yangzhou and Nantong, and Zhejiang province’s Hangzhou, Jiaxing, Huzhou, Ningbo, Shaoxing and Zhoushan.

8 While Chengdu and Chongqing MR is the centre for the south-west region, there is no equivalent to the north-west region. In this sense, the central government wished to see the emergence of a comparable metropolitan region in the north-west.

 

Additional information

Funding

Research for this paper was been supported by the Sino-Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation Programme [grant numbers IP16-092010 and FU-11-032014]. Lisheng Dong acknowledges support by a Marie Curie Professorial Fellowship within the European Union 7th Framework Programme [project number 626590] and by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA, financed by the European Regional Development Fund.