Building Chinese city-regions under state entrepreneurialism

ABSTRACT

The past decade has witnessed a variety of city-regional projects across the world. However, the geopolitical motivation or regional coalition alone cannot fully explain the actual mechanism of city-regionalism in the Chinese context. Drawing on the governance framework of state entrepreneurialism, this article distinguishes between the processes of centrally orchestrated regional imaginary and regional cooperation through multi-scalar alliances in the making of Chinese city-regions. By tracing the latest national strategy of the Yangtze River Delta regional integration and three different cases with concrete practices, this paper suggests that the recent rise of city-regionalism reflects the dynamic development of state entrepreneurialism beyond the urban scale.

KEYWORDS:

• regional cooperation
• city-regionalism
• governance
• state entrepreneurialism
• Yangtze River Delta
• China

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. The first author is also thankful for the audiences’ active engagements at the events of the MIT/UBC/Harvard Urban China Talk Series and ERC-ChinaUrban China Planning Research Group, which profoundly helped the authors to further clarify the conceptual framework. The usual disclaimers apply.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ETHICS STATEMENT

Given the fact that China has no equivalent system on ethics application, the collaborative research does not have signed document regarding human ethics approval. Nonetheless, we did state our purpose when we contacted the interviewees. Before we conducted our interviews, we asked the permission of our interviewees to record and also to cite some of their comments in our work in the future. We have obtained their consent to state their professional roles to make the quotations robust. Our interviewees agreed with this as long as their names were anonymised. We confirm that we abided by the ethics stated above when conducting and writing the research in China.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 42071206], the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (A) [grant number XDA23020102], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number B220207009], and the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme [grant agreement number 832845, Advanced Grant] ChinaUrban.