Adding new narratives to the urban imagination: An introduction to ‘New directions of urban studies in China’

Managing growth and environmental governance: The lingering state and multiple logics

The first section examines institutional dynamics in growth management and rising urban environmental governance in China.

China has developed a quite unusual and particular land system. The marketisation of land for urban development has been extensively studied in Chinese urban studies. The state controls the appropriation of collectively owned rural land for urban development. The revenue from selling the development rights to developers constitutes an important source of local public finance, which is commonly known as land-based finance (Lin, 2014; Tao et al., 2010). However, in contrast to the sale of state-acquired rural land, rural land is not tradable in the land market. Land-centred development has led to rampant encroachment on rural land, as local governments compete to acquire cheaper rural land to finance urban development. To strengthen land management and the protection of agricultural land, the Chinese government has adopted a new land policy which requires the local government to maintain agricultural land overall and to ‘link’ the quantity of land developed with the reclamation of equivalent agricultural land elsewhere. This ‘linkage policy’ has opened up the trading of rural land, or the transfer of development rights (TDR) (Shi and Tang, 2020). In terms of knowledge gaps, Shi and Tang (2020) describe the recent change in the Chinese rural land system, enriching an extensive literature on rural-to-urban land conversion in China. In practice, the policy has led to a great variation in rural land markets. Chengdu in the western region of China is one of the cities that have developed a quite mature rural land market, and this is their case study. On the surface, this transfer of development rights is a further step in the marketisation of rural land, which allows rural collectives to sell their development rights to other developers (by converting their existing non-agricultural land into agricultural land) and also provides the opportunity for developers other than the government to acquire land development rights to supply developable land to the urban land market. In Chengdu, the agriculture equity exchange has been set up to facilitate the market transaction of rural land entitlements.

With the extensive documentation of China’s land marketisation and land-based financing, it is no surprise that in the rural areas sophisticated market tools such as the transfer of development rights are experimented with and deployed. The finding of continuing marketisation of rural land is timely but not surprising. However, the intention behind using this technique is not to maximise land income but rather to implement land consolidation in places where rural villages are left vacant (Long and Liu, 2016). Similarly, in suburban Shanghai, land consolidation is implemented to curb urban sprawl (Tian et al., 2017). The narrative of the transfer of rural land development rights thus deviates from the widely narrated ‘urban entrepreneurialism’. It fits better the narrative of ‘planning centrality, market instruments’, as the market instrument is used to relocate resources and manage growth. The implementation of this policy, however, has led to ‘unexpected’ consequences, since although some economic benefits are returned to the rural users who gave up their development rights, the region that acquires the development rights performs much better than the region that produces the quota of development rights. This specific practice is considered here, along with other case studies on environmental governance.

Faced with environmental challenges, China has strengthened its environmental governance. This has been achieved through the restoration of vertical management, such as land development quotas (Xu and Yeh, 2009). The implementation of environmental policies varies across different localities. To build an environmentally friendly city, local government has strengthened environmental education. Besides economic growth, environmental protection targets have become a key performance indicator for local officials. Rising environmental concerns from the middle class also force the local government to pay more attention to local environmental quality. In this context, local district governments try to promote green urbanism. Luova (2020) investigated the creation of ‘green schools’ in the districts of Tianjin and observed variation in terms of applying for green school entitlements in these districts. In addition to teaching environmentally friendly lifestyles, green schools demonstrate their efforts to improve the greenness of their campus and reduce waste. Some poorer inner urban districts are more enthusiastic towards the entitlement of green schools, as being green helps them negotiate a better deal in resource allocation, while outer districts only fulfil the basic requirements of environmental education. The traditional working-class area, with stronger government capacity but tighter budget constraints, is actually more willing to implement a stringent government requirement for environmental education.

While it is not surprising that financial return is taken into consideration when the local government implements environmental policies, the case of green schools shows how environmental education has been seriously implemented in a way that is independent from economic governance. There are also significant variations across local districts in terms of implementation. These variations depend on local conditions and are more nuanced than a simplified narrative of using the green agenda to promote economic growth. Building more green schools may help the district government gain recognition from the municipal government for achieving key performance indicators. Environmental policies are not subordinated to economic targets, and being green has become an objective in itself.

With a rising awareness of environmental quality, Chinese cities strive to develop green infrastructure. Originating in Guangdong (Chung et al., 2018), greenways are a popular type of environmental project because they enhance a green image, green amenities and access to green spaces. In the city of Maanshan in Anhui province, massive greenways of more than 250 km are being planned and constructed (Zhang et al., 2020). The development of greenways is a requirement by the provincial government, which in turn follows the guidance of the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development. The project was initially conceived as beneficial to local tourism. While there is no evidence to suggest substantial impacts on economic development and city marketing, greenways are helping the city gain recognition as a Chinese garden city, turning away from its past as a steel city. Some sections of greenway in rural areas are not extensively used. But the greenways inside urban areas are widely used, promoting active travel and non-motorised commuting. The green infrastructure brings material benefits to residents.

The surprising finding is that the Chinese government does treat environmental governance seriously, which represents a shift away from the earlier policy of ‘growth first, treatment second’ to a new narrative of ‘ecological civilisation’. The latter recognises the importance of nature and the need to develop a ‘harmonious relation’ between humans and nature. For a long time, the literature on China’s environmental governance has stressed the discourse of sustainability and ‘green washing’ and the green spectacle as environmental imagineering in China, as well as the economic motivation behind green projects such as eco-cities (Caprotti, 2014; Chien, 2013; Wu, 2012). Greenway projects are initiated due to a variety of factors in different cities, but they all bear the imprint of political legitimisation. As a political project, the development of greenways demonstrates the alignment of the local state with the central government mandate of ‘ecological civilisation’ and state power in environmental governance. There is an environmental turn in China’s urban development, although actual implementation is compounded with local adaptation and various resource constraints. The actual environmental benefits are not always obvious, despite an initial policy desire to achieve green development. The greenway project adds a new narrative to the ‘sustainability fix’ (While et al., 2004), as the latter recognises the need to fix the environmental constraint on capital accumulation. Here, the motivation for green projects is compounded.

The role of the state in environmental governance can be clearly seen in the case of post-disaster reconstruction. In 2008, Wenchuan experienced an earthquake of 8.0 on the Richter scale. The earthquake caused huge damage and the loss of many lives. The central government mandated a swift reconstruction plan. The speed of reconstruction was remarkable. Although multiple agents were involved, the administrative system demonstrated a significant leading role in post-disaster reconstruction. The central government instigated a ‘pair assistance programme’, which paired a better-off province with a county that had suffered in the disaster. The former province was required to allocate 1% of its revenue to the latter to support reconstruction. The reconstruction plan has been led by the state, especially the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Housing and Urban–Rural Development. The capacity of top-down planning has been mobilised. The state has been directly involved in relocating and resettling affected residents, and planning and reconstructing new settlements. To cope with the complex and challenging task of reconstruction, the planning procedure was simplified and cross-border collaborations were established. While the central government provided 30% of the reconstruction cost, it mobilised local governments and non-state sources to fulfil funding requirements.

It is not surprising to find that the state plays a critical role in environmental governance, in particular in coping with natural disasters. However, thinking about the narrative of resilience, Xu et al. (2020) argue that while resilience often implies the adaptive capacity of individuals and the social capital of their communities, the Chinese case suggests an indispensable role of the state in leading and coordinating post-disaster reconstruction. Post-reconstruction planning shows some flexibility and adaptability among engineering-minded professionals, and the state managed to pull resources from different places and across various administrative hierarchies. Going beyond the technical issues of disaster management, the narrative is not confined within ‘resilience’ but interrogates the state–society relation. The post-disaster reconstruction plan is first and foremost a political task, legitimising state power in environmental governance.

Marketisation and environmental crises are explained by the narratives of entrepreneurialism and the subordination of nature to the capital logic. The cases of land management and environmental governance produce new narratives of lingering state power and legitimacy in managing economic growth and environmental politics that are related to but not determined by economic imperatives. These more nuanced narratives help us more convincingly criticise China’s environmental policies and practices. In a wider imagination of urban environmental governance, these narratives enrich existing narratives of the urban sustainability fix, the eco-state and politics. While the institutional dynamics and geographical settings are quite specific to China, the narratives of the cases present multiple logics, revealing that it is imperative to understand the context-specific logic in growth and environmental governance.

Social transformation: Beyond dichotomous state or market narratives

The second section examines the social transformation of Chinese cities. This theme is a core concern of urban studies. The articles in this section resonate with well-established topics in Chinese urban studies on rural migrants (Wu and Logan, 2016), residential satisfaction (Li and Wu, 2013) and neighbourhood attachment (Zhu et al., 2012), and with many other articles in a virtual special issue of Urban Studies (He and Qian, 2017) where three frontiers were identified: urban enclaves; consumption and culture; and urban activism. While focusing on specific topics of residential changes, the articles here interrogate state–market narratives.

Chinese cities have witnessed a housing boom over the last two decades. Housing affordability is becoming a serious challenge. Cui (2020) compares how skilled migrants and locals get onto the property ladder. Skilled migrants often have to move out to the suburbs in order to become homeowners. Although they are better educated, their educational attainment does not help them much and can even constrain them. Cui explains this surprising finding by looking at the timing of entering the property market and the intergenerational transfer of wealth. A longer education delays people from getting onto the property ladder. The parents of skilled locals in large cities benefited from the housing boom and thus accumulated assets which may help the second generation into the housing market. These are quite complex narratives about urbanisation, housing marketisation and social inequalities. They present the reproduction of housing inequalities across generations and geographical regions, and are thus more complicated than narratives of hukou (household registration) division between urban and rural areas and of disadvantaged, poorly educated migrants. The inequality is created by neither marketisation nor policy discrimination. Rather, it is an outcome of interwoven state–market dynamics.

The narrative of the housing career of skilled migrants goes beyond the issue of the housing of specific social groups. It maps the effect of market transition, but also the complex historical and material conditions within which social and housing differentiation are created. The narrative of skilled migrants’ housing enriches the debate on market transition, state persistence and housing inequalities (Logan et al., 1999). More generally, the narrative highlights the need to understand the reality of urban life and socio-cultural institutions in order to understand housing inequalities.

Rapid urban development in China has led to significant neighbourhood changes. When rural migrants move into urban areas, they have to choose particular neighbourhoods to suit their needs. In other words, they sort themselves into different neighbourhoods. However, they also have different satisfaction levels in different residential environments, and these are affected by their choices. The issue of self-selection is more than just a methodological difficulty but reflects the fact that choice and satisfaction might be related. Chen et al. (2020) find that Beijing migrants rank residential satisfaction in order from commodity housing (highest), to work-unit housing and finally to urban village housing (lowest). The order is similar to the rank of the quality of these environments. But interestingly, because the selection of residential environment follows socioeconomic characteristics, the migrants would be happier in commodity housing because they have a lower expectation regarding the living environment. Homeownership makes migrant residents happier only in commodity housing neighbourhoods, not only due to the ownership per se but also because of their choice of residential location.

While homeownership is regarded as a major determinant of residential satisfaction, the effect only holds for a particular type of residential environment in China – the commodity housing neighbourhood. Migrants who do not have local hukou may be excluded from home purchase and hence have to remain as renters and consequently report lower levels of satisfaction. However, some migrants manage to buy property in a commodity housing neighbourhood and thus become very satisfied. In other neighbourhoods, there are very few migrant homeowners. In the informal housing market, migrants can still become homeowners, but compared with renters they are not significantly happier. Although these findings are very specific, the narrative is more complex than a universal one about the advantage and satisfaction of homeownership.

Over the last four decades, Chinese cities have experienced profound residential changes. A large number of residents have been relocated due to urban renewal and suburbanisation. Residential mobility is a ‘classic’ field of urban geography but also an established topic in Chinese urban studies (Li and Mao, 2017; Li and Song, 2009; Wu, 2004). The findings from a longitudinal study in Beijing largely confirm what we know about residential relocation: over 73% of residents are happier after relocation (Wang and Wang, 2020). Improvements in housing and neighbourhood living environment make relocated residents more satisfied. The change from renter to homeowner greatly raises residential satisfaction, although those who move from old neighbourhoods to commodity housing areas, usually in the suburbs, reported lower levels of satisfaction, probably due to the loss of neighbourhood attachment and involuntary relocation. The finding that it is not only housing attributes but also neighbourhood characteristics that matter is plausible, as residents may be pursuing a particular preference for a more private lifestyle (Shen and Wu, 2013). Better design and maintenance certainly improve the quality of living.

It is surprising that a quantitative residential survey has not led to unexpected findings. Quantitative residential surveys are sometimes contradictory to qualitative studies, which often focus on cases of forced relocation, demolition and property dispossession (Shih, 2017; Shin, 2016; Zhang, 2017). Except for the sampling bias (more middle-class homebuyers), the quantitative research covers a larger sample of relocated residents. It reveals that Chinese urban renewal has improved the residential conditions of most residents, although some social groups have suffered severe negative impacts. Considering the initial rehabilitation of dilapidated housing in Beijing or the renewal of old alleyway housing in Shanghai, the living conditions of the old neighbourhoods were appalling. Urban renewal and residential relocation have been major steps to solving the housing shortage. But increasingly, in order to finance redevelopment projects, market instruments have been used, which give a greater power to developers to generate more land profits. While the state has tried to regulate the practices of demolition and relocation, in reality rampant redevelopment occurs from time to time. In the redevelopment process, there is always a tension between a modernisation vision and the financial logic to fulfil the project finance requirements and contribute to the local fiscal balance. Therefore, the quantitative survey and qualitative case studies, rather than being contradictory, present different aspects of China’s urban transformation.

Land reform has had significant impacts on both urban and rural households. In rural areas, collectively owned land rights have been reformed. Village economic collectives (jingji hezuoshe) have become shareholding cooperatives (Po, 2008). Villagers are entitled to land shares as ‘shareholders’. However, women who have ‘married out’ are excluded (Po, 2020). Land marketisation thus has created gender inequalities. Therefore, married-out women have begun to defend their entitlements by lodging complaints with state agencies and suing their villages in court. The state has eventually supported their claims. However, it is difficult to implement the law as the villagers were protesting against a government decision, which threatens social stability. As a result, although many women received their shares through state-subsidised purchase, the delivery of dividends to women is not guaranteed. The narrative of married-out women’s activism is an extremely complex one. Different from the hukou policy, which restricts the entitlement of the rural population, married-out women lost their entitlements because traditional culture and social practices affected the process of land marketisation. Gendered inequality resulted from a complex interaction between marketisation and social division.

The surprising finding of gendered inequalities in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is that the root cause is more complicated than one of unfair state redistribution or market-based injustice. The inequalities are created through the interaction of social norms with a process of market development, as in post-colonial India where social divisions and inequalities are formed between different segments of caste, religion, language, identity, family and community (Chatterjee, 2004). Considering the existing literature on ‘the right to the city’ (Purcell, 2003) and its application to Chinese cities (He and Chen, 2012), it is not straightforward to classify these women’s activism as the right to the city or as a citizen movement to gain recognition from the state. The activists contest their current rights and argue for the recognition of their community. On the other hand, their claim is clearly limited to land entitlement, at least at this stage, rather than connected to a wide range of citizenship such as participation and decision-making in local politics and entitlement to social benefits. The specific research topic of women’s activism is not just about the gendered outcome but also about their contests against exclusion from land rights allocation, which is outside the remit of state policy. However, claims for property rights and citizenship are related because through claiming their property rights, the women have become aware of their citizenship and resorted to protesting against customary discrimination. They engage with different social and political processes and become ‘active citizens’.

New geographies of Chinese cities: A city-regional dimension

The third section examines the regional dimension of Chinese urbanisation, in particular an emergent form of mega-city region. While the urban system has been a classic topic of urban studies, recent research has begun to interrogate interrelated urban and regional governance and has explored suburbanisation, polycentric city-regions and new geographies of the metropolis (Keil, 2018; Roy, 2009). In Chinese urban studies, the research goes beyond regional inequalities (Wei, 2000), and rather, seeks to understand the process of urbanisation beyond individual cities (Li and Wu, 2017; Luo and Shen, 2008; Wu, 2016; Xu and Yeh, 2005). The articles in this section cover the changing dynamics of urbanisation in the PRD, economic restructuring and new spatial development, new science and technologically based cities, and urban clusters in the Yangtze River Valley.

China’s open-door reform of the late 1970s led to export-oriented urbanisation in the coastal region, particularly in the PRD (Sit and Yang, 1997). The towns and cities in the region presented some similar characteristics, but this was not equivalent to ‘regionalism’ because linkage and interaction between the towns and cities were very weak. In the PRD, villages and towns were linked directly with overseas investors rather than nearby cities. They were production sites for export-oriented manufacturing industries and presented mixed urban and rural uses similar to desakota in South-East Asia (Lin, 2006). But the Global Financial Crisis marked the collapse of foreign direct investment-driven ‘exo-urbanisation’ and triggered spatial restructuring (Yang, 2020). Some industrial towns and villages experienced financial difficulties (Xue and Wu, 2015), while the provincial government promoted industrial relocation and the municipal government attempted to shift towards high-tech industrial parks rather than scattered village-based economies. Yang (2020) provides a detailed narrative of industrial dynamics and consequent spatial transformation.

Industrial restructuring and uneven spatial effects in the PRD are convincingly narrated through a particular angle on production networks which provides additional insights beyond territorial dynamics. The surprising finding is that ‘strategic coupling’ (Yeung, 2016) in this case is more than a metaphor that indicates the matching of production networks with regional assets. It is literally a ‘strategy’– an intentional plan to reshape the course of urbanisation and spatial production. The city of Dongguan deliberately proposed Songhuahu High-tech Park as a new development strategy, which attracted the relocation of Huawei, China’s high-tech giant, from Shenzhen to Dongguan. The narrative of ‘strategy’ thus implies more than a network dynamic, and rather reflects more strategic guidance and intervention from the local state in economic development. Therefore, the narrative goes beyond the economic geographical description of industrial dynamics, requiring the interrogation of territorial governance, as shown in other strategic developments of high-tech spaces in China (Zhang and Wu, 2019).

Economic transition and infrastructure development have begun to link cities in the same region. The PRD has witnessed a transformation from scattered rural industrialisation, to city-centred land development, and finally to networked service industrial development (Yeh and Chen, 2020). The cities are linked to form a mega-city region. Although producer services are linked in the region, collaboration between jurisdictions is weak. As the Chinese economy experiences a rising market of domestic consumption, firms in the region have begun to serve a wider hinterland. At the same time, firms that produce for global markets need financial, logistical and other services in the region. All these activities generate a huge demand for office space. New business districts such as Qianhai, Hengqin and Nansha represent a new generation of new towns which are similar to ‘edge cities’, based on offices and R&D.

The narrative of the mega-city region in the PRD portrays a regional dimension of new geographies of Chinese cities. The insight from the case is that industrial structures (rural manufacturing industries, urban-centred land development and tertiary industries) and corresponding spatial forms are associated. The development of producer services that serve the production activities and consumers in the region has meant the formation of a network of cities (Yeh et al., 2015), which is seen throughout a globalising world (Hall and Pain, 2006; Scott, 2001). In addition, the narrative of the PRD reveals the materiality of mega-city regions: the development of connectivity through high-speed railways and inter-city railways which has profoundly enhanced accessibility and the reach to a wider hinterland. The surprising finding from the PRD is that it is not a narrative of a ‘natural’ course of economic restructuring and upgrading. Each economic stage corresponds to specific historical and geographical developments: township and village enterprises (TVEs) in rural industrialisation; the conveyance of urban land in city-centred development; and high-tech office parks and new central business districts (CBDs) in the period of tertiarisation. Behind these developments are changing development strategies (Zhang and Wu, 2019) and governance rescaling to cope with the crisis in the earlier stages (Wu, 2016).

The development of high-tech parks, or more recently science and smart cities, illustrates the aspiration to modernity. Through the narratives of local people, we can begin to understand mega-urban projects such as Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-tech City as state modernisation projects (Anzoise et al., 2020). Recently, China has tried to transform single function industrial parks into mixed-use new cities with extensive public realms and amenities. This represents a new phase of suburbanisation. Near Xixi Wetland National Park, the Future Sci-tech City in Yuhang district has been designed to become a sub-centre of Hangzhou. The development aims to attract talent and promote innovation. Local people feel that the development has created economic prosperity, employment opportunities and infrastructure and landscape improvements, but they are also concerned about the loss of local cultural identity and of flexible and diverse lifestyles. As in many high-tech parks, a policy aiming to attract talent may lead to the exclusion of low-income social groups and inflation in property prices. There are also concerns over environmental quality and whether the place will remain the ‘garden’ of Hangzhou.

The narrative of this case is illuminating about the process of creating new cities that are oriented towards R&D or service industries in a mega-city region. Like many other places, such as the Zhangjiang High-tech Park and the Songhuahu High-tech Park, the development of Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-tech City involves significant policy manoeuvres. China is witnessing a transition into high-tech development through the promotion of innovation, especially indigenous innovation capacities. ‘Indigenous innovation capacities’ does not necessarily refer to Chinese firms but rather signifies the ownership of intellectual property rights. The development aims to create and apply knowledge to advance economic benefits rather than just conducting material processing for multinational corporations. However, different from a more government-initiated project, the future city has also been driven by private capital and the involvement of leading technological firms. High-tech firm clusters form in the future city. The clustering of internet firms is a recent phenomenon in Zhejiang, usually in purposely-built and upgraded small towns known as ‘specialised towns’ or ‘featured towns’, resembling edge cities in post-suburbia development (Keil, 2018; Teaford, 1997). But the Chinese case reveals the hybridity of state–market roles in this process. While aiming to create an urbanism which is important for talent and innovation, the approach of mega-urban projects often acts in the opposite direction, creating a homogenous and imagined landscape and the loss of diversity and mixed uses. Despite these concerns, the views of local people towards large-scale development are generally positive.

At a larger scale, urban clusters have appeared in China in coastal, central and western regions. For example, in the Yangtze River Valley, many smaller city clusters can be identified (Li et al., 2020). These clusters present different spatial configurations with varying levels of productivity and population densities. In the upper reaches, cities with low productivity are adjacent to each other, while in the Yangtze River Delta, cities with high productivity cluster together. The result is significant inter-region inequality and intra-cluster differentiation. The narrative here presents a regional dimension of China’s urbanisation which is presented as a cluster of cities, or a city-region. The research expands recent interest in the city-region in general (Harrison and Heley, 2015; Jonas and Moisio, 2018). The city-regions described in the Yangtze River Valley may not be different from the megalopolis as seen by Gottmann (1961), or from the mega-city regions (Hall and Pain, 2006). The whole region of the Yangtze River Valley presents different levels of economic development and economic structures.

What is significant in China’s urban clusters is the government strategy behind their vision and formation. They are created as a new state space to manage inter-city competition through rescaling and networks (Lim, 2019; Wu, 2016). Some may not be directly implemented by the state, but through market instruments and operations. The narrative of economic agglomeration stresses the firm and production networks, while the narrative of rescaling emphasises the territorialised governance or a regional form of urbanisation (Jonas and Moisio, 2018), which is now increasingly becoming planetary (Brenner and Schmid, 2014). Also, as illustrated by high-tech parks, smart cities and future cities, their development involves political actors enabling city regionalism (Jonas and Moisio, 2018), often initiated as a modernisation project by the state. The development of Chinese city-regionalism thus provides a narrative beyond economic-oriented description. The concept of Jing-Jin-Ji is envisioned as ‘the project of a thousand years’ for China’s revitalisation. These are specific imaginations. Further, building regional infrastructure such as high-speed railways and regional greenways provides investment opportunities within an overall development strategy. What is different is that the megalopolis is not a vision or an object of state intervention. It is a more or less geographic description of the distribution of cities. Here, Jing-Jin-Ji is more than an academic concept. These visions present the centrality of state power, while market instruments (networks of cities) are used to achieve this objective. City-regionalism is associated with economic dynamics, but they go beyond firm-level interactions. Proximities matter, but they are conditions rather than determinants for linking cities.

The emergent urban clusters in China are not imagined based on statistical measures or inter-city connectivity as usually applied to ‘measure’ and define the boundaries of city-regions. The narrative of the Chinese city-region contributes to a rescaled and territorialised governance of the nation state (Brenner, 2004). The development uses economic agglomeration but goes beyond an imagination of firm clustering, agglomeration, diversity or urbanism. These elements may indeed matter and even be important in the formation of ‘urban clusters’ in China (Wu, 2016). But at the same time, building urban clusters reflects ‘state spatial selectivity’ and the centrality of state power along with economic transition (Wu, 2018). Some urban clusters such as the Great Bay of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao may resort to more market-based and intercity collaborations, while others such as the development of Xiong’an new city in the Jing-Jin-Ji region for Beijing are driven by the vision of the central state for China’s new capital. Urban clusters are created by particular local contexts and hence show different levels of economic development and spatial configurations (Li et al., 2020), but are beyond an imagination of economic linkages or pure state mandate – they reflect an urban process.

Finally, as shown in the two critical commentaries, Chinese cases provide new narratives for urban research. Hamnett (2020) asks whether Chinese cities are unique and argues that, because Chinese urbanisation is so different from both western and other developing countries’ experiences, we should not simply incorporate Chinese urban studies into an existing literature. Jonas (2020) uses the geographies of city-regionalism to illustrate that Chinese urban development processes are not exclusively unique. They are essentially comparable. China’s city-regionalism is produced through China’s reposition in a globalising world, consequential sub-national administrative adjustments and the imperative to manage new territorial politics of dispersed and cross-boundary developments. From these commentaries, we can see a consensus that the value of Chinese urban studies is not to generalise them into a universal theory but rather to present new narratives which contribute to our understanding of the cities. This means that it is more interesting to stick to original observations from the field and to add the narratives to expand our imagination of the urban.