China’s urban development in context: Variegated geographies of city-regionalism and managing the territorial politics of urban development

Abstract

Chinese

China’s urban development is often regarded as exceptional in terms of both the pace of urbanisation and the size and territorial reach of the country’s constituent city-regions. This commentary examines the variegated role of city-regionalism in the internationalisation and domestic management of Chinese state territory, and considers how the rise of new city-regional urban forms inside China is transforming the politics of urban development. China urban development processes are neither exclusively unique nor are they resistant to general theorisation; instead they are essentially comparable and therefore amenable to further theoretical interpretation.

Keywords

China city-regionalism urban development urban politics

Introduction

For some urban scholars, contemporary urbanisation processes are not confined to national territory and, as such, must be examined and theorised as essentially planetary in scope and causal efficacy (Brenner and Schmid, 2015). Although there has been much debate about the value of planetary urbanisation as an explanatory concept (see Wilson and Jonas, 2018), there is little doubt that it captures something about the spatially encompassing nature of contemporary urbanisation processes. Moreover, such ‘post-national’ representations of global population growth and economic development are not lost on international organisations, planners, consultancies and policy think tanks. The new ‘urban experts’ are increasingly minded to measure economic development not so much in terms of the performance of national economies but instead in relation to how the world’s global cities and city-regions measure up against each other on various economic and demographic indicators (Moisio and Jonas, 2018).

For small states, the prospect of conferring global city-region status on a major urban agglomeration – regardless of its absolute size – often serves as a politically persuasive indicator of international competitiveness, prompting a national government to target resources at the city-region so privileged. Moreover, national governments and political leaders in countries – both large and small – increasingly address global problems and challenges, such as climate change, trade deficits and austerity, through an urban rather than national policy lens. Despite recognition that urbanisation exacerbates regional inequalities within a national territory, policy measures designed to address such inequalities are less likely to be traditional ‘top down’ state-led redistributive regional policies but instead ‘bottom up’ initiatives that encourage collaboration between successful cities and surrounding regions. In this context, China’s urban development stands out as exceptional, not simply in terms of how rampant urbanisation has fuelled the country’s ascendency up international league tables of economic development, but also in terms of the urgent need for national and local government political leaders and planners inside China to address the negative socio-distributional problems plaguing the country’s new mega-regional urban forms.

In a synthesis of current knowledge of city-regionalism, Scott (2019) persuasively argues that future research on the political dimension of city-regionalism should address two challenges. Firstly, it must consider how planners and policymakers manage growing domestic societal tensions manifested as rising income inequalities, informality and social polarisation, fragmented labour markets, unaffordable housing, poor transport linkages and inadequate services across city-regions. Secondly, it should investigate the ‘distinctive yet variable role’ (Scott, 2019: 574) of geo-economic and geopolitical processes in the formation of city-regions. In this short contribution to the special issue ‘New directions of urban studies in China’, I respond to Scott’s ambitious intellectual agenda and consider, firstly, the variegated role of city-regionalism in the internationalisation and domestic management of Chinese state territory and, secondly, how the rise of new city-regional urban forms is transforming the politics of urban development in China. I illustrate these two themes with selected examples from each of the special issue contributions.

Variegated geographies ofcity-regionalism

According to Shi and Tang (2020), the rate of urbanisation in China rose from 17.9% urban in 1978 to 54.8% in 2014. China’s rapid and recent urbanisation raises fundamental questions about whether its exceptional growth has fostered unique state-territorial forms around the country’s rapidly expanding city-regions. Whilst few centrally planned socialist countries have urbanised as quickly and extensively as has China (in fact, during the Cold War many socialist and communist countries sought to restrict the growth of dominant urban centres), it might be that a more appropriate comparator to China today is the United States (US) in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century. During that period, US urbanisation was fuelled by, inter alia, the growth of manufacturing, land speculation at the urban fringe, the violent attempts to domesticate and integrate ‘native’ peoples, efforts to foster a unified national cultural-territorial ideal and the expansion of internal markets for capitalist commodities. In a similar way, the rise of new city-regional forms in Communist China since 1949 has reflected national efforts to generate a self-sufficient national urban system, foster a centralised national polity, develop and expand domestic industry and markets and pursue a national doctrine of cultural-territorial unity. However, here the comparisons end. Whereas the US was from the start a thoroughly globalised ‘national’ political economy with a multi-party federal electoral system that fostered local (urban) entrepreneurialism and fiscal autonomy, after 1949 China operated as a relatively closed centrally-planned economy dominated by a single political party (the Chinese Communist Party or CCP) that gave little scope for local state entrepreneurialism and autonomy. And although since pursuing market reforms in the 1980s, China shows signs of moving in a similar direction to the US at least in respect of entrepreneurial urbanism, this is happening in a spatially selective fashion due to domestic and international political and administrative challenges associated with the recent rapid growth of mega-urban regions (Wu, 2016).

As Yeh and Chen (2020) argue, mega-city regions in China have in fact been evolving along a very different pathway compared with the West. They indicate that rural industrialisation coupled with rampant suburbanisation have shaped Chinese territory into distinctive city-regional formations comprised of separate local jurisdictional entities albeit increasingly interconnected by flows of capital, labour and information. Two further dimensions of Chinese city-regionalism, highlighted to a greater or lesser degree by this collection of articles, warrant especially careful consideration, namely, (1) the role of city-regions in the international orchestration of the Chinese economy and territory, and (2) commonalities and variations in the administrative mapping of city-regions within the national territory.

City-regionalism and the internationalisation of the Chinese economy and state

It seems that city-regions – and in particular global city-regions – are fast becoming national and international policy instruments, as national and local governments seek not just to manage domestic economic growth but also to assert their influence at a global scale. As Scott (2019: 568) puts it: ‘… city-regions everywhere are sites of continuing experiments focused on attempts to build effective frameworks of governance in the effort to manage their own internal affairs and to enhance their growing influence as both nationally and globally significant actors’ (emphasis mine).

Nevertheless, recent interpretations of Chinese city-regionalism have tended to emphasise its role in domestic spatial policy and have paid less attention to the interplay between global and local factors in city-regional developments. Drawing upon Global Production Networks theory, Yang (2020) establishes a causal connection between urban transformation in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region (especially Dongguan) and the restructuring of global production networks (GPNs). This article illustrates how in the 1980s and 1990s migrant workers and villagers were significant local actors, who contributed to export-oriented urbanisation and industrialisation. Nonetheless, in recent times GPNs and local actors have become somewhat decoupled as the PRD undergoes further urban transformations and processes of industrial restructuring, producing new urban forms across the PRD region.

At one level, one might assume that the Chinese state does not need to market its global city-regions on the international stage. If anything, cities like Hong Kong and Shanghai appear to operate somewhat apart from the national state as internationally recognised ‘global cities’ (Derudder et al., 2013) and, as such, serve de facto the developmental aspirations of the Chinese state. Indeed, recent scholarship (e.g. Woon, 2018) on the role of historical contingencies in shaping China’s wider geopolitical aspirations rarely if ever references the rise of city-regionalism as a contributory factor. At another level, there is a growing sense that the international zeitgeist of global city-regionalism has created tremendous domestic challenges for the Chinese state as reflected in recent sub-national administrative reforms.

China’s sub-national administrative geographies

Consolidation and reform of sub-national state territory is not a new phenomenon in China. In the early 2000s, there were several waves of territorial consolidation as established municipal governments were merged into, or annexed by, larger jurisdictional entities. For example, as urbanisation across the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region proceeded apace, conflicts between prefecture-level cities and county-level cities were frequent, especially in Jiangsu Province and Zhejiang Province, which internalised the negative externalities of Shanghai Municipality’s phenomenal growth (Zhang and Wu, 2006). An annexation wave followed, involving the consolidation of county-level cities by prefecture-level cities in order to exploit economies of scale and reduce cutthroat competition for urban development (Zhang and Wu, 2006). Such domestic territorial reforms by and large involved readjustment of the administrative responsibilities of different levels of government departments, rather than legal action. As a result, Chinese local government and administrative boundaries remain ongoing foci of conflict around urban development, as cities and counties strive to maximise the inflow of capital and fiscal resources.

In this context, societal actors and interests involved in new peripheral forms of urban development strive to strengthen their territorial-political status within the Chinese party-state. For example, when compared with their North American counterparts (see Garreau, 1991), edge-city high-tech zones in China have developed in unique ways, not only exercising growing economic influence regionally and nationally but also reshaping the territorial-political status of large rural areas. A case in point is the Zhejiang Hangzhou Future Sci-Tech City (Anzoise et al., 2020), where local stakeholders – firms and residents alike – attribute increasing significance to the place-making characteristics of urban development, such as the quality of the local environment and landscape, social diversity and supportive living and working conditions. As China’s post-suburban regions continue to expand – supported in no small measure by the amalgamation of suburban and rural administrative areas into larger city-regional territorial entities – so countervailing geopolitical processes are set in motion that tend to counteract the dominant centralising tendencies within the Chinese state (Li and Jonas, 2019).

Managing the territorial politics of urban development

Scott (2019) convincingly claims that the rise of city-regionalism is associated with new and quite distinctive urban forms, which nonetheless can be analysed and interpreted through generalisable theoretical and methodological frameworks. For instance, Li et al. (2020) use GIS techniques to show how new urban spatial forms in the YRD are quite typical of an emerging pattern of metropolitan interlocking regions (MIRs). If the clustering of economic activities around MIRs became a clear trend between 2000 and 2013, much of this had to do with urban agglomeration plans adopted by national and provincial governments in the 2000s. During this period, moreover, clustering contributed to the widening of urban and regional inequality, prompting the national government to expand greatly the territorial limits of the YRD mega-urban region (Li and Jonas, 2019).

In this context, the Chinese state is turning its attention to new mechanisms for managing the uneven territorial-distributional consequences of city-regional development. If, in the past, the CCP managed the urban politics of collective consumption in a manner that assisted industrialisation and national economic growth, there are emerging cracks in the architecture of state collective provision, as evidenced by (1) growing societal tensions around Chinese urban development, and (2) the emergence of new institutions and political actors at the urban scale.

Societal tensions around new urban forms in China

Articles in this collection provide a more detailed mapping of societal tensions at the urban and neighbourhood scales in China, highlighting vexed issues of gender, citizenship and social reproduction. In terms of access to housing, migrants lacking hukou (registered resident) status are constrained in tenure choices, especially in major cities such as Beijing. Consequently, they tend to sort themselves into neighbourhoods with similar social characteristics, a factor which in turn shapes residential satisfaction (Chen et al., 2020). Whilst there is little evidence provided of a link between housing tenure and neighbourhood activism, this research suggests that environmental conditions in the urban living place are important determinants of residential satisfaction as much for low-income migrants as for long-term residents. Wang and Wang (2020) interviewed 537 participants who had recently moved house in Beijing and found that degree of residential satisfaction reflects a combination of factors ranging from housing tenure status to conditions in the living place, such as physical design, absence of nuisance and levels of social interaction.

Po (2019) factors gender into the above discussion of housing, tenure and activism. Across China, the tradition of patrilocal residence, whereby women who have ‘married out’ (waijianü) and are excluded from entitlement to communal land, has created a class of rural female non-citizens. Waijianü are deprived of opportunities to share revenue from the sale of land at the urban fringe. Nonetheless, in cities like Guangdong, women have challenged such patriarchal practices of urban citizenship, using land activism to redefine citizenship as more than a pre-given bundle of rights and entitlements (Po, 2020). Meanwhile, in major cities, skyrocketing house prices have contributed to other forms of societal fragmentation and inequality. Cui (2020) observes widening disparities in housing tenure between recently settled unskilled migrants and skilled local workers. Such disparities, in turn, reflect a growing gap in the intergenerational transfer of wealth and regional disparities in economic development.

New institutions and urban political actors

Given that new urban forms are throwing up all sorts of new societal tensions, questions arise about the changing nature of urban politics in China and the specific spaces through which such politics are manifested (see Ward et al., 2018). In the West, much of the debate has centred around the rise of a New Urban Politics in which, responding to enhanced capital mobility across local jurisdictional borders, municipal, county and provincial governments have allied with ‘growth coalitions’ to attract inward investment and boost local tax revenues (Cox, 1993). These politics result in a ‘race to the bottom’, as subsidies used to attract business divert resources from basic services such as education. In an age of urban austerity, the geography of the state – the allocation of functions and resources between different branches (local, regional, national) of government – becomes ever more embroiled in local political struggles around urban development and collective provision, giving rise to all sorts of new institutions and political alliances (Cox and Jonas, 1993).

In China, given the decentralisation of decision-making powers, sub-municipal governments have become key actors in urban policy implementation. At the same time, given the hitherto powerful role of the state in land assembly and exchange, the capacity for ‘growth coalitions’ to organise and to resist state intrusion in local policy processes is attenuated. Instead, Chinese-style urban growth coalitions have tended to form between state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and city authorities. For example, in Beijing during the 1990s, local governments and local SOEs organised into growth coalitions that ultimately were able to resist efforts to restore dilapidated housing for local residents in the city’s historical districts (Zhang and Fang, 2003). In light of this, the local implementation of provincial and municipal policies is likely to vary significantly at the district level.

Luova (2020) examines sub-municipal variation in environmental governance in three urban districts in the city of Tianjin, demonstrating how the interpretation of ‘green’ environmental policies varies with local context. Throughout China, new institutions and political actors are becoming visible in various types of urban greening strategies or ‘sustainability fixes’ (While et al., 2004). For example, Chinese municipal governments have recently invested heavily in the creation of extensive systems of greenways ostensibly designed to make cities more liveable for urban residents (Zhang et al., 2019). Nonetheless, such policies align closely with growth coalition-led efforts to make Chinese cities – especially global cities – not just liveable but also more competitive. In a resilience analysis of post-disaster communities in China, Xu and Shao (2020) argue that whilst urban planners have incorporated ecological resilience into post-disaster recovery policies, they tend nevertheless to pay more attention to economic recovery and rather less to urban social sustainability.

Hitherto one of the key fiscal mechanisms underpinning urban development in China has been state-led acquisition of rural land. In 2004, the Chinese state implemented the so-called ‘Linkage’ Policy (Zengjian Guagou), which requires any increase in new urban land by the local government to be compensated for with an equivalent amount of new arable land. In a detailed study of Chengdu, a rapidly growing municipality in the Chinese province of Sichuan, Shi and Tang (2020) argue that when the development rights of rural land become tradeable, this induces ‘institutional changes in the property rights arrangement and in the social relations amongst various players in organising land development’ (Shi and Tang, 2020). Although similar schemes involving the transfer of development rights (TDR) may have empowered developers, there is growing evidence that urban residents in zones vulnerable to earthquakes have been able to access additional state resources as a result of their participation in such TDR schemes.

Conclusion

Lately, urban scholarship has reflected at some length on the degree of generalisability of urban theory – especially theory grounded in the experiences of an individual city and/or a national urban system. In concluding this commentary, I might choose to pose a series of questions about the role of theoretical generalisation in future research on China’s urban development. For example, should scholars take North American and European theoretical urban models and apply them to Chinese cities? Is Chinese urbanisation similar to or different from urbanisation in Europe or North America? If it is different (as I have suggested), is it then exceptional or unique? Or should we instead follow the likes of Robinson (2006) and theorise sui generis from China’s urban development processes? The answers to these questions very much depend on how and why we engage in urban comparison (Robinson, 2011). The value of a collection such as this, which treats China as a ‘specific case’ of urban development, is that comparison enables (theoretical and empirical) generalisation whether or not the individual contributors themselves engage directly in a comparison (and, indeed, regardless of what form or process they are comparing). My own recent forays into processes ofcity-regionalism in China have led me to the conclusion that China's urban development processes are neither exclusively unique nor fundamentally resistant to theorisation. They are in this respect essentially comparable and thus highly amendable to theoretically informed generalisation.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Andrew E.G. Jonas

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