The production of extended local territory: Topology and the spatial politics of city-region making in China

Topology and the extended local territory

In the endeavour to bring a topological view into discussions on the geographies of power, Allen and his collaborators (Allen, 2011, 2016; Allen and Cochrane, 2007, 2010) mainly focus on the making of reach through and beyond physical distances. From this perspective, the most important lesson we can learn topologically is to see how and how far certain power dynamics cut across proximity and distance, so as to renew nearby from afar or bring distant others within close reach. ‘Reach’ is redefined here as ‘the ability of the state to permeate everyday life or to make itself present … at a distance’ (Allen and Cochrane, 2010: 1074), which then pre-conditions the intensified and mediated relations of power and transforms the power geometries (located and fixed space–power nexus) into power topologies (mundane and fluid geographies of power, see Allen, 2011: 290–291). Ghertner (2017), on the other hand, develops an alternative framework with what he coins ‘the topological state’. Shifting the focus from the conduct of the state to that of the local people, he recognises the vernacular ways in which ‘provisional access to a state apparatus’ is enabled (Ghertner, 2017: 737), eventually rendering the state functioning ‘as a more porous form prone to manipulation and rule bending’ (p. 745). On top of the difference between the two accounts – on the state’s making of reach and the grassroots and conjunctural agency of shaping proximate connections – we suggest that together they mark two key moments that demonstrate the validity of the topological perspective in interrogating the prosaic geographies of power and stateness (see Painter, 2006). This validity can also be clearly recognised in some recent discussions on the reassembling of governmental techniques (Collier, 2009; Harvey, 2012) and the politics of urban densities (McFarlane, 2016; Zhao, 2020), among other related topics.

The popularity of this topological approach, however, requires further reflection. Instead of taking the topology as ‘a satisfactory synonym for relationality’, Martin and Secor (2014: 435) aptly remind us to attend more to the processes through which ‘those relations are repetitively reproduced, and yet continually changed’. A topological view, in other words, is to focus on the rules of connection, disconnection and transformation, rather than simply claiming that certain things or forces are related to each other, as if this has been turned into another kind of ‘spatial truth’. The attention to the patterns of correlation also marks Collier’s (2009) key concern in his Foucauldian account of the topologies of power. He recognises the break in Foucault’s writing on biopolitics and the state, and foregrounds the changing arrangements of governmental elements and their connective properties to reflect on the bio-politics of the population. The topological approach, in this view, would require us to ‘trace certain techniques and technical mechanisms from one context to the other’ (Collier, 2009: 100), so as to make the new topologies of power intelligible. This approach is not something set a priori or that has by default been a panacea to better investigate the spatiality–power nexus. Instead of essentialising the topological approach, our task is to look into the grounded and actually existing spatial and power dynamics in making certain reaches possible or distances being cut across – often also with their own limits. In this process, it is crucial to interrogate together – rather than isolate between – the topology and the topography, the connection and the rupture, the reproduction and the transformation and the arrangement and the rearrangement (see, for instance, Abdullah et al., 2023).

This reflection has an echo from the past, when researchers on the Actor Network Theory worked hard to explore the spatialities of heterogeneous manners of ‘the social’ (see particularly Law and Mol, 2001; Mol and Law, 1994). Instead of making a dualism between the topography and the topology, as was premised on in Allen’s works, they take a radical view and see different spatialities as diverse manifestations of the social topologies: the regions are with ‘old and secure’ solidity, the networks are newer with formality yet still bounded, and the fluid is without boundaries and allows leakage, for instance (Mol and Law, 1994: 644). On top of this, and more relevant to our discussions here, they bring to the fore ‘the inter-topological effects’ as the primary issue to attend to when dealing with more than one spatiality. When the networks are generating new regions ‘by crossing boundaries and spreading themselves’ (Mol and Law, 1994: 649), for instance, a certain type of inter-topological effect is at work and induces what Latour (1986) would call the ‘immutable mobile’. Similarly, the flows of elements could sometimes lead to ‘variation without boundaries and transformation without discontinuity’, which in turn paves the way for the rise of a fluid space (Mol and Law, 1994: 658), characterised not by breaks or disruptions but rather by gradual adaptation (Law and Mol, 2001: 614). This pattern marks another kind of inter-topological effect where the object is turned into a ‘mutable mobile’, one that changes its shape gradually as it flows, cutting across regions and/or networks, yet at the same time maintaining a shape constancy.

When the ‘Eastern frontier of Shenzhen’ is being configured, how can we account for the roles of Shenzhen and Shanwei authorities respectively in the complicated scalar and territorial pattern? Shall we take Shenzhen as an ‘immutable mobile’ that has been replicating and spreading its own socio-spatiality simply by crossing boundaries and cutting across distances? Or is it more appropriate to examine whether and how the authorities, images and landscapes of both Shenzhen and Shanwei have been transformed in this process, more akin to ‘mutable mobiles’? In this paper, we want to draw on the above discussion on the inter-topological effect and propose the extended local territory as our analytical concept. Recognising and reconciling both the extensive (topography) and the intensive (topology), this concept aims to illustrate how and how far SSCZ is co-configured with both extensive territoriality and intensive locality. On the one hand, Shenzhen has indeed turned into a model ‘place-object’ in the state’s territorial agenda, embodying a more advanced urban economy, society and landscape in the view of both the central and the provincial authorities, which should be spread elsewhere to tackle regional unevenness as an ‘immutable mobile’. But on the other hand, the local remaking of this Shenzhen socio-spatiality in SSCZ does not manage to dissolve the gap between two places at all. While Shanwei concurs with the view on Shenzhen’s advanced-ness and would capture this opportunity to pursue economic growth and achieve their own aspirations, the long-lasting local conditions are not ready for a complete or smooth replication of Shenzhen.

The integrity of Shenzhen as a ‘place-object’ is hence challenged and disrupted, in particular by existing institutional arrangements and boundaries (hierarchical) and local concerns and demands in SSCZ (regional). Here, two different types of localities have to encounter and play with each other in configuring SSCZ – the locality of Shenzhen as a ‘place-object’ and that of SSCZ, rooted in the local history and geography and pre-conditioning what the zone is and could be. Also, these intensified localities have to come across the solid and ‘old’ state space (together with all the institutions that are involved), which is also in the way of making the ‘immutable mobile’. Because of these tensions and interactions, the gap and distance between Shenzhen and Shanwei are only partly traversed and hardly dissolved (cf. Allen, 2011), with Shenzhen’s reach as a ‘place-object’ made and felt in SSCZ to a certain extent while also being limited. The meaning of seeing through the inter-topological effects hence emerges vividly: it is at boundaries between the extensive and the intensive, the immutable and the mutable, the mobile and the immobile and the local and the trans-local that we can best illustrate the ways in which spatiality and power are imbued with each other in SSCZ. Our task, to summarise, is to draw on this inter-topological view and trace the patterns of correlation in the mundane geographies of power that are configuring the extended local territory– in terms of replication, rupture, connection and gradual adaptation for example.

The following sections will examine the Shenzhen–Shanwei Special Cooperation Zone empirically to scrutinise the scalar-territorial dynamics and inter-topological effects in making the ‘Eastern frontier of Shenzhen’. Our investigation focuses on the multi-faceted state territorial strategies and manoeuvres of various actors in this case. Semi-structured interviews and participant observations were conducted during five spells of fieldwork in Shenzhen and SSCZ between July 2018 and April 2021. We conducted 35 interviews with various key figures in the place-making process, including the officials in Shenzhen and Shanwei municipal governments and the SSCZ management committee. We had another 11 interviews with those who witnessed or experienced the development of SSCZ, including urban planners, academics as well as local residents living or working in the zone. On average, each interview was around one hour in duration. We also collected and compiled secondary data to triangulate our findings with other sources, including statistical yearbooks, government reports and local news reports between 2011 and 2022.

The scalar-making of ‘special cooperation’

The ‘special cooperation’ narrative was first and foremost manifested in a public speech by Wang Yang, then top leader of Guangdong province, when he paid a visit to Shanwei in 2011 and elaborated on his vision of further developing SSCZ:

The mode of cooperation should surpass paired support with friendship and lead instead to coordinated and mutually beneficial development. For this purpose, we must move from one-way transfer to special cooperation between both sides, (Yangcheng Evening News, 2011; emphasis added).

Along with this vision, SSCZ was turned into a joint development zone between Shenzhen and Shanwei, which marks an alternative approach of ‘special cooperation’ and paves the way for the spreading of Shenzhen’s socio-economic and material elements, into SSCZ. Being empowered to establish mutually beneficial partnerships with Shanwei, Shenzhen was expected to ‘play a more critical role than a provider of economic aid’, as instructed by Wang Yang (interview with a Shenzhen official, 11 July 2018). Accordingly, Shenzhen municipal government has been striving for greater control in SSCZ, so as to offer a ‘Guangdong Model’ and address the national concerns of tackling regional unevenness (interview with an SSCZ official, 25 December 2019). This aspiration had also been recognised by Hu Chunhua, the succeeding top leader of Guangdong. During his visit to SSCZ in 2017, Hu declared that

the existing mode of Shenzhen–Shanwei joint management can no longer meet the needs of SSCZ’s rapid development. It is imperative to change the collaboration from a temporary, assistance-based mode to one that is appropriate for long-term production, operation, and management. (Shenshan Yearbook Editorial Committee, 2018)

As such, SSCZ embarked on a new administrative mode with Shenzhen’s overall management in September 2017.

Concurring with the ‘special cooperation’ narrative, Shanwei has been embracing this new mode by emphasising its comparative advantage of territory, part of which is ready for further development in SSCZ. We can illustrate this issue more clearly with some numbers. While Shenzhen has been generating almost the highest GDP per capita among Chinese cities, it has been constrained by its limited territory, with only 1997 km² in total, which is at more than 50% land development intensity (First Finance, 2021). Shanwei, on the other hand, is much bigger, with 5271 km² of territory, while it is ranked last in terms of economic growth rate in Guangdong. The two cities’ respective aspirations of spatial expansion and economic development could hence be articulated together to ‘hook up’ the provincial agenda of regional development. This is also evidenced by our interview with a SSCZ official:

The complementarity between Shenzhen and Shanwei is much stronger than that between any other cities. From a political-strategic view, such cooperation is in line with the trend of coordinated development. If Shenzhen cooperates with Dongguan or Huizhou (another two developed cities in PRD), it might be joked as a ‘club of the rich’ and will lose much of its strategic significance. (Interview with SSCZ official, 7 January 2020)

Indeed, the multi-scalar making of ‘special cooperation’ had its strategic significance recognised before long. In 2019, SSCZ gained recognition from the central government and was designated as a national demonstration zone of regional coordination (The State Council, 2019). In other words, the legitimacy of Shenzhen’s extra-territorial authority has been endorsed by the central and provincial governments’ concern with tackling regional unevenness through spreading Shenzhen’s advanced-ness. This explains why and how Shenzhen is turned into a model ‘place-object’ in the state’s territorial agenda, referring to a more advanced economy, society and landscape to be replicated and expanded. We now turn to the conducts of both Shanwei and Shenzhen in enabling and conditioning such a vision, which eventually paved the way for the rise of extensive territoriality in SSCZ.

The rise of extensive territoriality

In line with the territorial arrangement of promoting coordinated regional development in the form of replicating Shenzhen’s advanced-ness in SSCZ, a series of administrative reforms have been carried out, involving both Shanwei’s concessions on jurisdictional management and Shenzhen’s increasing authority on local issues. In the first stage (before 2017), to better cooperate with Shenzhen in driving economic development, Shanwei delegated a total of 188 economic management functions to SSCZ and only kept its role of social management in the zone. Meanwhile, staff members of the SSCZ authority were co-dispatched by Shenzhen and Shanwei. For example, the Party Secretary of SSCZ was from Shanwei while the Director was from Shenzhen; Shenzhen officials were in general appointed to manage economic affairs while Shanwei officials were responsible for social affairs. With the transfer of local management responsibilities, the subjects involved in SSCZ started to produce a more topological space with institutional continuity that links Shenzhen to SSCZ in a closer way, where according to a top leader of Shanwei, the ‘Shenzhen Special Economic Zone now comes to Shanwei’s doorstep’ (Shenshan Yearbook Editorial Committee, 2016). Furthermore, the idea of the ‘Eastern frontier’ was promoted to further showcase the extensive territoriality of Shenzhen. The retreat of Shanwei from managing SSCZ made an institutional void to be filled with Shenzhen’s jurisdictional power, which in turn made the reach of Shenzhen increasingly palpable.

The extensive territoriality was further intensified in the second stage (after 2017), when SSCZ came under Shenzhen’s overall management, with leadership positions all taken up by Shenzhen officials. Illustrating the direct presence and intense impacts of Shenzhen authorities, our interviewees often address a key transition from personnel ‘dispatch’ to ‘appointment’. Dispatch, as a method of personnel transfer conducted in the first stage, was a form of cross-border administrative aid: officials from Shenzhen would only have a term of three years, the renewal of which was subject to approval from both Shenzhen and Shanwei. Appointment, on the other hand, implies that Shenzhen municipal government can appoint officials directly for SSCZ, with no restrictions on the length of the term or its renewal. This depicts vividly Shenzhen’s consolidation of its political–territorial authorities in places beyond its border, gradually promoting ‘the production of the continuity necessary for the existence of legitimate territory’ (Lussault, 2016: 114) in and through its extensive territoriality.

Topological continuities as such have not only reconfigured the local state power, but also elicited strong responses from local residents and enterprises keen to invest in the zone, both of whom aspire to benefit from the spreading of Shenzhen’s advanced-ness. Being informed that Shenzhen had been granted power of overall management, ‘some villagers started to engage in unauthorised land and housing development, aiming to capture the expected increase of land values, which might be induced by the possible incorporation of SSCZ into Shenzhen’ (Interview with an SSCZ official, 13 September 2018). In addition, local residents in SSCZ were eager to transfer their hukou to Shenzhen and turn themselves into ‘Shenzhen people’ (see further discussion in the next section). According to a local report:

The local residents fully support Shenzhen’s overall management, and even take the hukou transfer for granted. Some villagers believe that if their hukou could not be transferred to Shenzhen, then the term ‘special cooperation’ is an exaggeration, and they will visit government offices or write letters to lodge complaints. (SSCZ Management Committee, 2018)

The market actors are also optimistic about this extensive territoriality. We were told by an enterprise manager that ‘as long as Shenzhen enables its authority to be exercised, SSCZ would be half the success’ (Interview with manager, 18 December 2018). With the rise of topological connections in SSCZ, the number of enterprises that are interested in making investment has been increasing dramatically. For example, in the first half of 2018, more than 300 enterprises visited SSCZ (mostly from Shenzhen), which exceeded the figure for the whole year in 2017. By the end of 2018, 87% of enterprises that settled down in SSCZ were from Shenzhen (Shenshan Yearbook Editorial Committee, 2019), which further evidences the economic effects of Shenzhen’s extensive authority and territoriality in SSCZ.

The material replication of place-object

Following the institutional changes towards extensive territoriality, we also witnessed the transplanting of Shenzhen-based facilities and Shenzhen-style landscapes in SSCZ, which marks a further step towards replicating Shenzhen as a model ‘place-object’. This spatial transformation first unfolded with the reorientation of SSCZ’s urban function in its new master plan, formulated by the Shenzhen municipal government and incorporated into the Shenzhen City Master Plan (2017–2035). SSCZ was recognised as the ‘Eastern Gateway of Greater Bay Area, New Centre of Guangdong Eastern Coastal Economic Belt, and the Extended Zone of Shenzhen Self-dependent Innovation’. In this way, national and regional strategies were incorporated into Shenzhen’s ambition and vision of remaking SSCZ, rendering the image of ‘Eastern frontier’ palpable, accessible and operational.

This aspiration of territorial extension is further supported by a new and high-standard transport system. Historically, Shanwei had long been marginalised with poor transport connections, which has been ‘sitting on 455-kilometer coastline yet with no port, and adjacent to Special Economic Zones yet with no access to railway’ (21st Century Business Herald, 2012). In the SSCZ Master Plan, a new transport system was set up, with three ports, four stations, four railways and five highways, aiming to integrate the zone into the ‘30-minute circle’ of Shenzhen. This is a key step of promoting the ‘Eastern frontier’, where topological manoeuvres were consolidated in and through topographical transformation of the zone, particularly in terms of transport connections and time–space compression for more investments.

Furthermore, the transplant of Shenzhen-based facilities and Shenzhen-style urban landscapes marks another strategy of local place-making to reshape SSCZ (see Figure 2). Taking education infrastructures as an example, there has been neither a middle nor a high school in this zone for decades, and local students have had to leave their hometowns to get education opportunities elsewhere. On the other hand, the rapid expansion of urban population in Shenzhen induced a severe shortage in land provision for building up new schools. The two dilemmas were well resolved together in and through SSCZ. Nanshan district government in Shenzhen signed an agreement with SSCZ in 2018 to introduce high-quality educational resources ranging from kindergarten to high school. This was soon put into practice: a 12-acre school campus was built in just two years, aiming to teach with the same standard as Shenzhen Nanshan Foreign Language School, one of the most prestigious schools in Shenzhen. Shenzhen also issued a High School Construction Plan (2020–2025) in 2020 and proposed constructing four education parks for new high schools, including one in SSCZ that would involve a total investment of 3.3 billion yuan (about $ 450 million, see SSCZ Management Committee, 2021).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

Shenzhen facilities and landscapes in SSCZ (top: Peking University Shenzhen Hospital; bottom: Shenzhen Nanshan Foreign Language School).

In terms of medical care, as the first Shenzhen medical institution that settled down in SSCZ, the SSCZ Branch of Peking University Shenzhen Hospital also indicates that the medical operation at SSCZ has been incorporated into Shenzhen’s medical system. As for other urban utility systems, such as gas, water and public transport, most of them have also been taken over by public or private sectors from Shenzhen. These changes in both urban landscapes and social services not only visualise the territorial authority of Shenzhen, but also produce a socio-spatial pattern underlined by the lure of Shenzhen’s advanced-ness, which plays a crucial role in legitimatising the new political–territorial conjuncture in SSCZ.

To conclude, the operation and integration of various territorial ideas, technologies and practices together enable the development of SSCZ, and this in turn shows alternative approaches to the (re-)imagination and production of extended territory in city-region making. This zone hence illustrates well how and how far the local territory, as a politically contested arena, has been (re-) made topologically by the multi-scalar power relations that are involved. In this sense, we should attend to the relatedness and extendedness of power topology in spatial politics and seek to locate their material configurations in variegated forms. Instead of foregrounding the administrative levels or pre-given boundaries per se, it would be more helpful to capture the porous and flexible nature of boundaries and explore the territorial modalities that are getting increasingly elastic and extensive. This marks a promising approach to better decode the process of territorial differentiation, circulation and calculation in terms of city-region making, both in and beyond China. There are still gaps, nevertheless, in the local replication of this Shenzhen ‘place-object’, since the tensions among localities and the institutional underpinnings of scalar politics are at best partly resolved. In this regard, there are always limits to the capacity of Shenzhen as an immutable mobile in reshaping SSCZ. We will now turn to such tensions and local conditions that are at work.

The challenged economic leverage

Since the establishment of SSCZ, Shenzhen has been working hard to render sensible its economic influence in the zone by implementing a series of industrial policies. They signed industrial transfer agreements with Shanwei in 2011, designated SSCZ as a key area for industrial transformation and upgrading in 2012 and provided equal treatments with preferential policies and efficient services in 2015. The Shenzhen authorities were very confident in their capabilities, through such policy schemes, to develop SSCZ. However, the reality in the zone did not echo this grand vision, especially in its early years. For example, in contrast to the commitment that Shenzhen would transfer 4000 industrial projects to SSCZ by 2015, the reality is that only 244 projects were contracted and 13 were put into full operation from 2011 to 2016. Moreover, SSCZ’s share of the total GDP in Shanwei was only 4.9% in 2016, contributing little to the latter’s economic take-off (Shenshan Yearbook Editorial Committee, 2016).

The slow progress reflects the limit of Shenzhen’s economic leverage in SSCZ, and our interviewees offered some clues to better understand this. The reason was straightforward in the first stage of SSCZ (before 2017): ‘those enterprises would hesitate to invest here as long as Shenzhen does not really come into SSCZ’ (Interview with SSCZ official, 25 December 2019). In other words, Shenzhen was expected to play a dominant role, much the same way as how Allen talked about the arm’s-length reach and relational proximity: ‘the mutable geometry involved is less concerned with … their inscribed position, and more interested in what works, say, to hold authority in place’ (Allen, 2011: 292). Yet, with no adjustment of administrative division, Shenzhen failed to make its spatial leverage and presence sensible or visible. In another interview, we were informed that even when Shenzhen started its overall management of SSCZ in the second stage, the structural constraints still prevented it from promoting the local business environment.

While Shenzhen has made substantial efforts in attracting investment, it is we town governments who are in charge of enterprise service and management, including land expropriation, business qualification review and safety production supervision. However, we are understaffed and lack the power of administrative enforcement. Previously, the Haifeng county government often sent personnel to assist us in routine management; now, with the retreat of Shanwei, Haifeng is also reluctant to continue its involvement, which results in much lower efficiency of administration and hence diminishes the enthusiasm for investment. (Interview with town official, 19 April 2021)

This is a moment when the tension between the ‘immutable mobile’ and the local conditions is vividly presented. Even though Shenzhen manages to spread its economic influences and ‘advanced-ness’, this mobility is constrained by the regions that have are with ‘old and secure’ solidity(Mol and Law, 1994), showcasing the dialectics between the extensive and the intensive while also highlighting the significance of locality and power hierarchy in better understanding the inter-topological effects at work.

Troubling political authority

Not only the economic leverage, but also the political authority of Shenzhen has been situated in tensions, if not struggles. This situation could be illustrated through a case of local mobilisation we learned about in our fieldwork, which happened at the beginning of making SSCZ in the early 2010s. At that time, the management committee of SSCZ planned to build a road to connect the four towns in the zone, which required town governments and local villagers’ support for land expropriation. One of the town mayors convened a meeting with villagers - not to persuade them, but instead to mobilise them to boycott this plan. The tension between the management committee and town governments was first and foremost induced by the vague connotation of the term ‘joint management’, which lacked legal instructions and bureaucratic clarification. These towns were under Shanwei’s jurisdiction and the SSCZ management committee did not get administrative endorsements for its political technologies and conducts. Unmatched authorities and non-affiliated bureaucrats hence led to an impasse of city-region making.

While direct confrontations as such gradually disappeared afterwards, especially in the second stage of SSCZ, nonconfrontational yet disobedient local responses continued setting the limit of transplanting the ‘immutable mobile’. For instance, the SSCZ management committee initiated a project on rural environmental beautification. This effort, however, met with indifference from local villagers and was eventually stopped ‘as they argue this is an encroachment on their territory’ (Interview with an SSCZ official, 18 April 2021). Similar cases are so common that the officials we interviewed often complained to us: ‘what we have been striving to do progressed very slowly since people here remain suspicious of this cooperation’ (Interview with an SSCZ official, 13 July 2018).

Moments like this reveal the power dynamics involved in the encounter between the ‘immutable mobile’ and local conditions in SSCZ, where Shenzhen’s aspiration of materialising its extensive territoriality is undermined by the grassroots politics rooted in local history and geography. These tensions in and between localities also invite us to attend more carefully to the ‘local’ dimension in the production of ‘extended local territory’, where the intensive locality has always been challenging, interrupting and setting the limit of boundary crossing and distance traversing.

The suspended social transformation

The tension between the extensive territoriality and the intensive locality has been further evidenced by the undelivered commitment to hukou transfer, which was an important tactic of Shenzhen to consolidate its authority in SSCZ. The hukou system in China is a key institutional arrangement of social welfare provision for different social groups. Since the quantity and quality of welfare depend on each place’s economic strength (Chan, 2010b), the prosperity of Shenzhen is hence translated into much better social welfare provision than that of Shanwei. In this context, getting Shenzhen hukou became extremely attractive for SSCZ residents. This expectation was in turn deployed tactically by Shenzhen officials. In August 2018, for instance, a deputy mayor of Shenzhen declared that ‘local residents’hukou in SSCZ will be transferred to Shenzhen’ (Nanfang Daily, 2018). Enterprise employees working in SSCZ would also expect to be granted Shenzhen hukou, which marks another way to attract more ‘talented’ people.

This hukou commitment was arguably the most exciting news for residents and workers in SSCZ, as mentioned earlier. However, whether Shenzhen can really deliver on its commitment remains uncertain as there has been no precedent of transferring local people’s hukou without the adjustment of administrative division. Indeed, more than five years have passed since the deputy mayor announced the above plan, but SSCZ residents are still waiting while enterprise employees are not assured of getting Shenzhen hukou either. This suspension can be partly explained by concerns of the central and provincial governments about the risk of ‘hegemonic localism’. To avoid Shenzhen being regionally ‘hegemonic’, administrative restructuring has not been put on the agenda, which therefore prevents the transfer of hukou for SSCZ residents. Indeed, an interviewee reminded us that the media coverage of the deputy mayor’s hukou commitment had already been withdrawn from the Internet (Interview with an SSCZ official, 2 November 2020).

Once again, this scenario shows us another limit of the extensive territoriality in making the ‘Eastern frontier’. Even though this project embodies a new political framing of territorial (re-)making towards city-region development, it is by no means a singular political–spatial action to territorialise social and material transformation once and for all. The role of the central and provincial governments, as well as Shanwei authorities, still looms large, often casting intensive shadows over the extensiveness of Shenzhen and challenging and disrupting its otherwise significant social, political and economic effects.