Feature town development for inclusive urban development? The case of the Jadeware Feature Town in Yangzhou,China

Abstract

This article examines the current wave of feature town development in China, a key pillar of China’s new type urbanization strategy. It is based on a case study of a feature town in Yangzhou, which is being developed within Wantou Township, with a focus on tourism nominally connected with the jadeware industry through public–private partnership (PPP). The article first demonstrates how the local government took advantage of inflated institutional incentives and pursued speculative construction and commodification of places. Although PPP introduced new dynamics to project financing and operation, this Jadeware Feature Town project, integral to urban-centric socio-spatial transformations of Wantou, marginalized existing inhabitants, sustained a land-based accumulation and reproduced an urban bias. The experience of the Jadeware Feature Town deviates from the national urbanization strategy’s emphasis on inclusion and equity and raises concerns over whether feature town development, or PPPs, can offer an alternative to exploitative, exclusionary land-based urbanization.

Keywords

Feature town development urban entrepreneurialism policy mobility state politics public–private partnership (PPP)Yangzhou

After intensive urbanization for three decades, China now hosts the world’s largest urban population. While contributing to economic growth and improving the living standards of millions, the drastic reconfiguration of Chinese cities has left China with a bitter legacy of widening social gaps, empty real estates, environment degradation, and housing unaffordability, as reflected in the debates on ‘urban pathology’ (Sorace and Hurst, 2016). Acutely aware of these socio-ecological challenges while committed to further urbanization, the Chinese state has been exploring different strategies to move away from the current exploitative and exclusionary land-based urban development towards a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable urban development.

This article examines the development of feature towns (tese xiaozhen) in China. A feature town can be organized around an administrative township, an urban agglomeration or a district within a city. As suggested by its name, each feature town must exploit a unique characteristic, namely a place-specific advantage. By design, this strategy seems to have the potential to resolve the problem of a disconnect between capital and labour caused by urbanization as land and real estate development commonly found in China and in many parts of the Global South (Schindler, 2017). It started as a local experiment and was promoted nationally in 2016, as one of the strategies to deliver an ‘innovative, coordinated, green, inclusive, and shared’ development and to meet the aims of the New Type Urbanisation Plan (2014–2020) (China State Council, 2014). It has triggered a rush in constructing feature towns across China.

A few pioneering studies have explored the birth of this strategy, its evolution into a national programme and the potential problems in upscaling an approach that began as a local experiment (Miao and Phelps, 2019a; Zou and Zhao, 2018). Recent media reports seem to reaffirm their doubts on the scalability of the development strategy. According to National Development and Reform Commission, 419 recognized feature towns were deemed problematic because they lacked a unique strong industrial agglomeration, made little actual progress or did not even exist (People’s Daily in Xinhuanet, 2019). In 2020, it also identified that some feature towns were damaging the natural environment, violating existing regulations, or sugar-coating real estate projects (Ding, 2020). The question then is, what went wrong when translating this strategy across places?

This article attempts to answer this question through an in-depth case study of the Jadeware Feature Town project in Wantou, Yangzhou. Bringing together the literature on entrepreneurial governance and policy mobility, I suggest that the feature town strategy can be seen as an example of entrepreneurial statecraft. As this strategy travels across places, borrowing from Peck (2011: 793), it is not simply transferred over spaces but is in fact transformed by its journey. In particular, through the empirical case, I aim to draw attention to the roles played by state politics in diffusing this entrepreneurial strategy. I will show how incentives for local governments to pursue this strategy were inflated by the hierarchical competitive recognition system for feature towns. In the present context of tightening budget control, lacking practical guides on how to build it on the ground, the feature town development strategy created an opening for local governments to sustain speculative construction and commodification of spaces. This is a key reason behind the rush of feature town development. It also partially explains why many feature town projects were unable to deliver on their promises, including the case of the Jadeware Feature Town project. As discussed later, while jade was claimed to be the defining identity of Wantou’s feature town project, it was in fact tourism developed around the jadeware industry that would become the main industrial base. To further experiment in feature town development, the local government adopted public–private partnership (PPP)—a novel instrument for large-scale mixed-function territorial development in China. This instrument did not change the ways in which land clearance was organized nor did it seek to involve meaningfully local communities in the planning of the project. In total, 1,620 households were or would be displaced from the planned area, excluding jadeware craftworkers and shop owners who were renters. They were treated by the coalition of the local government and the developers as passive stakeholders in, if not barriers to, capital accumulation through land development.

The article stems from my research on the mega-urbanization project, Guangling New City, which is situated within Wantou Township and in close proximity to the Jadeware Feature Town project (see Figure 1). It draws upon published materials and planning documents from government agencies at different levels. Between 2018 and 2019, I also conducted 41 interviews, including 15 informants from the villagers’ committees, the township government and municipal agencies, 11 business owners and 15 local households. I mobilized my local contacts and used snowball sampling to recruit participants from the local governments. As discussed further below, the jadeware industry had been struggling for some time before my fieldwork due to declining consumer demand and the significantly delayed construction work related to the Jadeware Feature Town project. In fact, many craftworkers and shop owners had closed their businesses and left. I recruited interviewees involved in the jadeware trade from two main marketplaces. Two of them were local residents and the rest were renters. All of them kept a shop and eight of them were involved in various stages of jadeware production. Residents were chosen from two settlements that were prioritized for wholesale demolition. Four of them were interviewed inside their homes when other members of their families were present. The rest of the interviews were conducted on the doorsteps of their houses.

Figure 1.

Source: Based on map.baidu.com.

In what follows, I will discuss the conceptual foundations of this article, linking the debate on entrepreneurial statecraft and policy mobility. I will then situate the Jadeware Feature Town project within the context of real estate–driven urban expansion in Yangzhou. After this, I will discuss the patterns of land development in constructing the Jadeware Feature Town and show how rural actors were repeatedly marginalized and excluded in territorial restructuring and land development.

I. State Entrepreneurialism, Policy Mobility and In Situ Marginalization

One main inspiration for this article is the debates on entrepreneurial statecraft. In his seminal article published in the late 1980s, Harvey noticed a shift of urban governance towards urban entrepreneurialism in many Western capitalist economies (Harvey, 1989). Central to his thesis is inter-urban competition, which disciplines local governments, with a declining industrial base and tax income, to reorient their focus from providing public services and welfare towards attracting footloose capital and fostering economic development (Harvey, 1989: 7). This emphasis on market discipline as a cause of entrepreneurial governance has been put to the test in later studies. Linking it with the parallel discussion on East Asian development states and their transitions, as argued by Miao and Phelps (2019b), urban entrepreneurialism is shaped as much by market forces external to the state as by the enduring influence of the developmental state and endogenous changes internal to the bureaucratic field. Such a perspective is also in line with recent practice-based theorizations of entrepreneurial statecraft. Urban entrepreneurialism is considered to encapsulate many different entrepreneurial governing practices motivated by multiple, and sometimes incompatible, agendas (Acuto, 2013; Phelps and Miao, 2020). Of these, as Lauermann (2018: 212) argued, competitive growth is a parallel instead of a generative logic.

Research on urban China testifies to the diverse causality and forms of urban entrepreneurialism. Extant literature centres around the changing power dynamics and relations within the state (Chien, 2013; Shen et al., 2020; Su, 2015; Wu, 2003). The established understanding is that local governments in post-reform China have gained considerable autonomy in managing socio-economic affairs within their jurisdictions. As the main providers of local public goods without corresponding fiscal resources (He et al., 2016), local governments have pursued a host of entrepreneurial strategies to generate fiscal income and meet development targets. Their strategies range from directly running businesses through (quasi-)state organizations to indirectly facilitating capital accumulation through favourable policies in tax, land supply, etc. (Duckett, 1998; Oi, 1999; Wu, 2000). Since the 1990s, the focus of entrepreneurial development has shifted to land and real estate development, resulting in rapid reconfiguration of Chinese cities. This is often aided by local government financing platforms, the corporate arms of the local governments to circumvent budget control and access capital market. However, the central government still maintains control through various mechanisms. These include creating various zones (for policies and initiatives of experimental nature), adjusting territorial boundaries or administrative ranking of localities or appointing elite politicians (Cartier, 2015; Hsing, 2010; Wu, 2018). Therefore, although the logic of economic growth has been dominant, as Wu (2018) sought to highlight through the term ‘state entrepreneurialism’, the state and power relations between state units are important dimensions to understand the specificities of entrepreneurial governance in China.

Inspirations for entrepreneurial strategies come from both within and outside China. Extant literature on policy mobility provides important insights into the dynamics of policy diffusion across places and times. Set against rationalist assumptions of policy transfers, discussion in geography highlights the embeddedness, the multiscalarity and the infrastructures of policy generation and diffusion (McCann, 2011; Zhang, 2012). While research in the West tends to focus on transnational and local policy entrepreneurs in mobilizing and translating policies, literature on China tends to pay more attention to the role of state politics in shaping policy generation, learning, and mutation. This literature rejects the view of the Chinese political system as a rigid hierarchy; instead, it emphasizes flexibility, entrepreneurship, and innovation at different levels of the Chinese state and focuses on the interactions between different layers of the state in policy processes. The central government, through its mandates or official recognition, serves as an important driver of innovative solutions to governing problems and their diffusion. Subnational governments are not passive but actively adapt these innovations to accommodate local conditions and their own needs.

However, extant studies differ in their views of the implications of this interactive mode of policy experiment and diffusion. For Wang (2009), controlled experiments and learning within and across places improve the adaptive capacity and resilience of the Chinese state. Heilmann (2008) concurred with this assessment and added that this approach allowed for bottom-up initiatives and local knowledge to be incorporated into policymaking and function as a needed self-correcting mechanism for a highly centralized, bureaucratic and authoritarian system. However, Heilmann (2008) also warned that local experimenters may exploit the opportunity and smuggle in their own agendas in the guise of experiments. Similarly, Zhou (2010) noted collusion between lower-level authorities, a built-in problem of the Chinese state bureaucracy, often leads to displacement of the intended policy goals of upper-level governments. Other scholars have critiqued the ‘fever’-like responses of local governments to the central government’s call for policy entrepreneurship, which often lead to wasteful and disingenuous efforts to exploit political opportunities and address local governments’ own agendas rather than, as intended, making space for local initiatives to resolve identified problems (Shiuh-Shen, 2013; Zhou, 2017).

The consequences of China’s land-based entrepreneurial development strategies for families on the receiving end have been a recurring theme of existing research. There is a wealth of literature on the material violence, expulsion, and dispossession involved in land expropriation and clearance (He and Xue, 2014; Hsing, 2010). However, this literature has overlooked the predicament of actors who are caught up in the development process but are not yet displaced, a situation which Wang and Wu (2019) define as in situ marginalization. As development of different parcels and organization of development activities are scheduled according to financial or political calculations, residents living inside the boundaries of planned projects endure declining living conditions caused by construction projects receiving higher priorities. Their lives become dependent upon the health of these development projects and the uncertain land market. In the event of project delays or cancellations, they bear all the negative externalities. To make it worse, project companies or governing bodies set up to oversee development projects are mainly concerned with economic goals and territorial organization, whereas concerns of social responsibility are left to formal state institutions of localities hosting development projects. As rent distribution is progressively skewed towards upper-tier governments, lower-tier governments’ capacity in addressing in situ marginalization is further undermined.

Feature town development can be considered as an example of state entrepreneurialism. It emerged as a local experiment in Zhejiang province in 2015 when the province was confronted with the lingering impacts of the global financial crisis on the export sector and searching for new engines of growth (Zou and Zhao, 2018). According to Qiang Li, then governor of Zhejiang province and the mastermind behind the development strategy, each feature town was expected to cultivate a unique industrial sector based on its natural endowment or existing strengths (Li, 2015). It was envisaged that territorial restructuring would mix functions of production, housing, and leisure, serving as a platform to foster collaboration between, governments, citizens, and businesses in the co-construction of places (Li, 2015). They would become testimonies to ‘innovative, coordinated, green, inclusive, and shared development’, the new development philosophy advocated by the Communist Party (Li, 2015).

The feature town development strategy received recognition from the central government in late 2015. It soon travelled beyond Zhejiang province and became a national programme, offering another instrument for the central government to shape local development priorities and direct local spending. The Party’s development philosophy still claimed to be the guiding values for feature town development and its espoused aims were similarly broad: facilitating economic transition, optimizing urbanization patterns, promoting institutional innovations and narrowing down rural–urban gaps (MHURD et al., 2016). It is clear that in both Zhejiang’s experiment and the national programme, the entrepreneurial strategy of feature town development was driven by goals beyond competitive economic growth. As I will illustrate through the empirical case in the next section, state politics played a critical role in translating and diffusing this strategy. Subnational governments actively exploited the opportunities and sought to bring the strategy in line with local conditions and preferences. In the case of the Jadeware Feature Town project, the district government turned it into a tourism-oriented land development project and furthered commodification of places.

II. Constructing Jadeware Feature Town in Yangzhou

1. The Land-based Urban Development and In Situ Marginalisation

In this section, I will take a detour and offer an overview of Wantou’s development trajectories, especially the mega-urbanization project, Guangling New City, launched in 2006. This urbanization project accelerated rapid territorial restructuring and the shift to land-based accumulation in Wantou. It was not simply the precedent to the Jadeware Feature Town project but transformed the governance of Wantou. Such an overview, thus, will help bring out the relations of interest behind the Jadeware Feature Town project. Moreover, representative of land-based accumulation model, the patterns of land development and marginalization inhering in the mega-urbanization project serves as a reference point for the analysis of the Jadeware Feature Town project.

Wantou sits at the eastern side of the city region of Yangzhou. Before 1978, agricultural production dominated the local economy. During the 1980s, consistent with what Oi (1999) observed in many other parts of rural China, villagers’ committees and the township government in Wantou acted like corporations and promoted the rural industrial economy. In 1988, there were 73 enterprises managed by the township government or villagers’ committees (Wantou Local Chronicle Editorial Committee, 2017). In the 1990s, as part of the continuing reform of the state-controlled economy (Naughton, 2007), the collective economy sector in Wantou underwent a similar ownership restructuring. According to the recollection of two retired cadres of villagers’ committees, the prevailing mentality at that time was to reform the management of collective enterprises altogether in order to keep government functions separated from business operations, regardless of the financial performance of these enterprises (interview, 2018). Consequently, even profitable businesses were privatized through management buyouts. To deal with the decline of the collective economy, several villagers’ committees promoted the growth of the tertiary sector, mainly through the development of retail marketplaces and logistics facilities. The marketplace for food, beverage, and toiletry products built in 1992, for instance, hosted more than 400 retailers and had a turnover of ¥1.6 billion in 2000 (Wantou Local Chronicle Editorial Committee, 2017).

The mega-urbanization project, Guangling New City, a signature project of the district government drastically transformed the economic organization in Wantou (see Figure 1). It has been a mixed blessing for rural actors. On the one hand, land development provided the township government and villagers’ committees with substantial income. This was particularly important for the township government, which had struggled to provide for public spending and operating costs (interview, 2018). On the other hand, this urbanization project altered the governing structure of Wantou and caused in situ marginalization (Wang and Wu, 2019). The planned new city covered four administrative villages of Wantou. The governing body and the project company set up for the new city took charge of territorial organization. Outpowered by them, the township government and the villagers’ committees remained responsible for social management and collective spending and were instructed to serve the interests of Guangling New City by any means necessary. Despite being positioned as grassroots organizations for self-government in law, villagers’ committees in practice had administratively become subordinates to the township government, which compromised their positions in the event of displacement and land clearance orchestrated by upper-level governments. In most instances, they were dispatched to the frontlines to persuade rural households to give up their land and to pacify discontented petitioners (interview, 2018).

Expropriation and development of land were conducted in a piecemeal manner. Consequently, despite some rural collectives and households remaining the legal owners of land within the project boundary, they had lost control of land uses in practice. Households in the remaining rural settlements within the planned new city suffered from deteriorating neighbourhood conditions caused by the construction work taking place. Knowing that all land would be cleared for building the new city, villagers’ committees had little incentive to invest in improving the built environment and collective facilities that would only be demolished at a later stage. An informant recalled their village’s response to the request to invest in water infrastructure maintenance:

the money [of the collective] did not come from thin air. It belonged to the ordinary people [of collective]. Why would we [the villagers’ committee] spend money on these projects now? It should be the responsibility of [the management committee of] the [Guangling] new city. (interview, 2018)

Villagers’ committees also lacked the resources to address the predicament of remaining households. Although they had received a sizeable income from land expropriation, this revenue was one-off and the villagers’ committees were under long-term fiscal pressure, due to the slow progress of the mega-urbanization project. Until all land has been expropriated and all collective assets liquidated, these villagers’ committees, as independent cost centres, must remain functional and have to finance their own operating costs, such as rent for the office spaces, pensions and salaries. According to one informant from a villagers’ committee, pensions for retired workers from collective enterprises and former village cadres cost around ¥2 million per year (interview, 2018).

Worse still, construction of the resettlement housing further deprived the township and villagers’ committees of development opportunities. To ensure the profitability of the mega-urbanization project, only two resettlement neighbourhoods were built within the planned new city while the rest were constructed on land outside it but still within Wantou boundaries (see Figure 1). To meet the development targets and to appreciate the value of collective assets, the township government in 2009 decided to capitalize on Wantou’s reputation and strength in jadeware production and ordered the villagers’ committees to pool financial resources into the construction of marketplaces for the design, polishing, production and trading of jade-related products (see Figure 1). Mobilized by the township government and the villagers’ committee, many local families surrounding the marketplaces also rented out spare rooms to jadeware craftworkers and traders as workshops or stores. The marketplaces were a success in the first few years, providing stable rental income for villagers’ committees and local families. In their heyday, according to a state official, it was estimated that there were nearly 1,000 shops or workshops in and around the marketplaces (interview, 2018). This was short-lived, however. Demand for jadeware products has declined substantially in recent years, especially from business gift buyers. According to one jadeware craftworker, only about 10% of shop owners and craftworkers were still operating, hoping that the market would go up (interview, 2018). To prevent the marketplace from turning into a ghost space, the villagers’ committees, as the landlords of the marketplaces, halved the rent for their tenants (interview, 2018).

In 2016, after the inspection tour by then Mayor Xie Zhengyi, redevelopment of Wantou’s remaining land was brought onto the political agenda, with the aim to make it more compatible with the image of the modernist new city (interview, a state official, 2018). The Feature Town project responds to the ambition of elite politicians but also presents a solution to the problems emerged from land-based development triggered by Guangling New City. If the feature town project is successful, it can give existing struggling projects in Wantou another boost. Improvements in the infrastructures and the built environment in general would inflate the land and real estate values in surrounding areas. This would benefit in particular Guangling New City project, which was severely delayed because of financial difficulty and the troubling relationship with the main land developer (interview, a state official, 2019). As in-kind resettlement had been phased out in Yangzhou, households displaced from the planned area of the feature town constituted an effective demand for resettlement housing. Residential real estates within Guangling New City were among the direct beneficiaries. Moreover, according to the planning of the feature town project, all heavy manufacturing industrial operations from the planned area and along the waterfront would be relocated, thus allowing the district government to further rationalize land use structure. Most new development projects on the other hand would be related to tourism. Increasing tourist arrivals were expected to resuscitate the jadeware marketplaces in Wantou. Additionally, as I will explain next, in the context of tightening budget control, national promotion of further experiments with feature town development strategy made additional funds and favourable policies available, thus making this strategy an appealing option for subnational governments.

2. Feature Town Development Strategy on the Move

In China, land development is constrained by a rigid hierarchal land use planning system (Lin, 2009) and a state-dominated financial system (Stent, 2016). Assembling land for development, thus, requires strenuous political bargaining. The endorsement from the central government for nationwide continued experiment in feature town development clears these obstacles.

According to the critical scholarship on policy mobility, development strategies and policies are socially produced to respond to context-specific urban problems (McCann, 2011). When they travel between places, they are subject to abstraction, selection, adaptation, and reinterpretation (McCann, 2011; Peck, 2011). The state-driven translation and diffusion of feature town development strategy has had two consequences. First, considerable ambiguities in terms of the meanings and functions of feature towns emerged when incorporating local knowledge of Zhejiang into a national controlled experiment, which can be partially attributed to the word zhen (or town in English), used in the official texts. Within the Chinese state structure, town is the lowest level administrative unit. In Zhejiang province, where the feature town strategy was born, a feature town need not be situated within the boundary of an administrative town. However, when this strategy was first introduced by the national authorities, only existing administrative townships were recognized as eligible hosts of feature town projects (MHURD et al., 2016). In December 2017, in view of the feature town construction boom sponsored by local governments, the national authorities further clarified the meaning of zhen in the feature town strategy. The adapted programme extended recognition to agglomerations with unique industrial sectors regardless of their locations (NDRC et al., 2017). A feature town could be an agglomeration within urban built areas, industrial parks, urban fringes or townships (NDRC et al., 2017). It was more about the built form rather than an administrative unit. This clarification brought the national programme closer to the original vision of Zhejiang.

This should not be taken lightly as a matter of semantics. How zhen is defined and how a feature town is recognized nationally shapes the responses of local governments. This then brings us to the second consequence. As the feature town strategy moves up and down within the Chinese state along vertical line, this led to the formation of a hierarchical competitive recognition system for feature towns. Authorities hosting feature town projects can compete for recognition through systems organized by upper-level authorities, thereby obtaining earmarked funds, favourable policies, etc. The layered recognition system significantly inflated the targets and incentives for feature town development.

On the national level, in addition to earmarked fiscal support, the central government between 2016 and 2017 instructed two policy banks (the China Development Bank and Agricultural Development Bank of China) and two joint-stock banks (the China Construction Bank and the Everbright Bank) to provide additional credit and prioritize projects related to feature town development when making their lending decisions (MHURD and ADB, 2016; MHURD and CCB, 2017; MHURD and CDB, 2017; MHURD and CEB, 2017). It also encouraged these financial institutions to explore more innovative financial products, such as collateralizing carbon emission rights, financial leasing and PPP, to support local governments to build feature towns. These directives are significant because since 2014, the central government has imposed stricter fiscal discipline on subnational governments in order to curb ballooning public debts. The revised Budget Law (The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, 2014) and the opinion on local financing platforms (The State Council, 2014) required subnational governments to fund future infrastructure spending through issuing bonds, forbade them to raise new debts and hardened the budget control. Feature town development, therefore, created an opening for subnational governments to raise capital.

The incentives from the central government had a strong demonstration effect. The provincial government of Jiangsu (where Li Qiang was reassigned a leading position in 2016) and the municipal government of Yangzhou followed in the footsteps of the central government and announced their own guidelines to encourage lower-level governments to enter into this nationwide competition for feature town development and recognition. When doing so, they inserted their own interpretation to bring feature town development more in tune with local conditions and their ambitions. On the provincial level, the aim announced in 2016 was to facilitate the development of 100 feature towns across 13 cities in its jurisdiction within 3–5 years (The Provincial Government of Jiangsu, 2016). Following the earlier definition of the national programme, provincially recognized feature towns were to be situated in administrative towns. They were required to attract inward investments of ¥3–5 billion in 3 years, the majority of which could not be related to real estate development (The Development and Reform Commission of the Jiangsu Province, 2017). In return, feature town authorities would receive ¥2 million in fiscal bonuses each year for 3 years (The Development and Reform Commission of the Jiangsu Province, 2017). If existing building structures were used or the proposed development projects were in alignment with the original purposes of the land, land use fees would be waived or reduced (The Development and Reform Commission of the Jiangsu Province, 2017). In addition, the provincial government allowed feature town authorities to appropriate 50% more rural land on top of the annual land use plans to meet the demands of land development (The Development and Reform Commission of the Jiangsu Province, 2017). Since hosting governments of feature town projects often had low credit ratings, the provincial government, in alliance with the China Development Bank and Jiangsu Guoxin Investment Group (a subsidiary of the Jiangsu State-owned Asset Supervision and Administration Commission), established a fund of ¥100 billion to finance the development of recognized feature towns.

On the municipal level, Yangzhou municipal government came up with its own plans to promote the development of 20 feature towns and encouraged them to compete for provincial and national recognition and by extension, for the associated funding and prestige (Yangzhou Municipal Government, 2017). Similar preferential policies in finance and land were introduced. Fiscally, it offered an earmarked match-up bonus of ¥6 million to feature towns recognized by the provincial government to be dispensed in instalments within 3 years and ¥3.5–5 million to those recognized by the municipal government depending on their performance (Yangzhou Municipal Government, 2017). As for land supply, the municipal government provided additional construction land of 66,667 m² for the development phase and reduced the fees for land used by industries prioritized by the municipal government (Yangzhou Municipal Government, 2017). If proposed development projects in feature towns were in the sectors of health and elderly care, culture, creativity, and design, or if feature town projects could utilize existing real estate stock, no additional charges were levied by the municipal government (Yangzhou Municipal Government, 2017).

The diffusion of the feature town development strategy, thus, testifies to the adaptive and interactive policy process in China (Wang, 2009). Both the provincial government of Jiangsu and the municipal government of Yangzhou sought to direct investments in feature towns to preferred sectors through regulatory and financial means when promoting the feature town development strategy. In doing so, however, they inflated the targets and incentives for feature town development. This phenomenon is not unique to Jiangsu or Yangzhou. Other provinces and municipalities responded enthusiastically in similar ways. Provincial governments of Guangdong, Guizhou, Sichuan, and Hebei, for instance, planned to construct 100 feature towns each within their jurisdictions and offered additional fiscal support to facilitate the development of these towns (Chen, 2018). Subnational governments’ efforts are bound to inflate the central government’s target of building 1,000 feature towns. Their enthusiasm is predictable. Uncertainty as to whether and when policies would change meant that they need to react rapidly before favourable policies and political opportunities disappear. They were able to do so because the central government provided no templates for feature town development except for some generic guidelines (e.g., fostering private participation, deepening institutional reform, etc.) and encouraged local governments to further experiment with different approaches to build feature towns on the ground.

In 2017, Wantou was formally enlisted by the district government into the feature town construction boom. In response to the central government’s call for further experiment, it did not follow the modality of the mega-urbanization project, Guangling New City, for the development of the Jadeware Feature Town in Wantou; instead, it chose the novel instrument PPP, which in the view of Harvey (1989) is an archetype of urban entrepreneurialism. Although PPP has been widely used in infrastructure development in China, it is rare to extend it for large-scale mixed-function urban development projects. In the next section, I will dissect this partnership scheme and its consequences for affected inhabitants.

3. Partnership of Capitals and Repeating Patterns of Marginalization

From the onset, the district government’s plan—with little input from extant land users and stakeholders—was to reconfigure the planned area for tourism consumption rather than directly supporting the jadeware sector. Extant jadeware marketplaces, part of the planned Jadeware Feature Town, were grouped under the category of infrastructure in the public procurement announcement. The only planned intervention for them was to renovate the building façade to ensure that their appearance would be aesthetically compatible with the planned Jadeware Feature Town project. Developments classified as the defining characteristic of the Jadeware Feature Town on the other hand were all related to tourism such as an industrial heritage theme park, three tourist accommodation zones (e.g., bed and breakfast, hotels), an exhibition centre, a tourist information centre and a tourist attraction featuring buildings constructed in architectural styles of Ming or Qing dynasty.

Focusing on tourism was, arguably, a savvy choice. First, Wantou is rich in natural and cultural resources. Two rivers running through Yangzhou intersect in Wantou, one of which is Grand Canal connecting Beijing and Hangzhou. This unique location turned Wantou into a hub for transport and trade in history. On the north of Wantou also lies a tourist attraction combining a zoo, a botanic garden and a park. Second, unlike typical urbanization projects, to be recognized as a feature town, the portion of land used for real estate developments must be restricted. Third, due to declining consumer demand, except for the major companies, small workshops and businesses in the jadeware sector were already struggling to stay financially afloat.

In addition to tourism-related investments, the Jadeware Feature Town project also involved public infrastructure developments, such as landscaping the waterfronts, cleaning the waters, building new roads and bridges and upgrading the façade of buildings to be retained in the planned area. It was estimated that costs for infrastructure alone would be slightly more than ¥3 billion, that is, 60% of the total costs for the Jadeware Feature Town project during the construction stage.

The capital required for the feature town project, especially for public infrastructure, raises an important question about its financing. The district government departed from the conventional land financing model—using land as a collateral to borrow money and finance land clearance and essential infrastructure development to prepare land for commodification and market exchanges (Wu, 2019); instead, it opted for PPP. This is partly because committing resources to the feature town project would drain much-needed resources from the district government to its mega-urbanization project, Guangling New City, which was on the brink of financial insolvency (interview, state officials, 2018 and 2019). Partly, it was because the central government was promoting PPP as a viable alternative to addressing local development needs and containing rising public debts. Like feature town development strategy, approved PPP projects come with additional earmarked financial support but from a different budget line.

To be clear, PPP as defined in Chinese regulatory frames is not semantically equivalent to PPP in the Western contexts. In Chinese policy texts, the English term, Public Private Partnership, is translated as and used interchangeably with the Chinese term—zhengfu yu shehui ziben hezuo, which literally means partnerships between the government and social capital. Shehui ziben, or social capital, here is an expansive category not limited to non-government or private capital (MoF et al., 2015). It also includes various species of state capital controlled by different layers of the state; for instance, the local government financing platforms, representing local state capital, are also allowed to be part of PPP as shehui ziben once they have set up a modern corporate system and cease to raise new debt for local governments (MoF et al., 2015).

The PPP regulatory frameworks, therefore, are designed to the advantage of capital external to the local governments. Given that the Jadeware Feature Town project mixed both for-public and for-profit developments, the next question then is, how can the district government make this project financially exciting to attract external investors? This brings us to the business model of this PPP-based Jadeware Feature Town project: this was centrally articulated in the district government’s invitation to public tendering and constituted its only key message regarding the guiding values for the Jadeware Feature Town project. As the tendering document made clear, the PPP contract would last 33 years, divided into a construction phase of 3 years and an operational phase of 30 years. This relatively long temporal horizon could in theory counter the short-termism of China’s territorial development and ensure consistency of political commitment (Chien and Woodworth, 2018). Since real estate developments must be restrained in the feature town project, there was a strong emphasis on asset formation and the recurring incomes that these assets generate. Investments and profits were expected to come from three sources: rent from commercial real estates, tourism revenues and fiscal subsidies. Fiscal subsidies included ¥461 million for infrastructures and ¥76 million for cultivating the feature industry, primarily the tourism industry, every year during the first decade of the operational phase. Operating revenues from tourism were estimated to generate an income of ¥407 million every year for the whole contractual period, constituting 65% of all cash income of this PPP project. Since the tourist revenues were calculated on the basis of projected future tourist arrivals, in response to the concerns expressed by interested tenderers during the bidding process, the district government offered to negotiate further behind closed door. These arrangements safeguarded potential investors from potential losses in the PPP deal.

Tenderers were evaluated on the basis of their credentials, financial performance and their track record in PPP projects. In the end, the PPP contract was awarded to the consortium consisting of Qinlü Chengshi Shangye Guanli LLC (QCSG), China Railway Construction Investment Group Co. Ltd (CRCIG) and China Railway Fifth Survey and Design Institute Group Co. Ltd (CRFSDIG). Together with the district government, the consortium established a project company in 2017 to oversee the Jadeware Feature Town development. The district government acquired 20% equity by contributing ¥0.2 billion to the project company. QSCG was controlled by private investors. Its share in the project company was later diluted after it brought in EREC ESTATED, a private equity fund investing in real estate development and asset acquisition globally. The biggest shareholder was CRCIG, which owned CRFSDIG. CRCIG was cross-listed in the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and owned by major state agencies such as China State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission and Central Huijin Asset Management Co. Ltd with the Chinese State Council as its ultimate beneficiary.

In terms of the shareholding structure, state capital controlled by national state agencies was dominant. The project company’s charter claimed that a branch of the Communist Party would be set up within the company and the board of directors would ask for opinions from the Party Secretary first when it comes to major business decisions. This corporate structure and governance may leave the impression that this PPP project is yet another example of what Shatkin (2017: 180) calls ‘state capitalist development’. If state capital is claimed to suffer from ‘mission creep’ (Tsai and Naughton, 2015: 10) by prioritizing political goals over economic ends, to what extent does the dominance of state capital in PPP affect the operation of capital through the Jadeware Feature Town project? In response to this question, an insider of the PPP deal and the project company repeatedly emphasized that the project company first and foremost followed the logic of capital in the sense that sociopolitical ends were secondary to profit maximization (interview, 2018). In the words of this interviewee,

the capital fund of 1 billion RMB plus the financial leverage of 4.7 billion RMB constitutes an investment. Unlike investment decisions of local government financing platforms or China Development Bank, there is no political mission to fulfil when it comes to the operation of this PPP project… As a market activity, the main interest is to maximise return on investment. (interview, 2018)

As the interviewee further explained, although the main shareholder of the project company, CRCIG, is controlled by the national government, it is also listed in the stock market, meaning its business practices must also be accountable to many non-state investors (interview, 2018). While the state actors investing in the project company may have social and political goals to pursue, they can only do so by redistributing their shares of the profits generated by the project company (interview, 2018). In short, as far as the project company is concerned, the ethos is to generate profits and maximize returns for the shareholders. In this context, it is no surprise that the district government, during the tendering stage, conceded and promised to absorb the risk of an underperforming tourist market by providing more subsidies if tourist arrivals in the operational phase of PPP were lower than projected.

Although PPP changed the financing and governance of land development, when it came to land clearance, it bore striking similarities to patterns of marginalization as seen earlier in the development of Guangling New City. According to the official calculation, 1,620 local households would be displaced from the site of the feature town project. Local residents were tokenistically consulted about their willingness to move out. This was done partly because they were the property owners and partly because their displacement was deemed by the feasibility study, conducted by consultants commissioned by the district government, to be a source of social risk. Whereas half of the interviewed families would prefer to stay put, this was not an option. Few interviewed families knew what would be built on the ruins of their homes. Some expressed an interest in renovating their houses to run bed and breakfast businesses. Unsurprisingly, they were not offered this opportunity, given that tourism was a main source of profit for the project company.

On average, each (to-be) displaced household would receive ¥2.8–3 million in compensation (interview, 2018). As monetary compensation had become the norm in Yangzhou, displacing local inhabitants all at once was too big a financial burden. Hence, displacement and land clearance were carried out gradually according to the schedules of the feature town project. For households I interviewed, it was certain that they had to move out, but they were not yet informed when and how. Living in places under transformation was to live in giant construction sites and put life plans and family projects on hold. Similar to households caught up in Guangling New City project, residents had to endure the nuisances, pollution and inconveniences caused by projects that were already under way, becoming marginalized in situ (Wang and Wu, 2019). One neighbourhood, for instance, had been cut off from a main road for months because of the construction of an underground parking space. A family I interviewed had to cancel their plan to renovate their house in view of anticipated displacement. Rapid declining living conditions, compounded by construction delays, led many families to welcome displacement and petition for faster land clearance.

Renters who were involved in the jadeware trade disappeared from the official calculation of displacement entirely. Questioning their exclusion, a renter-cum-retailer remarked, ‘the government only announced a plan through the big billboard. They did not attempt to talk to us and create a common vision that bind all of us’ (interview, 2018). This view was echoed by a renter-cum-craftworker: ‘the government seemed to have invested a huge deal in roads and building façades. These were meaningless. It missed the point that we [the craftworkers] were the very people that make the town distinctive’ (interview, 2018). To renters of jadeware shops along the road where the underground parking was being constructed, the most pressing challenge was the disruption caused by the construction work and its delay, which had made it more difficult for their shops to stay afloat in a declining market (interview, 2018).

The villagers’ committees were relegated once again to land suppliers and frontline eviction crews rather than important stakeholders or potential partners, despite the fact that they, representing their collectives, invested in the development of and owned existing jadeware marketplaces that are part of the planned Jadeware Feature Town. Such marginalization was not without discontent. While acknowledging the potential of feature town development to generate some profits and improve public facilities, a few cadres of the villagers’ committees believed that the feature town project deflected attention from real problems (interview, 2018). For them, one of the pressing challenges is how to resuscitate the marketplaces and recover their investments. Like shehui ziben partners of PPP, they were similarly unconvinced by the projected tourist traffic. They doubted the potential of tourism to boost the jadeware sector. In this regard, their concern was not unfounded. Many extant shop owners and craftworkers I interviewed were considering switching jobs or closing down their shops permanently. They did not even know if the marketplaces would stay in the planned feature town. They were also worried about a rent spike, which would squeeze their profit margins. For the cadres of the villagers’ committees, if craftworkers and shop owners leave, this would mean substantial losses for their collectives.

The other challenge, which was left untouched, was finance. Specifically, at issue was how to maintain collective welfare provisions and keep the grassroots agencies in operation while consistently losing control of collective assets, especially land. Several cadres of the villagers’ committees I interviewed protested that the two projects—Guangling New City and the Jadeware Feature Town—made it difficult to keep up with social management and collective spending in the long run. They claimed that they attempted to cite national policies to defend their rights to upper-level authorities, but that their protests had been ignored. Given the uncertainty surrounding these projects, one village had divested its share in the jadeware marketplaces and instead pursued real estate development. Other villages were also looking for opportunities to accumulate new assets and reduce the risk of over-reliance on urbanization projects dominated by more powerful urban state players.

It remains too early to assess the long-term effects of the Jadeware Feature Town project. However, the way it has been carried out raises legitimate concerns. As discussed above, the PPP-based tourism-oriented feature town development enabled the local government to obtain additional resources from upper-level authorities for an experiment in both feature town development and PPP-based territorial development. The project revolved largely around profitability, but most of the profits would be directed to external capital as shehui ziben partner. Moreover, PPP arrangements ensured that external capital was guaranteed against financial losses arising from lower than projected tourist traffic through public subsidies. The planning and the operation of this feature town project disregarded the interests, needs or rights of extant land users, namely local inhabitants, villagers’ committees, small businesses and craftworkers, despite them being important stakeholders in the project. This is short-sighted, particularly with respect to jadeware traders and craftworkers, since they are intrinsic to the living cultural heritage of the jade industry on which the feature town project was based, at least nominally.

III. Conclusion

In this article, I explored the feature town development strategy, one of China’s fixes to the exclusionary, exploitative urbanization of the past three decades. Conceiving the strategy as an example of entrepreneurial statecraft, the article contributes to bringing out the role played by the state in normalizing entrepreneurial governance (Wu, 2018). In both its birthplace and the subsequent national programme, this strategy embodied goals including but not limited to competitive economic growth. Instead of simply being a reaction to market discipline (Harvey, 1989), its emergence and diffusion within China were driven mostly by the state agencies from different levels. Offering only generic guidelines, the central government encouraged interested local governments to carry on experimenting with novel approaches to build feature town development on the ground by offering them additional fiscal resources and favourable policies. Subnational governments fervently responded to the central government’s call by matching funding and policy support. In line with the discussion on adaptive policy processes in China (Heilmann and Perry, 2011; Wang, 2009), they proactively sought to align the feature town strategy with their various preferences. In the case of Yangzhou, for instance, the municipal government promised additional support if proposed projects fell into the sectors such as healthcare and elderly care whilst the district government integrated the feature town development project within its urbanization ambitions.

As Peck (2011: 773) claimed, the mobility of policies is not simply conditioned by the institutional landscape but also remakes this landscape. This article casts light on an important path of policy mobility in China and its consequences. By tracing the state-driven diffusion of the feature town strategy, this article shows that the formation of a hierarchical recognition system for feature towns increased both the number of recognized feature towns and the institutional incentives to develop them. This is not an idiosyncratic characteristic of the feature town strategy; rather, as noted by Zhou (2017), it is a well-observed phenomenon in China, symptomatic of mutually reinforcing systems of political accountability and elite politicians’ evaluations. Keen to meet or outperform the targets set by upper-level governments, lower-level authorities tend to inflate policy goals or development targets. This is not necessarily a problem. Few people would object if lower-level governments pursue more ambitious than expected goals with respect to providing affordable housing or reducing carbon emissions. However, in the case of the feature town project, the consequence is more worrying. As the Chinese central government has tightened public budget control, inflated incentives and flexibility in development approaches make the feature town strategy susceptible to local manipulation, thus displacing its intended goals.

This trend can already be seen in the feature town construction boom. As mentioned earlier, many projects had been flagged by the national government’s inspection team for contradicting the intended goals of the feature town strategy (People’s Daily in Xinhuanet, 2019). The empirical case of the Jadeware Feature Town project provides yet another piece of evidence. The project was integral to the drastic transformation of Wantou, systematically eliminating the remaining peri-urban settlements to make way for urban expansion. It became an instrument of the local government to acquire preferential treatment and sustain land-based accumulation by packaging the feature town project as a local innovation that adopted PPP for mixed-function territorial development. The planning and development process so far has excluded and marginalized the jadeware traders and craftworkers as well as other existing land users, despite them being important stakeholders. Instead of moving away from exploitative land development, the feature town project seems to have replicated and reinforced it. The experience of this project, thus, casts doubt on the potential of feature town to reconnect capital and labour in territorial development and challenges the national urbanization strategy’s interest in inclusivity, participation, and equity.

It is true that post hoc inspections can weed out failing projects and those built under false pretences. It is also possible to reclaim fiscal rewards and bonuses from hosting authorities. However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse or remedy the impacts upon the built environment and the local communities. The high stakes require us to conceive urban development strategies with greater care. Another important lesson of this case study is concerned with the incentive-based approach to policy and development practices. Providing incentives enables upper-level authorities to shape lower-level governments’ preferences and direct public resources. Within China’s hierarchical political structure, the catch is that the incentives may be considerably magnified and are susceptible to being exploited or abused by local governments. Projects branded to attract these conditional funds may considerably deviate from the pressing needs of the local communities. For inclusive and equitable development, it is necessary to look from the perspectives of local communities and allocate resources to development strategies and projects that respond to their needs.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the constructive comments and suggestions from anonymous reviewers and the editors, Catherine Locke and Prakash Kashwan. I am responsible for all remaining errors.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

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

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I received funding support from Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek - Vlaanderen (Grant number: 12T2418N).

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