Competition among cities for mobile capital in the twenty‐first century has intensified. The urban hierarchy of regions is undergoing transformation, causing economic fortunes to vary markedly among different localities. In China, these global forces and regional restructuring have caused a relative economic decline in some historically powerful cities, and have also brought about the emergence of new economic centers. In response to these forces, many Chinese cities have been driven into adopting a series of new competitive strategies, which seek to win back and build up their leading positions and competitiveness. To translate these strategies into concrete actions, local governments have promoted high‐profile and face‐lifting projects and investments. The extensive new urban development in Guangzhou is a particularly interesting case. As the provincial capital of the Guangdong Province, and a historically central city in the Pearl River Delta region, Guangzhou’s importance has recently declined. This article attempts to reveal the general strategies and specific projects initiated in Guangzhou as important promotion devices in its revitalization program, and to examine the rationales behind them. The ambitious new strategies are most likely to occur under the ‘soft budget constraint’ syndrome in China, and these strategies could be risky. Although the extent to which these strategies actually do stimulate business and lure investment is yet to be seen, the citizens are immediately and directly benefiting from them and consequently they have gained much popularity and support. However, the competitiveness building in Chinese cities has called into question the legitimacy of local state governance, and the validity of large projects that lack financial discipline, social objectives and accountability for unsuccessful investments. Au vingt‐et‐unième siècle, la compétition pour attirer le capital mobile s’est intensifiée entre les villes. La hiérarchie urbaine des régions évolue, créant de nettes différences de réussites économiques entre localités. En Chine, ces forces planétaires et la restructuration régionale ont provoqué un relatif déclin économique dans certaines grandes villes traditionnellement puissantes, entraînant par ailleurs l’émergence de nouveaux centres économiques. Face à ces forces, de nombreuses villes chinoises ont été poussées à adopter une série de stratégies concurrentielles visant à reconquérir ou bâtir leur compétitivité et leur position dominante. Pour traduire ces stratégies en actions concrètes, les gouvernements locaux ont encouragé des investissements et des projets de rajeunissement d’image très en vue. La nouvelle urbanisation d’envergure que connaît Guangzhou est un cas particulièrement intéressant. Capitale de la province du Guangdong et centre historique établi dans le delta de la ‘rivière des Perles’, Guangzhou a pourtant connu un récent déclin. L’article tente d’identifier les stratégies d’ensemble et projets spécifiques lancés à Guangzhou comme instruments promoteurs de sa rev...

This article examines the development of the land market in

No abstract

This study empirically tests the theory of state rescaling with a study of recent city-region making in China. The implementation of two interjurisdictional projects, the Pearl River Delta Intercity Railway and the Guangzhou-Foshan Metro, are critically investigated to probe the restructuring states in the transitional Pearl River Delta. We argue that the principle of scale theory is relevant to China, where scalar reconfiguration of states has been identified in the process of city-region making. To implement the projects, governments at various geographical scales engage in numerous activities of flexible competition, cooperation, and negotiation. The paper draws on a detailed empirical observation of the actual process, to broaden the theoretical framework of state rescaling, showing four dimensions of state-rescaling categories of restructuring: upscaling, downscaling, statization, and destatization. The paper also highlights the creation of the city-region-that is, state space-as both a de jure and de facto political instrument to rearticulate state power. With an emphasis on the concomitant trend of centralization or upscaling, it also contributes to the existing literature on state rescaling in China by denaturalizing the trend of decentralization, or downscaiing.

No abstract

No abstract

This paper contributes to a geographically-informed preliminary assessment of the diverse and uneven immediate impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, and outlines an agenda for geographical studies of its longer term effects. Intrigued by the apparent tendency of an inverse relationship between a country's health security capacities and Covid-19 mortalities, the paper explores the significance of a range of geographically situated contextual factors in the realms of the economy, governance and culture as mediators of the public health impacts of Covid-19, and questions how these realms may also be reshaped by this viral pandemic. The paper concludes with reflections on the path dependency and state centrality of pandemic response, and the potential postpandemic reconfiguration of state-market-society relationships.

Interjurisdictional cooperation has emerged as a major recent trend in China in response to challenges from market reforms and globalization. However, given that cities are in fierce competition with one another, interjurisdictional cooperation presents many difficulties for policy making. This paper attempts to examine how cooperative partnerships can be developed, sustained, or even resisted. It uses the Guangzhou-Zhuhai Railway as a case study to explore the institutional configuration of such a practice and to understand how the historical contingencies and path-dependencies in a transitional society interact with intensive bargaining to influence partnership building. It argues that the lack of a formal institutional framework to facilitate horizontal networking forces actors to opt for ad hoc collaborative arrangements. With the objective of making joint projects workable, commitments for cooperation have to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis through extensive bargaining. Although this creates much flexibility in consensus building, it does not guarantee success: success depends on the interplay of inter-ministry politics, interscalar relations, intercity politics and state-market relations. To a certain extent, the Chinese state can go beyond economic logic and shore up its legitimacy by prioritizing development. The post-reform path-dependencies can provide current political leaders with more rather than fewer instruments with which to negotiate interjurisdictional projects, and thus have greater influence over urban and regional economic governance.