Beyond Growth Machine Politics: Understanding State Politics and National Political Mandates in China’s Urban Redevelopment

Abstract

Large-scale demolition has been ubiquitous in fast urbanising China. The politics of redevelopment is often seen as secondary, derived from and defined by local entrepreneurial governance. However, changing state politics, in particular national political mandates, has not been adequately addressed. Through examining variegated practices, this paper understands how the changing national political context affects or redefines local redevelopment projects. These cases reflect local responses to the national campaigns for rural vitalisation and "Beautiful China", heritage preservation and "incremental regeneration" (weigaizao), and community participation in dilapidated neighbourhoods for a "harmonious society". We find that these redevelopment projects are inherited from and associated with, but at the same time go beyond, growth machine politics. We argue that their motivations reflect a governance mode of "state entrepreneurialism" to achieve extra-economic objectives through market instruments, and that this illustrates geopolitics, especially the role of the national state in development politics. 本文通过分析不同类型城市更新项目, 探讨了国家政治环境的变化如何影响或重塑当前中 国的城市更新。这些案例反映了地方如何回应全国性治理运动, 包括乡村振兴和"美丽中 国"、遗迹保护和"微改造"、老旧小区改造和"构建和谐社会"。我们发现这些项目虽然沿 袭但是超越了增长机器政治。我们认为这些项目背后的动机体现了国家通过市场工具实现 经济以外的发展目标的"国家企业家主义"。

Rethinking China’s urban governance: The role of the state in neighbourhoods, cities and regions

“…Facing an increasing role of society and diverse social actors, the role of the state continues to be critical as it strives to manage the migrant population (Buckingham, 2017) and initiate urban redevelopment (Wu et al, 2022). We illustrate these roles through recent strategies to 'incorporate migrants' and to promote urban redevelopment rather than wholesale demolition.…”

“…Recently, the central government encouraged incremental regeneration and community participation in dilapidated neighbourhoods. New redevelopment projects are strongly influenced by state politics and political mandates (Wu et al, 2022). Although these projects are associated with the property market, they cannot be exclusively or appropriately explained as an outcome of growth machine politics.…”

“…Environmentally, green projects such as 'greenways' in Guangdong are difficult to implement in land development (Chung et al, 2018), despite both top-down carbon control by the central state and bottom-up pressure from the middle-class demand for a better environment (Lin and Kao, 2020). But there are new trends of governance beyond entrepreneurialism (Wu et al, 2022). Based on the sound understanding of multi-scalar governance, future research will help to explain and predict the changing direction of entrepreneurial governance faced by rising social agencies on the one hand and state strategies on the other.…”

“…In neighbourhood governance, the paper unravels the role of the state in the everyday living space that interfaces with the society. In urban governance, we reveal that the local state strives to balance economic interests in the land market and development strategies under ‘national political mandates’ (Wu et al, 2022). In regional governance, we uncover the state’s role in region-building, managing both the expansion of the central city and economic agglomeration in city-regions.…”

Theorising from the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路)

“…To date, such considerations have been posed in terms of theories of the urban (Williams et al, 2020;Apostolopoulou, 2021;Zheng et al, 2021), diplomacy (McConnell and Woon, 2021) and empire (Sidaway and Woon, 2017), debates about ecology, the non-human/more-than-human and the Anthropocene (Barua, 2020) and geographies of finance (Lai et al, 2020). And whilst BRI may speak to ideas of 'assemblage'as a means to unpack relations between sites, technologies, nature, and people (Richardson, 2021), it also likely to inform theoretical development of models of 'state entrepreneurialism' (Wu et al, 2021) and 'state capitalism' (Alami and Dixon, 2020;Alami et al, 2021).…”