Rethinking China’s Model of Urban Governance

Project Information

ChinaUrban

Grant agreement ID: 832845

DOI

10.3030/832845

EC signature date 9 August 2019

Start date 1 January 2020

End date 30 June 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 492 786,00

EU contribution

€ 2 492 786,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - ChinaUrban (Rethinking China’s Model of Urban Governance)

Reporting period: 2023-01-01 to 2024-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

China’s phenomenal urbanisation is of world-historical significance. It first challenges our understanding of contemporary urbanisation, urban transformations, and the model of urban governance. Second, an appropriate understanding of changing urban governance is critical for the implementation of a new UN-endorsed urban agenda in the post-pandemic world. The project helps to recommend how China should change its development model and how the outside world should help China to address the immense challenges posed by urbanisation. The overall objective is to rethink China’s model of urban governance. The central concern is the role of the state and whether the introduction of market coordination has transformed political processes, as shown in Western democratic societies. This project contextualises Chinese urban governance in its historical and endogenous processes. The role of the state in neighbourhoods, cities, and regions is understood in the policy contexts. We see governance change as a concrete institutional and policy response to existing crises and perceived challenges. This project interrogates China’s model of urban governance through grounded and multi-scalar investigations ranging from neighbourhoods and cities to regions. For neighbourhoods, it unravels the interface between state and society in everyday living space, particularly through ‘self-governance’ under urbanisation, housing marketisation, and pandemic mitigation. For cities, it interrogates development strategies and the governance of migrant and ecological urbanism, as well as the implementation of projects through financial instruments and the land market. For regions, it explores the process of eco-state restructuring and uncovers entangled state-market relations which redistribute population and economic activities across cities and produce the city-region. The research will be conducted through multiple cases: Shanghai, Beijing, Wuhan, Dali, Xiongan, Jing-Jin-Ji (Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei), and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area. They are based upon grounded ethnographic observations, in-depth interviews, and close engagement with Chinese researchers and policymakers across different types of neighbourhoods and cities of varying sizes in coastal, central, and western regions, in addition to recent national strategic projects.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

This project rethinks China’s model of urban governance in a changing political-economic context. We have conducted a literature review on China’s urban governance and developed an innovative conceptual framework of state entrepreneurialism. We find the state has altered its GDP-centric agenda and strengthened national political mandates to address broad and diverse concerns: management of financial risks (Wu, 2021), heritage preservation (Wu, Zhang and Liu, 2022), ecological civilisation, and sustainability (Zhang and Wu, 2021; Zhang et at., 2021). For the component of migrants in China’s development model, we completed the analysis using 2014 and 2017 data, revealing the state institutional mechanisms for governing migrant social integration. Following this framework, we have investigated grounded operations of state entrepreneurialism. We focus on the development of multi-scalar governance involving actors from different tiers of the state, market, and society and multiple aspects of governance. At the neighbourhood level, we have observed new and diverse forms of self-governance in everyday living space, such as neighbourhood participatory planning and voluntary activities. We find that grassroots state agencies deploy self-governance as an instrument to realise the state’s strategic goals, such as trust and satisfaction and crisis management. At the urban level, we have examined the transformation of China’s urban development model, based on observations of new trends in land finance, urban redevelopment, and eco-city development. We unpack the implementation process of state entrepreneurialism, which extends beyond the previous land-driven entrepreneurial model and has become more state-centred, albeit with a variety of market tools. At the regional level, we have investigated new initiatives that reflect recent changes in regional governance. Using the ‘War against air pollution’ in Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (JJJ) Region as an in-depth case study, we find that the formation of JJJ is a state-led rescaling project with clear environmental sustainability goals. During the process of eco-state restructuring, the state-environment-economic relations are being reformed at urban and regional scales, and recently the city-regional level has become the key scale at which environmental regulations are targeted and enforced.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This innovative and contextually-sensitive research will contribute to entrepreneurial urban governance theories and offer a theoretically nuanced and grounded explanation of state entrepreneurialism in China.

The innovative conceptual framework of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ reveals the usefulness but also the limitations of the concept of the entrepreneurial city. On one hand, entrepreneurialism provides a framework to unpack state-market relationships in China. On the other, state entrepreneurialism adds a new narrative to descriptions of governance changes associated with financialisation and market operations. By adopting financial tools, urban financialisation in China is not embodied in a financial turn in governance, but is a by-product of the operation of the state (Wu, 2021).

Following the state logic, we expand the framework of state entrepreneurialism by involving multiple instruments and techniques (market and social agencies) deployed by the state to achieve diverse objectives (e.g. social and environmental sustainability). Our research will be broadened to multiple aspects, multiple scales, and wider geographical coverage (cases with distinct locations, development logics, and trajectories). Through multi-scalar and multi-case investigation, this project will be the first of its kind to provide a systematic and comprehensive picture of China’s changing model of urban governance in the post-pandemic era, a historical moment at which we are witnessing another phase transition of China’s ‘world factory’ model and its consequential governance form.

Moreover, this project will offer new perspectives to conceptualise China’s urban development. We move beyond existing reflections on variegated neoliberalism by arguing that neoliberalism and entrepreneurialism have become essential tools and technologies of governance along with state restructuring, rather than objectives and targets of governance in urban China. Simultaneously, we transcend the limitation of Chinese exceptionalism by critically reflecting on the role of the state from a processual perspective that emphasises path-dependency and contingency. Following the Foucauldian concept of ‘governmentality’, we argue that the Chinese state is not an autonomous source of power, but a means to exercise power. The proactive engagement of the state shall be seen as a reflection of and response to local and extra-local problems, which are formed and defined in state processes.

Globalisation of Chinese Cities

Creating Chinese Urbanism: Urban Revolution and Governance Changes

Rapid urbanisation and changing governance in China

Environmental Project of Greenways