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.
