Link to Session Platform

Chairs(s):

Yong Zhang, The University of Manchester

; ,

Description:

Largely influenced by Harvey’s (1989) seminal paper and the subsequent strand of ‘rescaling the state’ (Jessop, 2002; Brenner, 2004; Peck, 2002) literature, the entrepreneurial urbanism perspective has gained ground in contemporary urban (governance) studies. The common practice of entrepreneurial urbanism is usually conceptualized as associated with a process of neoliberalization, including privatization, deregulation, decentralization, marketization, local boosterism, place promotion, supply-side intervention, and ‘roll-back’ of the welfare state.
Harvey’s theorizing presumes a capitalist (liberal/democratic) state, with capital accumulation and class struggle as his core concerns. To Harvey (2005), neoliberalization across the world has been a vehicle for the restoration of capitalist class power within the state apparatus. Accordingly, entrepreneurial urban governance is seen as a negotiated order at the urban scale among different class interests and social entities capable of ‘jumping scales’ vertically and horizontally (Uitermark, 2002). Moving forward, Phelps and Miao (2020) elaborate the varieties of urban entrepreneurialism by defining ‘new urban managerialism,’ ‘urban diplomacy,’ ‘urban intrapreneurialism’ and ‘urban speculation’.

The applicability of entrepreneurial urbanism framework to China has long been questioned however. For example, to what extent and on what basis Chinese cities may be considered entrepreneurial, who are the key movers and shapers of China’s urban entrepreneurialism, and what motivates them to be entrepreneurial? It is generally agreed that, different from the nature of statehood and its transitions in the West, the PRC state has always been in the driver’s seat, without a shift of power from the state apparatus to the urban elites. The Chinese city thus has not yet become a substantive policy actor, despite of the rising prominence of the urban scale. Therefore, the state rescaling in China is considered as a relational restructuring within the state hierarchy rather than between state and society (Li and Wu, 2012). Hsing (2010, p. 7) for example, has stressed the state’s enduring planning power, persistent land tenure and control over rural-urban mobility.

Wu (2018, 2020), in a series of contributions, has coined the alternative term of ‘state entrepreneurialism’, denoting the already dominant and still strengthened role of the Chinese state in urban entrepreneurial activities through creating a market-like environment and using market instruments to accomplish its political and strategic objectives. The rising significance of financialization in contemporary Chinese urban entrepreneurialism, centered on land and housing, has also been dominated by the state (Petry, 2020; Wu et al., 2020; Feng et al., 2021). Moreover, the Chinese state itself has become financialized in the form of a ‘shareholding state’ in that the state uses financial means such as shareholding to manage its ownership, assets and public investments (Wang, 2015).

The notion of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ is in line with the broad conceptualization of China as a model of “state capitalism” (Naughton and Tsai, 2015). However, the Chinese state is not just another ordinary state. Chinese law expert Donald Clarke (2020), among many others, stresses that students of the PRC “must come to grips with the fundamental reality that China is a Leninist one-party state” (cf. Grünberg and Drinhausen, 2019). The party state is not a capitalist state—under the party state capital subordinates to the Party, not the other way around. As asserted by President Xi in 2017, the CCP “exercises overall leadership over all areas in every part of the country.” Scholars of comparative politics on China, have developed the so-called “authoritarianism with adjectives” (AWA) approach (cf. Hsu et al., 2021). Regardless of the adjective used, the analytical priority is placed on the regime’s authoritarian rather than capitalist nature.

In the past decade, the Chinese regime has become so distinctive that scholars have shifted from using the familiar term of “state capitalism” to a more specific “party-state capitalism” (Blanchette, 2020, Grünberg, 2020, Pearson et al., 2020). Party-state capitalism places the party’s leadership and political goals at the center of the organization of the economy, which drastically limits the scope for making compromises with private capital. The Party can exercise control over economic policy and influence the behavior of banks and firms directly through political channels. There is increasing penetration of party power into the private sector, e.g., through the installation of party cells, and the replacement of government administrations by party bodies as the primary locus of economic policymaking. It is now difficult (if not impossible) to delineate with any precision where CCP influence ends and where firm autonomy begins. Milhaupt and Zheng (2015) argue that the Chinese state has less control over state owned enterprises (SOEs) and more control over private enterprises than its ownership interest in the firms suggests.

The blending of the public and private, state and capital, and market and planning, marks a new paradigm in China’s urban and economic governance mechanism and development trajectory. This new model enables the leadership to mobilize economic resources towards political ends much more directly than most other systems. It has profound consequences for China’s domestic politics and international relations. The idea of China converging towards the (new)liberal capitalist system has by now been thoroughly dismantled. Leaders in Beijing are strongly convinced that the political-economic resilience and advantages of the party-state model, will accelerate China’s further rise to a superpower status over the struggling West.

The ‘party-state capitalism’ literature thus draws attention to the regime type, political architecture, organizational mechanism and political ‘new normal’ in China, setting a new research agenda apart from the conventional political economy approach to China’s urban governance and urban entrepreneurialism. In this paper session, we invite thoughtful theoretical and empirical contributions tied to China’s ‘new normal’ of urban and regional governance and development.

Selected Bibliography
• Brenner, N. (2004). New state spaces: Urban governance and the rescaling of statehood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Clarke, D. (2020). "Order and Law in China". GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works. 1506. available at https://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/faculty_publications/1506
• Feng,Yi, F. Wu & F. Zhang (2021). Changing roles of the state in the financialization of urban development through chengtou in China, Regional Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00343404.2021.1900558
• Grünberg, N. (2021). Party-state capitalism under Xi: aligning the economy with political objectives, in The CCP’s Next Century: Expanding economic control, digital governance and national security, edited by N. Grünberg and C. Wessling. MERICS: Mercator Institute for China Studies, accessed at: https://merics.org/en/report/ccps-next-century-expanding-economic-control-digital-governance-and-national-security
• Grünberg, N. and K. Drinhausen (2019). “The Party leads on everything,” Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies, Sept. 24, available at https://perma.cc/5TET-W5AV.
• Harvey, D. (1989). From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the transformation in urban governance in late capitalism. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 71(1), pp. 3-17
• Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hsing, Y.-t. (2010) The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hsu, S.-c., K.S. Tsai, and C.-c. Chang (2021). Evolutionary Governance in China: State-Society Relations under Authoritarianism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Jessop, B. (2002). Liberalism, neoliberalism, and urban governance: A state–theoretical perspective. Antipode, 34(3), pp. 452-472.
• Li, Y. and Wu, F. (2012). The transformation of regional governance in China: The rescaling of statehood. Progress in Planning, 78(2), pp. 55-99.
• Milhaupt, C. and Zheng, W. (2015). Beyond Ownership: State Capitalism and the Chinese Firm,” Georgetown Law Journal, 103, pp. 665–722.
• Naughton, B. and K. S. Tsai (eds.) (2015). State Capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Pearson, M., M. Rithmire and K. S. Tsai (2020). “Party-State Capitalism in China,” Harvard Business School, Working Paper 21-065.
• Peck, J. (2002) Political economies of scale: Fast policy, interscalar relations, and neoliberal workfare. Economic Geography, 78(3), pp.331-360.
• Petry, J. (2020) Financialization with Chinese characteristics? Exchanges, control and capital markets in authoritarian capitalism, Economy and Society, 49(2), pp. 213-238.
• Phelps, N.A. and Miao, J.T. (2020). Varieties of urban entrepreneurialism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(3), pp. 304-321.
• Uitermark, J. (2002) Re-scaling, ‘scale fragmentation’ and the regulation of antagonistic relationships. Progress in human geography, 26(6), pp. 743-765.
• Wang, Y. (2015) The rise of the ‘shareholding state’: financialization of economic management in China, Socio-Economic Review, 13(3), pp. 603–625.
• Wu, F. (2016). China's emergent city-region governance: a new form of state spatial selectivity through state-orchestrated rescaling. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(6), pp. 1134-1151.
• Wu, F. (2018). Planning centrality, market instruments: Governing Chinese urban transformation under state entrepreneurialism. Urban Studies, 55(7), pp. 1383-1399
• Wu, F. (2020). The state acts through the market: ‘state entrepreneurialism’ beyond varieties of urban entrepreneurialism. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(3), pp. 326-329.

Non-Presenting Participants Agenda