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This article examines how zoning – awarding exceptional status to selected sites – has been used as a governance tool to regulate access to land made available through land-use changes on the outskirts of Chengdu between 2007 and 2018. By studying these claims to exceptional status and the implementation of associated policies at the local level, t...
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Context 1
... article focuses on two sites on the periphery of the new satellite city, Tianfu New Area: Yang'an Township in the county-level city of Qionglai, part of the prefecture-level city of Chengdu, but just outside the new area; and Shigao Township in Renshou County within the prefecture-level city of Meishan, part of which is just inside the new area (see Figure 1). Both Yang'an and Shigao townships are located closest to Chengdu City proper. ...
Context 2
... addition, Qionglai became part of a designated disaster zone because it was officially classified as having been harmed by the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 and the Lushan earthquake in 2013. Figure 1 shows some of the different types of zones in Sichuan Province, while Table 1 lists the many different administrative levels. ...
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Development Project (DP) is creating the benefits for all and taking benefit-sharing (BS) as a goal. BS involves paying something above the fair market compensation or replacement value of the assets lost in the displacement and resettlement. BS becomes more important and complicated when the lost assets are not transacted as commodities in a marke...
Citations
... In other words, scholars in both strands tend to employ a single metaphor in describing the rapid transformation of rural China, which is insufficient to understand the increasingly diverse and complex reality (Smith, 2014;Wang, 2020). More recently, researchers departed from the top-down or bottom-up dichotomy and instead take a multi-scalar approach to examine the actions, relations, and implications of different agents amidst various state rescaling processes (Shen & Shen, 2017;Xu, 2020;Yang & Yang, 2021;Zeuthen, 2020). The key is therefore argued as understanding central-local (particularly rural grassroots) dynamics and how multiple agents across scales react in the transformation of rural China. ...
... From the top-down/downscaling perspective, the rise of rural revitalization in China can be regarded as an outcome of state spatial selectivity oriented rural regions to overcome the crises of rural decline brought by the conventional regime of city-based accumulation (He & Zhang, 2022;Liu et al., 2020;Wu, Zhang, & Liu, 2022). While the national campaign was a strategic decision taken at the highest level, what happened in the vast rural areas was to a large extent the result of local cadres bending rules allowing rural development to be accommodated by the market (Edin, 2003;Zeuthen, 2020). Thus that, local initiatives including the recognition by local authorities matters for the transformation of rural countryside (Wang, 2020). ...
... They may potentially be reused in another policy campaign or in a case of securitization. Exceptional politics become the norm (Zeuthen 2020). ...
This compilation thesis is the result of a public sector industrial PhD project made in collaboration between the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) and Aalborg University. Part of GEUS’ task is to produce knowledge about China’s mineral interests and its effects on the Danish realm for the use of Denmark’s central administration. The foundation for this task includes understanding the machinations behind Chinese decisions on what and where to mine. Prior to this PhD project, GEUS had a solid understanding of potential economic and strategic incentives for China’s engagement in mining and mineral exploration projects. This thesis adds to this understanding by studying how political framing in the Chinese state system plays out and how this framing along with a number of already well-known factors affect the decisions of state and semi-state-owned enterprises to engage in projects outside China, especially in the Arctic.
Chinese interest in minerals overseas has raised concerns, not least in Western countries. Fears have ranged from state-backed Chinese companies taking control over overseas mining operations to Chinese demand driving up commodity prices globally. There have also been concerns that Chinese state and private firms act not only as profit-seeking businesses but also to accomplish the long-term geopolitical goals of the Chinese Communist Party. This is especially the case in the Arctic, where Chinese companies’ engagement in Arctic mining operations are often viewed through the prism of Arctic geopolitics and China’s growing Arctic ambitions.
However, while scholars tend to agree that China has both a strategy for securing supply of mineral raw materials and a regional foreign policy strategy for the Arctic, there is a lack of qualified knowledge about the precise relationship between Chinese state policies and priorities and on-the-ground activities of Chinese companies in the Arctic. This compilation thesis, which consists of four freestanding papers, contributes to filling this research gap, specifically departing from Arctic mining and mineral exploration projects. Hence, the overarching research aim is to improve the understanding of the complex relations between, on the one hand, the Chinese central state’s foreign policy and industrial development priorities and, on the other hand, the decisions and approaches of state and semi-state enterprises and other actors.
Drawing extensively on Chinese-language policy and planning documents and academic articles, as well as field research in China and Greenland, the four papers explore this problématique through a focus on hierarchies of territories – defined and bargained as part of China foreign policy – and of minerals – defined and bargained as part of China’s mineral policy. They take a view of categorization and hierarchies as “performative,” meaning that actors construct and use them to achieve things. In the fragmented authoritarian context, companies, academics, and bureaucratic bodies, who all compete over political attention and limited state resources, not only interpret and adjust to official categories and hierarchies – they also participate in their construction and use them strategically to elevate the political priority of issues in which they have a vested interest or stake.
Based on the approach of fragmented authoritarianism (FA), the thesis viewed Chinese mining companies, mineral resource experts, and foreign policy scholars as part of a state bureaucracy and thus capable of acting as what Andrew Mertha calls “policy entrepreneurs” – or at least as sufficiently close to a bureaucracy to take on such a role. Unlike what is usually found when applying an FA approach, it argues that these policy entrepreneurs not only frame their activities in ways that address the policy frameworks or classification schemes most useful for them, but they also contribute to constructing or at least shaping some of the political language that becomes part of their framing. They do this, not only as FA has told us, by using categorization strategically to add political priority to issues and areas in which they are engaged or seek to engage, but they might also, earlier in the policy process, shape the labelling and content of political categories. In this way, they not only shape policies made at the center, as FA has found, but also to some degree contribute to shaping the state agenda. The thesis thereby also challenges the often-held assumption among China scholars that political language in China is produced by a narrow political elite and used as a tool for discourse control over lower-level cadres, intellectuals, and the masses.
This chapter deals with the intertwined relationships between city-making, migration and the differential citizenship regime in a Chinese “National New Area” built from scratch. In China, the hierarchically differentiated citizenship produced by the hukou system (also known as the household registration system) constitutes the origins of many forms of urban inequalities. The hukou regimes in Chinese metropolises not just engender distinctions between locals and non-locals but also create different classes of citizens and different degrees of full inclusion in cities. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I illustrate how recent reforms in the hukou system created a “citizenship as reward” paradigm for urban governance, thus enabling the local government to relocate the native rural population and then attract over 100,000 highly educated young migrants to repopulate the rapidly urbanising area. The “citizenship as reward” paradigm, I argue, serves the state’s larger project of zoning development and regulating the social composition of the new city. Moreover, it contributes to an emerging spatio-temporal imagination of the new city to be cosmopolitan, future-oriented and exclusive to certain groups of citizens.
Drawing on financial geography literature and the concept of state rescaling, this article investigates the state–finance nexus with an emphasis on state spatial reconfiguration. Through a historically and geographically informed political economic analysis, it argues that China’s state-led, market-oriented rural banking reforms are not merely the outcome of a deepening market logic within the financial administration of the rural sector. They are also crucial for state spatial reconfiguration to address uneven rural and urban development. The article calls for greater sensitivity towards relational spatiotemporality and uneven development to comprehend fully the spatiality of the state–finance nexus.
This paper proposes an infrastructure analytic for exploring the urbanizing landscapes of China's “national new areas.” In an effort to develop a less city-centred approach to the transformations underway in these spaces, I consider the new area as an “infrastructure space” in which the conventional distinctions between rural and urban have become increasingly meaningless. Such an approach draws our attention to the ways large-scale infrastructures of connectivity are driving a decentred form of urban development in which the livelihoods of residents are shaped by access to networks more than proximity to city centres. Based on case-study research of urbanizing villages and the rapid transformation of rural livelihoods in Gui'an New Area in Guizhou province, I suggest that an infrastructure analytic sheds light on the ways national new areas can be understood as particular events in an unfolding regime of circulation that has come to dominate urban forms worldwide.
China’s state driven urbanization and the revenues earned through conversion of land from rural (legally non-commodified) to urban (legally commodified) status have been studied intensively. What makes this new urban land valuable is less discussed in the context of financializaton. Through a study of bond financing in one of China’s “national level new areas”, Tianfu New Area, on the outskirts of Chengdu, south-western China, this paper argues that financialization is not only created through conversion of land, but also through the capitalization of perceived political favour. The link between state and market is frequently conceptualized as consisting of non-transparent vested semi-corrupt networks between the state and well-connected state owned or private enterprises. We argue that an additional link exists between state and market through financialized political capitalism. This is a system where certain narratives and interpretations of policy suggest an implicit guarantee of bailouts of those debtors who are perceived to be politically important. These narratives and perceptions of political ranking become factors in determining credit ratings and issuing bonds both on the Chinese and the global market and thus the creation of capital based on real estate in China.
