Urban governance and state entrepreneurialism

Key reference

Abstract: The death of urban entrepreneurialism is proclaimed surprisingly by opposite conceptualisations of austerity urbanism and radical municipalism. This paper argues that rather than seeing them as contrasting types, post-pandemic statecraft reflects the increasing tension and entanglement between capitalistic and territorial logic. From the ground of Chinese urban governance, we illustrate how Chinese statecraft maintains state strategic and extra-economic intention through deploying and mobilising market and society – to create its own agents and to co-opt those that are already existent or emerging. This statecraft is illustrated through community building, urban development, and regional formation.

A variety of statecraft in capital accumulation. From the paper above.
Capitalistic and territorial logics in statecraft: General definition and specific presentations in China’s
residential, city and regional statecraft. From the paper above. Continued to the next table.

Abstract: In this chapter, the authors use China’s urban development politics as an example to illustrate how they might theorise urbanisation and urban development politics in a non-Western context. That is, rather than focusing on the theory of neoliberalism or neoliberalisation practices, the chapter starts from Chinese historical development and aims to reveal how a particular form of politics, in this case, the trait of state entrepreneurialism which is not necessarily linked to neoliberalisation, emerged. Different historical moments are also utilised by the state to solve its internal crises of capital accumulation. In short, the author’s overall theoretical stance is still a critical political economic analysis, although such a narrative is sensitive to local histories and geographies. While paying attention to the imperative of capital accumulation inside China and later transnational circuits after China became the world-factory, the perspective adopted in this chapter is also historical and geographical.

Abstract: Instead of generating a grand theory from urban China, I have a rather modest aim – how we might use the political-economic perspective to better understand China’s urban development politics. Rather than treating empirical materials and theoretical insights as discrete entities, describing China should itself be regarded as a process of theorisation, contributing to a more global Urban Studies. We illustrate how ‘state entrepreneurialism’, as a quite peculiar form of governance, is generated from the conjunctural development of global capitalism and its crises. Hence, the role of the state is not a starting point for theoretical enquiry but rather a historical and material development of China’s political economy.

Abstract: This special issue comprehensively researches China’s financialization and examines the transformation of its development model, state development corporations, local government bonds, productivity, and the extent and characteristics of financialization. While it is widely known that the state plays an important role in enabling and constraining financialization, these papers further reveal that China’s financialization originates from the state’s deployment of financial approaches to urban and regional development under state entrepreneurialism. Through internalizing financial logic into the state development system, the expansion of financial operations reflects the state’s developmental intention and increases its governance capability. Thus, financialization is not a unidirectional process but involves extensive state involvement and participation in finance, to such an extent that it often simultaneously evolves into greater interference and de-financialization.

Abstract: Following the notion of the entrepreneurial city, this paper examines recent scholarship about China’s urban governance. Despite prevailing marketisation, the role of the state is visible in neighbourhood, cities and city-regions. The state necessarily deals with a fast changing society and deploys market-like instruments to achieve its development objectives. Through multi-scalar governance, the state involves social and market actors but at the same time maintains strategic intervention capacity. China’s contextualised scholarship provides a more nuanced understanding beyond the entrepreneurial city thesis, which is more state-centred.

The role of the state in response to social and market changes in neighbourhoods, cities and regions. From the paper above.

Abstract: This commentary reflects on varieties of urban entrepreneurialism and rethinks its application to China. I argue that the state is proactively using market instruments for more strategic and developmental objectives in China. Characterized by ‘planning centrality, market instruments’, state entrepreneurialism manifests a different state–market relation: the state acts through the market rather than just being market friendly. In the post-crisis West, it is claimed that urban entrepreneurialism mutates into a financialized value extraction machine. Similarly, state entrepreneurialism reveals the usefulness but also the limits of the concept of urban entrepreneurialism. State entrepreneurialism adds a new narrative to the current description of governance changes associated with financialization and market operations.

Abstract: This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), the development of suburban new towns and the reconstruction of the countryside, the article details institutional configurations that make the Chinese case different from a neoliberal growth machine. The contradiction of these tendencies gives room to urban residents and migrants to develop their agencies and their own spaces, and creates informalities in Chinese urban transformation.

Abstract: This chapter aims to understand China’s specific development regime through reviewing the origin of market-oriented reform and its pathway, through which a new space of accumulation has been created. The Chinese characteristics are not idiosyncratic practices resulting from an authoritarian state. The understanding of “state entrepreneurialism” has two pivotal premises: commodification and monopolization. The change in China is not a post-Keynesian shift but rather the creation of market means to expand the space of accumulation. The study of state entrepreneurialism is thus different from that of governmentality, because attention is not paid to individualization, market choices and the market itself but rather to how these choices are structurally conditioned and made. Market-oriented reform in China did not originate in an ideological shift. The policy of marketization and an open door to the global economy was adopted to create a new space of accumulation. The regime of accumulation under state socialism was based on state ownership of production factors.