Researching state rescaling in China: methodological reflections

This paper foregrounds and evaluates the research design associated with the study of Chinese state rescaling. It first synthesizes the existing gaps in the original, western-based state rescaling framework. The paper then explores how different methodological channels are integrated to support a revised analytical framework. Specifically, it presents the value of multi-sited comparisons through (a) the ‘extended case method’ and (b) the role of the ‘concurrent nested approach’ to data collection. In so doing, the paper offers a systematic assessment of the methodological contributions and constraints in ascertaining and explaining how regulatory reconfigurations unfold across space and time in China

Spatial egalitarianism as a social �counter-movement': on socio-economic reforms in Chongqing

Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million m² of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal access to social benefits as current urban residents, the paper explains how the quest for equitable urbanization magnifies two nationwide dimensions of institutionalized uneven development, namely 1) the caste-like categorization of populations according to �urban� and �rural�; and 2) the coastal bias in national economic development. The paper concludes that this state-driven pursuit of spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing expresses the dialecticism of economic development in China: it is a social �counter-movement� against the effects of an uneven spatiality that was instituted to drive and deepen the marketization of Chinese society

Labor market

Labor markets are socially-constructed entities that facilitate the buying and selling of labor power. They are effectively political-geographic institutions, governed predominantly by state regulations that apply within specific territorial boundaries. For this reason, analyses of labor markets have tended to be state-centric. Economic geographers have worked assiduously at transcending state-centrism through showing how the buying and selling of labor power is a gendered, multi-dimensional and often transnational process – it is never about the self-correction of prices by abstract forces of demand and supply

Regulation/deregulation

Economic regulation is dynamically entwined with deregulation. Contrary to the logic of market fundamentalism, producers and/or consumers do not always benefit from deregulation. Rational-choice theories of regulation have not impacted economic-geographical research as much as Regulation Theory (RT). Developed in France to theorize the crisis of Fordism, RT underscores the importance of social regulation in the capital accumulation process. Rather than study deregulation as an endstate, RT emphasizes regulatory reconfiguration and repurposing. Despite its eventual decline, RT left a strong legacy on economic-geographical research on (de)regulation. There is strong potential for current and future studies to build on this legacy, particularly in research on variegated neoliberalization and primitive accumulation

International division of labor

International division of labor refers to a conception of economic production as intrinsically transnational; of the interdependence between economic production and geographically-differentiated labor power in the first instance. ‘Old’ and ‘new’ versions of the concept abound: the ‘old’ international division refers to the Ricardian view that labor power enjoys comparative advantage based on finished products; the ‘new’ international division defines comparative advantages on the basis of tasks and processes. The new international division of labor was caused in large part by the crisis of Fordism, a process much researched by economic geographers. Empirical findings demonstrate a more complex process of transformation: the international division of labor was shaped by as much by changes in firm cultures and new politico-developmental objectives in developing countries as they were by the vertical distintegration in and relocation of production process by firms based originally in industrialized economies

The Constitutive Role of State Structures in Strategic Coupling: On the Formation and Evolution of Sino-German Production Networks in Jieyang, China

Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are actively (re)configured across multiple scales in ways that could redefine the prevailing mode of strategic coupling. The empirical basis of this framework is derived from a long-term case study on the formation and evolution of Sino-German production networks in environmental goods and services (EGS) in Jieyang, a relatively peripheral city in Guangdong province in China. The analysis draws from thirty-three interviews and seven focus group discussions, conducted between 2014 and 2020, with nonstate and state actors in Jieyang. Findings highlight how Zhongde, a coalition of Jieyang-based firms, transcended the limitations of structural coupling, which exemplifies uneven power relations between regions and lead firms, and attained more balanced coupling relations with German-led EGS global production networks (GPNs) through realigning interests with those of national-level institutions. Responding positively to the structural constraints and opportunities within a Chinese state structure based on experimental governance, Zhongde connected German EGS lead firms to the highly profitable but protected EGS market in China. This ability to jump between scales underscores the cross-scalar and dynamic aspects of strategic coupling: Zhongde was able to meet German-led EGS GPNs’ demand for market access and enhanced localization economies through reconfiguring regional assets. Abstracting from these findings, the article enhances the explanation of the evolution of strategic coupling by conceptualizing its intrinsic dynamism and incorporating state structural effects. Finally, it presents two directions for further research on GPN reconfigurations

The ‘Singapore Fever’ in China: policy mobility and mutation

The ‘Singapore Model’ has constituted the only second explicit attempt by the Communist Party of China (CPC) to learn from a foreign country following Mao Zedong’s pledge to contour ‘China’s tomorrow’ on the Soviet Union experience during the early 1950s. This paper critically evaluates policy transfers from Singapore to China in the post-Mao era. It re-examines how this Sino-Singaporean regulatory engagement came about historically following Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Singapore in 1978, and offers a careful re-reading of the degree to which actual policy borrowing by China could transcend different state ideologies, abstract ideas and subjective attitudes. Particular focus is placed on the effects of CPC cadre training in Singapore universities and policy mutation within two government-to-government projects, namely the Suzhou Industrial Park and the Tianjin Eco-City. The paper concludes that the ‘Singapore Model’, as applied in post-Mao China, casts institutional reforms as an open-ended process of policy experimentation and adaptation that is fraught with tension and resistance

‘Emptying the cage, changing the birds’: state rescaling, path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong

This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicization of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustrate the dynamic entwinement between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency: the Wang administration launched this industrial policy in spite of potentially destabilizing effects on the prevailing national structure of capital accumulation. This foregrounds, in turn, the constitutive and constraining effects of established, national-level policies on local, territorially-specific restructuring policies

State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China: a dynamic analytical framework

This paper evaluates the applicability of the state rescaling framework for framing politico-economic evolution in China. It then presents an analytical framework that examines institutional change as driven by the dynamic entwinement of state rescaling, place-specific policy experimentation and institutional path dependency. The framework problematizes simple ‘transition’ models that portray a mechanistic ‘upward’ or ‘downward’ reconfiguration of regulatory relations after market-like rule was instituted in 1978. It emphasizes, instead, a more established pattern of development marked simultaneously by geographically distinct (and enduring) institutional forms and experimental (and capricious) attempts to transcend them

Made in Hong Kong? Unpacking the transnational linkages of the Hong Kong film industry

Master'sMASTER OF SOCIAL SCIENCE