City Repositioning and Competitiveness Building in Regional Development: New Development Strategies in Guangzhou, China
By Jiang Xu, Anthony Gar-On Yeh. 2005
288 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Competition among cities for mobile capital in the twenty‐first century has intensified. The urban hierarchy of regions is undergoing transformation, causing economic fortunes to vary markedly among different localities. In China, these global forces and regional restructuring have caused a relative economic decline in some historically powerful cities, and have also brought about the emergence of new economic centers. In response to these forces, many Chinese cities have been driven into adopting a series of new competitive strategies, which seek to win back and build up their leading positions and competitiveness. To translate these strategies into concrete actions, local governments have promoted high‐profile and face‐lifting projects and investments. The extensive new urban development in Guangzhou is a particularly interesting case. As the provincial capital of the Guangdong Province, and a historically central city in the Pearl River Delta region, Guangzhou’s importance has recently declined. This article attempts to reveal the general strategies and specific projects initiated in Guangzhou as important promotion devices in its revitalization program, and to examine the rationales behind them. The ambitious new strategies are most likely to occur under the ‘soft budget constraint’ syndrome in China, and these strategies could be risky. Although the extent to which these strategies actually do stimulate business and lure investment is yet to be seen, the citizens are immediately and directly benefiting from them and consequently they have gained much popularity and support. However, the competitiveness building in Chinese cities has called into question the legitimacy of local state governance, and the validity of large projects that lack financial discipline, social objectives and accountability for unsuccessful investments. Au vingt‐et‐unieme siecle, la competition pour attirer le capital mobile s’est intensifiee entre les villes. La hierarchie urbaine des regions evolue, creant de nettes differences de reussites economiques entre localites. En Chine, ces forces planetaires et la restructuration regionale ont provoque un relatif declin economique dans certaines grandes villes traditionnellement puissantes, entrainant par ailleurs l’emergence de nouveaux centres economiques. Face a ces forces, de nombreuses villes chinoises ont ete poussees a adopter une serie de strategies concurrentielles visant a reconquerir ou bâtir leur competitivite et leur position dominante. Pour traduire ces strategies en actions concretes, les gouvernements locaux ont encourage des investissements et des projets de rajeunissement d’image tres en vue. La nouvelle urbanisation d’envergure que connait Guangzhou est un cas particulierement interessant. Capitale de la province du Guangdong et centre historique etabli dans le delta de la ‘riviere des Perles’, Guangzhou a pourtant connu un recent declin. L’article tente d’identifier les strategies d’ensemble et projets specifiques lances a Guangzhou comme instruments promoteurs de sa revitalisation et d’en examiner les raisons sous‐jacentes. L’instauration de strategies ambitieuses et novatrices est relativement possible compte tenu du syndrome chinois de ‘faible contrainte budgetaire’, mais elle ne va pas sans risques. Meme s’il reste a constater l’ampleur dans laquelle ces strategies stimulent reellement l’activite et attirent les investissements, les habitants en beneficient immediatement et directement, acquerant ainsi popularite et soutien. Toutefois, la competitivite qui se dessine dans les villes chinoises remet en cause la legitimite de la gouvernance etatique locale et la validite de grands projets dont sont absents discipline financiere, objectifs sociaux et responsables en cas d’echec des investissements.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0127e390274cc6325a45db1d5c8faf7ef13e7329
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Citations in the corpus
- (Post)Suburban Development and State Entrepreneurialism in Beijing's Outer Suburbs (2011, background): “(4) Elements of Chinese entrepreneurial urban governance have been widely noted in the literature (Duckett, 1998; Wu, 2003; Xu and Yeh, 2005) as providing an effective growth momentum which transcends local politics, such as the significant antigrowth interests which can exist in developed states…”
- Urbanization of Capital or Capitalization on Urban Land? Land Development and Local Public Finance in Urbanizing China (2011, background): “Finally, urban land has been used by many investment and development corporations set up by municipal governments as collateral to obtain bank loans and mobilize the capital needed to upgrade and expand the urban built environment (Xu and Yeh, 2005, 2009; McGee et al., 2007).”
- Decoding Urban Land Governance: State Reconstruction in Contemporary Chinese Cities (2009, methodology): “Current studies reveal that the formation of territorially-based entrepreneurialism is a state project which allows the state to tap the market and restore its role as active promoter of economic development (Wu, 2000, 2003; Xu and Yeh, 2005).”
- Urbanization, Land Development, and Land Financing: Evidence from Chinese Cities (2014, background): “Following this reorganization, the area under the direct administration of the city government increased from 1,400 to 3,719 square kilometers, which significantly enriched the local land bank and alleviated development pressure within the city’s jurisdictions (Xu & Yeh, 2005).”
- When are Cities Engines of Growth in China? Spread and Backwash Effects across the Urban Hierarchy (2013, background): “8 They are regarded as China's primary or mega-urban centres (G aubatz , 1999 ; H o and L i , 2010 , X u and Y en , 2005 ; Z hao et al.”
- Strategizing urbanism in the era of neoliberalization: State power reshuffling, land development and municipal finance in urbanizing China (2015, background): “…building of the new CBD, an International Convention Centre, Olympic Sport Stadium, a new international airport in Huadu to the north with the largest capacity of freight and passenger transport in the region and a new port in Nansha to the south (Gaubatz, 1999; Lin, 2004b; Xu and Yeh, 2005).”
- New local state power through administrative restructuring – A case study of post-Mao China county-level urban entrepreneurialism in Kunshan (2013, background): “However, relatively little attention has been paid to administrative restructuring (xing zheng qu hua) in relation to the new state power behind spatial economic development (Ma, 2005; Xu and Yeh, 2005).”
- Municipal statecraft (2018, background): “, 2002), East Asia (Jessop and Sum, 2000; Wu and Zhang, 2007; Xu and Yeh, 2005), Latin America (Portes and Roberts, 2005; Crossa, 2009), and South Asia (Datta, 2015; Goldman, 2011; McFarlane, 2012).”
- From cities to super mega city regions in China in a new wave of urbanisation and economic transition: Issues and challenges (2020, background): “Inter-city competition was further reinforced with the introduction of a taxsharing system that incentivised local governments to develop place-marking projects (e.g. large transportation and facelift projects) to enhance cities’ competitiveness (Xu and Yeh, 2005).”