Editorial

China’s great transformation: Neoliberalization as establishing a market society

This research explores the pattern of institutional change and its underlying logic in China's recent land development governance. China's central government has been issuing national policies since 2012 to promote urban regeneration to improve land use efficiency and sustainability. Through the lens of historical institutionalism, this paper analyses the making and implementation of Shanghai's new urban regeneration policies since 2014, which was a response to the central state's mandate. Results show that the redevelopment mode encouraged by the municipal governments is financially unattractive to district governments and market entities. Pro-growth development governance maintains strong inertia since it has been embedded in interlocking institutional arrangements. However, the top-down campaign temporarily changed the power distribution among different levels of government and cultivated incremental institutional layering. A small range of redevelopment projects were implemented through political mobilisation of the state-owned enterprises' financial resources and the local cadre's attention. This paper concludes that the transformation of China's land development governance is an inevitably arduous top-down process, characterised by constant rescaling of the distribution of power and constant adjustments to reconcile the pro-growth inertia and the state mandate toward sustainability.

A country’s housing policy paradigm is not static; rather, it is likely to experience multiple shifts at different stages. This article proposes a theoretical framework that reveals the interconnection between housing policy paradigm shifts and the underlying driving forces in the institutional arrangement of state entrepreneurialism. Furthermore, this article conducts national-level and city-level studies in China to illustrate this framework. This article finds that various political, economic, and social forces had driven two housing policy paradigm shifts – from the socialist welfare paradigm to the marketization paradigm, and then to the new phase of state intervention paradigm. This article argues that state entrepreneurism facilitates China’s adoption of different housing policy paradigms to better respond to the adjusted development goals and to manage crises that have occurred over different periods.

This study examines the uneven growth and spatiality of the practicing of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in China where capital mobilization had until recently been monopolized by the Party-State. Two types of PPPs are identified, namely those formed for businesses and economic developments and others for the purposes of social welfare and environmental protection. PPPs are not prominent in the cities and regions with a mature market and advanced economy. Instead, they are strongly associated with some backward and remote areas where the degree of marketization is low and the legacy of state socialism remains high. Results of multi-variate modeling suggest that the spatial variation of China's PPPs is significantly correlated with neither the degree of marketization nor the level of fiscal pressure but instead the socialist legacy of soft budget constraints. The findings of this research foreground an interesting practice that blends the state-market binary and challenge the popular perception of the state and market as unambiguous theoretical coordinates.

In the context of planetary urbanization, urbanization through resettlement in the global south has garnered increasingly scholarly attention. In China, state-led rural-to-urban resettlement has become a potent tool for the government. The production of concentrated resettlement communities (CRCs) to accommodate resettled villagers and facilitate their post-resettlement adaptation creates a unique urban phenomenon. However, existing research has insufficiently unpacked the evolution of the production process. Drawing on the theory of space production, this research proposes a dynamic spatial-temporal conceptual framework to examine the process of space production. Based on several months of fieldwork conducted in Hangzhou in 2021, this research offers an empirical lens on how CRCs have evolved and how landless farmers have adapted to the host city. This research first finds that CRCs in Hangzhou have three typologies. Secondly, resettled villagers in early CRCs are confronted with economic challenges but maintain well social relations. Their shared collectivism is conducive to their spatial adaptation. In recent CRCs, strict planning and community management have further limited resettled villagers' spontaneous attempts in reshaping space to support their adaptation. These findings have important policy implications for achieving inclusive resettlement in China and the Asian context.

Even though a new urban policy (public participation) that seeks to avoid the criticisms of radical urban regeneration has now been widely applied in Nanjing, China, the alleged success of this urban policy is questionable. While recent research has given greater attention to growing discussions of participatory approaches of Chinese urban regeneration projects, a majority of existing literature has only examined the nature or limitations of public participation, there has been far less consideration of the government's motivation in delivering these inclusive policies. This paper interprets Nanjing's inclusive urban policies through the conceptual lens of governmentality by analyzing the revanchist residual of Chinese urban regeneration. This research combines narratives from in-depth interviews (with a particular focus on key policymakers) and supplementary data from policies and archival records. It demonstrates that the implementation of inclusive urban policies in Nanjing is a remedy to the past “revanchist” urban regeneration policies. Indeed, public participation is a method refers to the restoration of residents' rights, seeking to direct them to behave towards what the government wants them to be. To that end, I conclude that if the spirit of revanchism still exists, it is through the inclusive urban policies to conduct local residents' conducts.

The literature on interurban competition emphasizes that market rules as an external coercive power dominate local state space conductive to economic growth. Is there another external coercive power, other than the market as a hidden hand, to promote and mitigate interurban competition? Addressing this question, this paper specifies that the Chinese state's political efforts to downplay the role of the market in, and remake the rule of, interurban competition could have far reaching implications for urban political economy. The two cases are Ruili and Wanding, two border cities located on the edge of China's southwestern borderland adjacent to Myanmar. While reranking is supposed to balance out the inefficiencies of market principles in interurban competition, multiple rounds of reranking in Ruili and Wanding in the past seven decades indicate that this political orchestration can accelerate interurban competition into a cutthroat game for economic growth and thus create problems for macro economic management. Nevertheless, it can become a political tool to revamp the game by strategically selecting some cities as nodes of development at the sacrifice of urban fortunes of other cities. In this process, market rules operate in parallel with, and sometimes succumb to, the principle of political order from above. This finding expands the geographies of the state: the co-constitution of the local and the national becomes necessary and pragmatic since interurban competition is not a territorially-conditioned endeavor, but remains open to extralocal stakeholders—upper-level governments in this case—who can remake local state space.