Abstract
The past decade has seen a surge in the use of city branding, which is used to attract specific target groups of investors, high-tech green firms and talented workforce and reflects a desired shift from old, polluting manufacturing industries to new, clean service industries. Previous studies in the Chinese mega-city regions Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji (region around Beijing and Tianjin) have shown that branding practices of primarily service and innovation oriented cities are largely in line with existing industrial profiles while those which are predominantly manufacturing oriented wish to present themselves as more service and innovation driven. In this contribution, city branding practices are studied in China’s three Northeastern provinces Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning which face structural decline because of the presence of many outdated resource-based and heavy industries. The gap between existing profile and branding choices appears not systematic as in China’s leading economic regions. Northeastern cities focus more on combining primary, secondary and tertiary industrial patterns than on displacing manufacturing with services. The tertiary sector in these provinces is more administrative and public sector oriented and generates lower value added; it is therefore not significantly more attractive than the primary and secondary ones.
Highlights
The past decade has seen a dramatic surge in the use of city branding practices by local governments around the world
Earlier studies in the application of city branding among cities in the face of ecological modernization focused on polycentric regions such as Rhine-Ruhr in Germany and Randstad in The Netherlands [11] and the three Chinese Mega-City Regions Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Jin-Jin-Ji [12,13,14]
It appeared that city branding practices were quite commonly used but that cities with a strong tradition in manufacturing and heavy industry were reluctant to present themselves as such and preferred to dress up as service or innovation cities even if this seemed barely realistic in the eyes of their stakeholders
Summary
The past decade has seen a dramatic surge in the use of city branding practices by local governments around the world. We ask ourselves what city branding strategies are deployed by cities in the North-East of China the attractiveness of which to investors, high-tech forms and talented workforce is low and which face economic and population decline and struggle to maintain their natural resources and environmental quality How do these city branding practices match their geographic and economic profiles and what are the policy ramifications of these choices?. These refer to their use of (1) city brand identities: positive self-descriptions containing their essential features and (2) city labels: attractive terminology by which local governments convey an appealing green and/or high-tech impression of their own cities.
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