City profile: Wenzhou - A model city of transitional China

Abstract

As the birthplace of China's private economy, Wenzhou is known as one of the three model cities of post-reform China, along with Suzhou and Dongguan. Wenzhou has experienced rapid development and is often taken as a paradigmatic case for the privatization and entrepreneurialization of urban China against the context of market-oriented reform and open-door experiments. Wenzhou has undergone a major social, economic, and spatial restructuring over the past four decades. In the last several years, however, Wenzhou has faced a number of challenges associated with slowing economic growth, difficulty in industrial upgrading, and decreasing attractiveness to highly-qualified employees and high-tech enterprises. This paper profiles the historical development of Wenzhou, particularly with regard to the aspects of economic and spatial restructuring, to interrogate the modality of its recent development and to seek answers to current dilemma. From a historical and cultural perspective, we argue that the key drivers underlying Wenzhou's development have been the bottom-up local initiatives and family-run enterprises, rather than top-down state promotion. In this vein, this study offers further understandings of urbanization against various contexts, in particular the state-oriented urbanization in China.