Abstract
As industrial activities account for a large part of environmental degradation and carbon emissions in China, the geographic location of industries significantly shapes the environmental performance and quality of life of surrounding areas. Since the late-2000s, China has sought to combat environmental degradation through the relocation of polluting industries particularly from industrial areas within inner cities. Using the concept of industrial transfer, which has been used in the Chinese context to capture not only the relocation of, but also structural and procedural changes to, firms, the paper analyses recent changes to China’s industrial structure. These occurred during the so-called eco-transformation, which seeks to improve China’s environmental performance. The paper expands the concept of industrial transfer by focusing on the intra-regional processes of this wider policy-led eco-transformation process based on the case studies of three traditional industrial areas in Hunan province. Case study results suggest that the ongoing phase of industrial transfer differs from previous regional transfers as it considers environmental impacts, elevates the relevance of the urban and local scale, involves new actor groups and offers benefits to both original and new locations.
Highlights
Industrialisation and urbanisation in China were used as critical strategies to realise modernisation [1] and ensure sustained economic growth [2,3] and were seen as inevitable requirement to realise the Chinese Dream [4]
Local governments focused on economic development reflecting the national priority during the primary stage of socialism initiated by the Communist Party and central government in 1980, ignoring environmental implications, where they conflicted with economic growth [5]
China still faces a significant legacy of polluting industries which can mainly be found in traditional industrial areas (TIAs) [6]
Summary
Industrialisation and urbanisation in China were used as critical strategies to realise modernisation [1] and ensure sustained economic growth [2,3] and were seen as inevitable requirement to realise the Chinese Dream [4]. Industrial transfers that saw politically driven and systematic (re)location of industries contributed to both industrialisation and urbanisation in China This involved two main phases: international industrial transfer from advanced Western countries to primarily the eastern coastal cities in China during the 1970s to 1980s and a second phase of relocation from these eastern areas to central and western areas of China since the 2000s. Since the 2000s, Chinese central and local authorities have made increasingly vigorous efforts in curbing those problems by internalising environmental performance into industrialisation and urbanisation processes This paper captures this green transformation as the eco-transformation of industrial areas. As such, it provides a fine-grained understanding of industrial restructuring as part of China’s eco-transformation process.
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