Abstract
AbstractDespite common national institutions and incentives to remake urban landscapes to anchor growth, generate land-lease revenues and display a capacious administration, Chinese urban governments exhibit varying levels of control over land. This article uses a paired comparison of Dalian and Harbin in China's north-east to link differences in local political economies to land politics. Dalian, benefiting from early access to foreign capital, consolidated its control over urban territory through the designation of a development zone, which realigned local economic interests and introduced dual pressures for enterprises to restructure and relocate. Harbin, facing capital shortages, distributed urban territory to assuage the losers of reform and promote economic growth. The findings suggest that 1) growth strategies, and the territorial politics they produce, are products of the post-Mao urban hierarchy rather than of socialist legacies, and 2), perhaps surprisingly, local governments exercise the greatest control over urban land in cities that adopted market reforms earliest.
Highlights
Despite common national institutions and incentives to remake urban landscapes to anchor growth, generate land-lease revenues, and display a capacious administration, Chinese urban governments exhibit varying levels of control over land
Dalian in Liaoning Province, like many cities that benefitted from early access to foreign capital as a result of preferential policies bestowed by Beijing, designated a development zone outside the urban core to rebalance the concentration of economic power in favor of pro-reform coalitions while leaving the urban core, the pre-reform power base, undisturbed during the early states of reform and opening
Hsing envisions municipal state agents pitted against collective and state-owned factory managers and other quasi-state actors who have de facto rights to urban land based on long-term usage, in a struggle for control of land resources within the urban core: “China’s urban politics unfolds as an intra-state struggle over land by these two sets of statist actors.”[7] not all cities appear mired in the kind of intra-state conflict that she emphasizes
Summary
Territory—politicized space over which groups struggle for control, occupation, and access—is an important locus of political conflict in China.[3]. While much has been made of decentralization and urban China as a “laboratory for reform,” the distribution and timing of preferential policies from Beijing allowed some cities access to foreign capital before or as they undertook politically difficult reforms, while others undertook reforms under resource constraints These changes to the post-Mao urban hierarchy have created fundamentally different rules of state-market relations across urban China, in evidence in this article with regard to growth and territorial strategies. In the early 1990s, Dalian began to attract the attention and envy of many cities as it amassed prestigious awards and titles related to its achievements in the urban environment: “Environmental Protection Model City” in 1992, one of China’s “Ten Most Beautiful” in 1992, and the first city in China and second in Asia to be included in the UN “Global 500” for livable environments in 1995.16 Dalian’s urban landscape evinces a palpable presence of state control and urban management to the visitor, mostly free of informal markets, dilapidated housing, and visible signs of urban blight or poverty, especially in urban core commercial areas and the city’s new industrial districts. The two sections detail how a globally-oriented political economy augmented the local state’s control over land in Dalian and a political economy of survival eroded that control in Harbin
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
