Narrating regional coordinated development: Discursive practices in China's city-regions

Abstract

Focusing on China's city-region building as a discursively power-laden process with a variety of contending and localized narratives, this article interrogates how and to what extent the strategy of Regional Coordinated Development, the top-down orchestrated initiative, is formulated and enacted to have the effects that it names. By constructing a conceptual framework of “selective discursive practices” and applying it to analyze two cross-jurisdictional cooperation cases—the Shenzhen–Shanwei Special Cooperation Zone and the Yizhuang-Yongqing Development Zone, key empirical findings and theoretical implications are as follows. First, a series of localized narratives, including pairing assistance, innovative reform, industrial integration, and de-territorialization, have diverged, to some degree, from the original win-win vision of Regional Coordinated Development. Second, unlike the formal administrative division deployed as a powerful political device for the central state, a new type of temporarily localized administrative division is being discursively produced and practiced by local states at the city-regional scale. To conclude, this article contributes to the academic discussion of China's state-spatial imaginaries from the discursive perspective and calls for more comparative studies on the discursive practices in relation to different institutional configurations.