State-led smart city with Chinese characteristics: the case of Xiong’an New Area, China

Abstract

ABSTRACT Smart cities have emerged as either a technical fix to challenges of urbanized accumulation or an adaptable governance strategy under neoliberal, entrepreneurial, and austerity politics worldwide. Utilizing Xiong'an New Area, the most ambitious experimentation in China, as an empirical case, we present a distinct smart city model under the governance framework of state entrepreneurialism. This paper examines the salient and proactive role of the state in the ongoing smartification and digitalization in Xiong’an New Area. We highlight the plural (geo)political agendas parallel to capital accumulation in this state project. Based on in-depth interviews and documentary analysis, we illustrate how the state steered experimental practices through innovating institutional settings and financing strategy, legitimizing ‘digital twin’ experimentation in urban management, and co-opting non-state actors, including technical professional organizations and domestic technology enterprises. Its success rests more on its demonstration effects nationwide than the ‘actually existing’ smart city/urbanism within the territory of Xiong’an. This ‘state-led smart city with Chinese Characteristics’ shows unique features of smart governance shaped by political economic dynamics in China, compared to typical smart city models in Western capitalist countries and Asian developmental countries. The findings further the nuanced understanding of smart initiatives and projects in different contexts and the role of the government through the perspective of entrepreneurialism.