The rise of Chengdu between geopolitics and geo‐economics: City‐regional development under the Belt and Road Initiative and beyond

Abstract

AbstractCity‐regional development is a key lens to understand the interplay between geo‐economics and geopolitics (re)shaping multiscale geographic processes. We advance this thesis by foregrounding the state–finance–infrastructure nexus underpinning contemporary city‐regional development. We argue that unpacking this nexus is important for understanding how the co‐constitution of crisis‐driven state restructurings and state‐mediated geographic processes arises as a solution to pressing crises emerging from the current conjuncture. In this conjuncture, the financial sector and the city‐region are the focal points of state regulation for addressing multidimensional and multiscale crises. We substantiate this argument by tracing how and why the Chinese central state restructured the municipal financing policy to prompt the rapid transformation of Chengdu from a less‐developed city in Western China to an emerging gateway city on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) since the mid‐2010s. We contribute an inward and material approach to understanding the geostrategy by shifting the attention from the broad‐level abstraction of external geopolitical/geo‐economic goals to (1) the material processes in which the geostrategy unfolds through internal institutional restructurings and territorial reorganisation and (2) how the BRI‐related infrastructure projects are enacted for addressing social, political and economic requisites at the (sub)national scale.