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Large-scale urban development projects have become the main vehicle by which targeted interventions for place- and scale-specific state initiatives unfold, triggering a series of processes that are associated with the rescaling of state space. This study aims to understand the place-specific conditions, pathways and strategies whereby states' spatial and scalar restructuring takes place in urban development projects (UDPs) within China's political economic contexts, and in turn how UDPs act as critical lenses for viewing the changing nature of state spatial strategy in China, through a case study of the Lingang New Town in Shanghai. The major findings are: UDPs in China function as tools not just for land value extraction but also for scale-making to cater to the state's pursuits of place-specific competitiveness in the global economy; the restructuring of the state apparatus and regulatory frameworks is driven by place-specific tensions and crises triggered by earlier rounds of state rescaling; the state chose state-agents rather than market-agents to reinforce its power, and thus the state space expands through development of UDPs; through developing UDPs, China's spatial strategies have explicitly and officially engaged with the discourse of globalisation while implicitly engaging with geographically variegated practices of neoliberalisation. At the theoretical level, this article facilitates an investigation of how China's state spatial strategy, characterised by geographically and chronologically variegated engagement with neoliberalism, is actualised through UDPs. It also demonstrates how, despite being a socialist polity, pragmatic market measures and downscaling are taken as transient measures in times of need. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What led to the boom of Chinese development cooperation in Latin America? This article provides a systematic analysis of China's foreign behavior, motives, and policies regarding development cooperation toward the region between 2000 and 2014. I propose a comparative framework that defines Chinese development cooperation as a tool of economic diplomacy. Drawing on empirical evidence from AidData's Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset and Chinese white papers on foreign aid, the findings evidence that China was motivated by multiple and conjunctural factors in providing development cooperation. In the realm of theory, the article contributes to the literature on economic statecraft—filling in gaps in understanding the relationship between economics and politics. Empirically, it provides a set of tools for understanding the important role that development cooperation plays in a nation's statecraft. Regarding Chinese foreign policy studies, it offers insight into the financial dimension of China's international economic relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has become the leading country to develop wind and solar energy industries. By presenting the institutional arrangement and interest constellations of China's regulatory system of renewable energy sectors, this paper argues that the reasons for China's swift expansion of wind and solar energy investment go beyond the notion of a state-led model. It also reveals that due to a series of internal power struggles and external shocks, the current regulatory system is undergoing significant restructuring. A new policy paradigm is emerging that is largely different from the previous decades of policy orientation that centred on capacity expansion and instrumental interests for renewable energy development. The new paradigm would face tremendous challenges from existing institutions and vested interests, and it requires new set of ideologies that can help renewable energy sector to truly competing with the energy incumbents in order to bring about meaningful lowcarbon energy transition in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development is no longer simply conceived of as economic growth, but also as encapsulating human development, the role of the developmental state must be rethought. Focusing on the state's ability to deliver collective goods such as welfare has become an important task for developing and developed nations alike, and nowhere is this more important than in China. Consequently, intimate connections between the political and industrial elites are no longer sufficient and may actually be counterproductive to the success of the developmental state. Diverging from traditional developmental states, China shows that incorporation of new stakeholders is not premised on principles of human development. The novelty that China brings to re-thinking and re-articulating a new developmental state framework is that the development state of the twenty-first century can create new alliances such as with non-governmental organisations to meet human development objectives, but substantive change with regards to how the state is organised is not a precondition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article defines the key parameters of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ as a governance form that combines planning centrality and market instruments, and interprets how these two seemingly contradictory tendencies are made coherent in the political economic structures of post-reform China. Through examining urban regeneration programmes (in particular ‘three olds regeneration’, sanjiu gaizao), the development of suburban new towns and the reconstruction of the countryside, the article details institutional configurations that make the Chinese case different from a neoliberal growth machine. The contradiction of these tendencies gives room to urban residents and migrants to develop their agencies and their own spaces, and creates informalities in Chinese urban transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the effects of natural resource extraction on authoritarian governments' provision of public services, using subnational data from China. Facing no electoral constraint that would reflect the policy preferences of citizens, Chinese local leaders instead allocate public funds differentially based on their need for quality labor in local economic development, a critical criterion for their political success. When the local economy benefits from natural resources, the need for skilled local labor dissipates, and leaders invest less in social services that enhance labor productivity. Using panel data across all prefecture-level cities (1992-2010), I find evidence that mineral resource abundance leads local governments to provide fewer public services for education and health care. Meanwhile, services unrelated to labor quality remain unaffected. The results are robust to the inclusion of key confounding factors such as FDI inflows and state-owned enterprises' output contributions. Additional analyses reject alternative mechanisms including political turnover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Sino-British Joint Declaration and Basic Law, Hong Kong was to exercise a high degree of autonomy under the framework of “one country, two systems” after the British handover of its sovereignty to China in 1997. In the initial post-handover period, Beijing adopted a policy of nonintervention in Hong Kong, but the outbreak of the July 1, 2003 protest triggered a subsequent change of policy. Since then, Beijing has embarked on state-building nationalism, adopting incorporation strategies so as to subject Hong Kong to greater central control over the political, economic, and ideological arenas. Ironically, instead of successfully assimilating Hongkongese into one Chinese nation, Beijing’s incorporation strategies are leading to a rise of peripheral nationalism in the city-state and waves of counter-mobilization. This article analyzes mainland–Hong Kong relations on the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the handover and offers insights from an emerging case study that builds upon the nationalism literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how China's economic cooperation affects authoritarian persistence elsewhere. For the period 1998-2008, the article assesses quantitatively whether the effects of economic cooperation from China vary, conditioned by the regime type of the recipient. The analysis finds that China's economic cooperation is associated with regime durability in party-based regimes. In non-party regimes, in contrast, it is associated with regime collapse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In studies of China’s economic rise and political system, multiyear comprehensive and sectoral plans issued by the national government tend to be played down as futile efforts at reigning in a political economy increasingly driven by market incentives and decentralized decisions. Contrary to this, we provide evidence that China’s planning system has been transformed alongside the economic transition, yet remains central to almost all domains of public policy making and the political institutions that have fostered China’s high-speed growth and economic stability. The incorporation of experimental programs into macro-plans, a tiered hierarchy of policy oversight, newly introduced mid-course plan evaluations, and systematic top-level policy review have allowed Chinese planners to play a central role in economic policy making without succumbing to the rigidity traps that debased traditional planned economies. By better understanding how the planning cycle influences incentives and resources of successive layers of bureaucracies and jurisdictions, and how it updates itself and adapts to new challenges, it is possible to explain a greater proportion of the Chinese policy-making process, including many of its successes and pathologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of a rising China, some scholars have argued that ASEAN countries will choose to either bandwagon with or balance against China, while others believe they will respond with a more moderate policy known as ‘hedging’. In considering these options, ASEAN countries must take into account their individual interests within the economic and security structure of this region. In this research, we argue that each ASEAN country confronts divergent sets of security and economic relations with China, which play a major role in shaping their policy responses. We can characterize their responses into four quadrants. Each cell can be categorized in terms of a high or low degree of threat perception (HT or LT) from China, as well as a positive or negative economic expectation (PE or NE) with China. We thus hypothesize that ASEAN countries in the HT–NE situation will balance against China; those in the LT–PE situation will bandwagon with China; those in the HT–PE or LT–NE situations will hedge against China. Hypotheses are supported by three case studies, Vietnam–China (HT–NE), Cambodia–China (LT–PE) and Singapore–China (HT–PE) relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]