CPRG: The Party-Statecraft of China’s Regional Governance and the Emerging Greater Bay Area
All are welcome to join this online China Planning Research Group Seminar.
CPRG: The Party-Statecraft of China’s Regional Governance and the Emerging Greater Bay Area
03 Mar 2023, 13:30 – 14:30
Zoom meeting ID: 978 6853 3978
This talk is a partial product of our ongoing research on “breaking new ground: economic integration and regulatory transformation in China's Greater Bay Area”. First we seek to rethink the fundamental characteristics of China’s territorial-based model of spatial governance, which we term as ‘party-state spatiality’ with four particular features: zoning, rescaling, experimenting, and bordering. We argue that such a regime of spatial governance is neither unidirectional liberalization nor decentralization, but dynamic, contradictory, and fundamentally defined by the inner logic of the party-state. We then apply such a framework to have some preliminary examination of the emerging governance mechanism of the Greater Bay Area of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau, with a focus on the newly established free trade zones. In so doing, we highlight the layered, heterogenous, and unevenly realized processes of party-statecraft.
Jun Zhang
Associate Professor of Economic Geography
Department of Geography & Planning, University of Toronto
He previously taught at National University of Singapore, and received his degrees in geography from University of Minnesota and Peking University. His main research interests include: China, geographic political economy of uneven development, geography of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, and geographic theorizing of markets, states, and institutions. His work has been published in outlets such as Journal of Economic Geography, Regional Studies, Urban Studies, and EPA: Economy and Space.