Regional Integration in Yangtze River Delta

Yangtze River Delta (YRD) includes Shanghai mage-city as well as Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces in East China. Since 2000, the Chinese central government has conducted a series of planning activities in order to profoundly integrate this broad region. It is expected that YRD will become one of the most competitive and modernized global regions and will lead the overall growth and development of China. However, the regional integration process has met dramatic challenges due to the administrative divisions across YRD. Therefore, this lecture aims to address the following questions in order to have a deeper understanding of the regional integration, which may not only useful to YRD, but also has wider significance to other regions and places. First, with the capital and population flows getting intensively in the integrated space, who (which city) gets more benefits? Second, why do multi-regions cooperate successfully or fail? Third, how is the governance rescaling in the integrated regions?