CPRG: The Party-Statecraft of China’s Regional Governance and the Emerging Greater Bay Area

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.