From the Pearl River Delta to the Greater Bay Area: State spatial selectivity, contingent socio-spatial processes, and variegated geographies of China’s city-regionalism

This paper revisits China’s city-regionalism based on a multi-scalar reading of state entrepreneurialism, with a special focus on the transition from the Pearl River Delta (PRD) to the Greater Bay Area (GBA). We first propose a multi-scalar theoretical framework of state entrepreneurialism to comprehend China’s city-regional development. At the national scale, the central state maintains planning centrality by establishing normative goals through national political mandates and orchestrating socio-spatial reconfiguration of city-regions using various planning techniques (e.g., zoning, annexation, connectivity, and place-making), which demonstrates state spatial selectivity. At the local scale, city-regional development, led by the local state, pivots on the mandates and resorts to market instruments. Place-specific contexts and development trajectories give rise to distinctive ‘regional models’ and contingent socio-spatial processes. From a historical-geographical perspective, these contingent socio-spatial processes represent both the outcome of and the precondition for successive waves of state spatial selectivity in city-regional development. Building upon the dynamic interplay between state spatial selectivity and contingent socio-spatial processes, we present a periodised analysis to delve into the ongoing transformation from the PRD to the GBA. Amidst evolving global-local conjunctures and shifting national political mandates, state spatial selectivity within the PRD-to-GBA transformation is categorised into three periods: (1) 1980s to early 1990s: exploiting zoning technologies to institutionalise exceptionality within delimited areas for undertaking market-oriented experiments; (2) mid-1990s to 2000s: empowering entrepreneurial cities to drive market-oriented development while managing their size, internal hierarchy, and external connections; and (3) 2010s onwards: an intensified planning centrality at the national scale and the reinvention of zoning technologies to emphasise relationality, reshaping the urban-regional and cross-border dynamics of the GBA within an ‘integration’ framework. In conclusion, this paper reflects on the variegated geographies of China’s city-regionalism – the socio-spatially distinctive, temporally evolving and ultimately polymorphic, multi-scalar construction of Chinese city-regions.