Centripetal urbanism: A view from China’s ethnic periphery

This article introduces centripetal urbanism as an analytical framework for examining how state-building and ethnicity intersect with urbanisation in China’s ethnic periphery. I define centripetal urbanism as a mode of state-orchestrated administrative city-making in frontier regions oriented toward nation-building, statecraft and legitimacy-making, rather than primarily toward colonialisation or capital accumulation. Building on the ‘state turn’ in urban studies and anthropological work on state centripetalism and affective governance, the article shows how administrative upgrading, county-seat urban form and public-good provisioning can function as political technologies through which the state becomes materially legible and affectively credible in peripheral everyday life. Empirically, I trace the urban trajectory of Zhaojue in the Liangshan Yi region from the 1950s to 2020: from a semi-autonomous frontier enclave, to prefectural capital (1952–1978), to administrative downgrading and urban decay in the reform era (1978–2015) and to renewed state-led urban growth through the targeted poverty alleviation campaign (2015–2020). The argument complicates accounts that reduce urbanisation in ethnic/frontier regions either to neoliberal political economy or to a singular settler-colonial logic, by specifying an additional mechanism: long-run fiscal transfers and public provisioning that produce beneficiary positions, political indebtedness and governable expectations of gratitude and loyalty. The article contributes to urban studies by theorising heterogeneous urban trajectories shaped by extra-economic state rationalities and politico-ethnic relations.