Abstract
City promotion and branding have become increasingly popular in the past two decades or so. Chinese cities fully share in this trend. They have stepped up their use of a great variety of attractive city labels, such as eco-cities, low carbon cities, smart cities, knowledge cities and resilient cities to enhance their attractiveness to the outside world. These concepts reflect a desired shift from old and polluting manufacturing industries to new and clean service industries. But not all branding efforts are credible or successful; there are specific requirements for actually realizing the proclaimed industrial shift. This chapter aims to answer two questions: (1) What do city branding practices look like in a number of significant Chinese cities? (2) What is the credibility of these practices in terms of the proclaimed industrial transformation?
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Notes
- 1.
We are particularly indebted to Yawei Chen, Simon Joss, Miaoxi Zhao, Qihui Yang and Chaoning Zhang for their role in the data collection and analysis.
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de Jong, M., Han, M., Lu, H. (2019). City Branding in Chinese Cities: From Tactical Greenwashing to Successful Industrial Transformation. In: Zhang, X. (eds) Remaking Sustainable Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-3350-7_5
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