Abstract
This chapter works to fill the research gap in existing literature on China’s regional governance by examining the proactive role of provincial governments in constructing a mega urban-region in the Upper Yangtze River Delta (UYRD). It finds that as regional plans are used by the central state to re-articulate its sophisticated functions in building national economic coherence in a global system, they also become the tool for entrepreneurial local states within that national coverage to brand their places as strategic nodes with perceived new ranks in the national hierarchical urban system and lobby central ministries or large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for preferential treatment in land and loan quota or project allocation. With resource allocation increasingly based upon regional plans, a more realistic entrepreneurial strategy for individual places to survive the inter-urban competition is to coalesce with one another to construct city-region and have it incorporated into regional plans made by the central state. Thus, building urban-regions becomes a new form of urban entrepreneurialism that unfolds itself on the provincial scale. The province, a level of government that is usually engaged in bureaucratic management of affairs across sectors, now becomes the major actor in reshaping China’s regional landscape.
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Wang, L. (2018). Emerging Urban-Regions in Central China: The Case of the Upper Yangtze River Delta. In: Ye, L. (eds) Urbanization and Urban Governance in China. Governing China in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57824-2_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57824-2_3
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