This article examines the sources of widespread rent-seeking practices and their relations to corruption in China. It argues that rent-creation and seeking are difficult to eliminate because they have become institutionalized as the constitutive parts of economic governance. Using case studies drawn from a number of industrial sectors, this study shows that the creation and allocation of economic rents has become a major policy instrument used by various levels of governments to manoeuvre industrial plans and development priorities. At the same time, the discretionary power exercised by state agents in implementing development priorities has created mounting opportunities for exchanging rents with bribes. The result is a structural nexus between economic governance, rentseeking and corruption that defy administrative measures aiming at achieving a clean government in China.Rent-seeking constitutes one of the most common sources of corruption in present-day China. Economic rents are generated when productions licenses are rationed, when prices are fixed, when trade quotas are imposed by the government, and so on. Typically, bribes are offered by businesses to government officials in exchange for the creation and allocation of rents. Ample opportunities of rent-seeking therefore bear directly on the prevalence of corruption in China.Constraining the creation and the pursuit of economic rents thus constitutes one of the many steps towards controlling rampant corruption in China. This article argues, however, that rent-creation and seeking are difficult to eliminate because they have become institutionalized as the constitutive parts of economic governance. Rent has been used by the central government as a policy instrument in effecting industrial plans and development priorities. Local governments have relied on rent allocation to manoeuvre the development of local political economies. At the same time, many private businesses have become

Recent studies have re-examined the implications and conceptual limitations of the theory of state rescaling in non-Western contexts. While the reconfiguration of state spaces has taken place in many countries and regions, the forces driving a state to reconfigure its spatial power and the forms of state rescaling appear to be contingent upon specific contexts. This article analyses the driving forces behind the scalar restructuring of the Chinese state and discusses how the logic as well as the form of rescaling differ from the post-Fordist experience of the West. By focusing on the frantic rush to establish special development zones, this article argues that development zones in China represent new political spaces that enable local state actors to navigate between multiple scales. Local states can manipulate the costs and benefits between a zone and its hosting locale by taking advantage of their overlapping jurisdictions across different scales. Zoning has become a scaling strategy from below. Local authorities have deployed various zoning technologies to empower themselves by manipulating the existing scalar order to their own advantage.

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This introductory article revisits cross-border shadow exchanges in a comparative perspective and reflects on their theoretical implications. It explores the diversities and complexities of shadow operations and critically examines the concept of informality that is commonly used to describe such non-state-sanctioned practices. It further underlines the key role played by checkpoint politics in border governance. Border checkpoints serve both as a state institution in regulating border crossings as well as a political site where material and power exchanges among state and non-state actors are negotiated. Such negotiation of selective passage through statecontrolled gateways is often predicated upon the skilful manipulation of time and space by experienced traders and brokers.

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