Understanding city-regionalism in China: regional cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta

Abstract

China has witnessed the orchestration of city-regionalism and two different regionalscale mechanisms have influenced this integration and cooperation: the top-down state-mandated process and the bottom-up process initiated by local governments. However, this has not been a smooth process and it is shaped by the internal politics generated by China's state configurations. Using the Yangtze River Delta as a case study, this paper argues that China's territorial administrative divisions are a historical configuration that is essential to understand the efforts to construct city-regions as well as to understand the failure to create a new subnational state space.

Regional Integration in the Inter-City Technology Transfer System of the Yangtze River Delta, China

“…As the junction area of BRI (Belt and Road Initiative) and the Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), the YRD, one of the sixth megalopolis of the world [51], is the leading area of China in terms of innovation-driven development, industrial structure transformation and upgrading, economic restructuring, and further opening-up to the outside world [52]. In fact, it has been a long time for the integration of the YRD both at the national and at the regional level [21]. In 1992, 15 cities in the YRD established the joint meeting framework for cooperative department between cities, and the YRD Economic Coordination Society was set up in 1996.…”

“…In January 2018, the YRD Regional Cooperation Office (YRDRCO) was jointly established by Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui, and in June, the YRDRCO issued the 'Three-year action plan (2018-2020) for YRD's integrated development'. After nearly 30 years of integrated development, both at the institutional level and at the practical level, the YRD is moving towards integration in such aspects as public infrastructure, public service, industrial transfer [19,21,22]. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the integration of YRD from the perspective of technology flows.…”

“…Regional integration has been used by the Chinese government both at the national and local level as a main policy tool to deal with the development gap within specific region [15,17,18]. Obviously, there has been a significant increase in the literature documenting the regional integration in China in recent years, within which the YRD is an important example [19][20][21][22]. At the just-concluded China First International Import Expo, Chinese President Xi Jinping pointed out that the Chinese government decided to support the integrated development of the YRD in a national strategic way.…”

A Running Start or a Clean Slate? How a History of Cooperation Affects the Ability of Cities to Cooperate on Environmental Governance

“…Different from the BTH case, cooperative initiatives on environmental governance in the YRD agglomeration took place from the early stages of our observation period (Figure 2) [9]. In 1992, mayors of fifteen cities (Shanghai, Wuxi, Ningbo, Zhoushan, Suzhou, Yangzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Nanjing, Nantong, Taizhou, Changzhou, Huzhou, Jiaxing, and Zhenjiang) in the YRD area set up the joint meeting system (Y1) in order to promote economic cooperation and environmental sustainability.…”

“…A key difference is the extent to which cities within UAs have previously cooperated on inter-city environmental affairs. In some of the UAs set up through the state government initiative, cities have primarily developed environmental governance activities autonomously, while in other UAs inter-city cooperation has already taken place spontaneously [6,9,10]. In this article, we focus specifically on these differences in the history of cooperation of UAs.…”