The Changing Governance Mechanism and Spatiality of Chinese State: Lessons from Guangzhou-Foshan City Region

Abstract

The changing form of political economy accords a distinctive regime of accumulation and state regulation in Fordism and post-Fordism. This paper advocates an alternative methodological approach of state by reading state spatiality as a self-reflexive attribute integral to the state regulatory capacity. In this paper, the changing mode of regulation and state spatiality will be examined under different regimes of accumulation. New state spatiality embodies as an articulation of both scalar and networked imaginaries. This is followed by examinations of the political economy in China since economic reform and open-up. Three interpretations, namely, local state corporatism, local growth coalition and urban entrepreneurism will be revisited and discussed. These interpretations indicate local state has become an object of regulation. Since 1990s, the scales of political economy restructure upwards to the level of city region. Taking Guangzhou-Foshan city region as a reference, two sets of planning (institutional narratives) are examined with a view to uncovering the dynamics that push city region a new state space. On the new state space where two municipalities could declare collective ownerships, synergic effects fail to take roots because of the organizational complexity in city region governance. City region as new state space in China could not exert full potential due to the lack of communication between different systems of accountability in current administrative system.