An Entrepreneurial Party-state and Its ‘City Manager’: The Ningbo Urban Construction Investment Holding Co., Ltd. (NBUCI) and Ningbo’s Tianyi Square Project

Abstract

In contemporary China’s urban governance, city governments operate local state enterprises which engage in land and real estate developments, and thus intervene in the production of urban space. This is typical of local state entrepreneurialism. Orthodox Party and mass organizations in China’s polity, such as the Party itself and Party-sponsored chambers of commerce and trade unions, in adapting to the high fluidity, burgeoning private sector, and governance demands of new urban spaces, have been incorporating political control with economic development and spatial governance through territorialized organizational restructuring. In the case of the Ningbo Tianyi Square redevelopment, the Ningbo government has realized the project through the Ningbo Urban Construction Investment Holdings Co. Ltd. as an urban policy instrument. In the governance mechanism of Tianyi Square, the Haishu District Government and the district-level Party and mass organizations have been deeply implicated in organizational power and urban governance networks through such territorialized organizational restructuring as “Party-building in business areas” and “trade unions in business areas”.