Demystifying the Chinese local state: Planning and contesting urban growth at Hexi New Town, Nanjing

Lili Wang
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Abstract

Taking note of the limitations of previously dominant political economy perspectives on China’s urban transformation, and inspired by recent works calling for “beyond-growth” and “micro-level” studies of the Chinese state, as well as ethnographic approaches to the state, this paper aims to explore the often-untold everyday politics of decision-making processes in China’s state-led urban development. Using an urban design project at Hexi New Town in Nanjing, China, as an empirical lens, the article makes three main contributions. Firstly, it reveals how the Chinese local state is constitutive of and lived through intense negotiations and contestations over urban visions, subjectivities, and rules of practices in everyday life. Secondly, building upon existing ethnographic approaches to the state, which focus primarily on state-society dynamics, this paper develops a framework to re-conceptualize the power topology within the Chinese local state as a field of relational modalities (ruling power relations (re)enacted in everyday practices) and relational embeddedness (situated positionalities and subjectivities of state actors). Thirdly, it further shows how the power modalities (the interplay of political-economy power vs technical-power, territorial power vs trans-territorial power) of the Chinese local state are constantly reworked, sometimes re-enacted, sometimes challenged, through both formal and tacit rules in the state’s everyday life. As such, the article provides a new set of entry points to open the black-box of the Chinese local state and to explore the relational nature and an ethnographic perspective of the local state and urban politics in China and beyond.
揭开中国地方国家的神秘面纱:南京河西新城的城市发展规划与争议
本文注意到以往关于中国城市转型的主流政治经济学视角的局限性,并受到近期呼吁对中国国家进行 "超越增长 "和 "微观层面 "研究的著作以及对国家采取人种学方法的启发,旨在探索中国国家主导的城市发展决策过程中往往不为人知的日常政治。文章以中国南京河西新城的一个城市设计项目为实证视角,做出了三个主要贡献。首先,文章揭示了中国地方国家是如何通过对城市愿景、主体性和日常生活中的实践规则进行激烈的协商和争论来构成和生活的。其次,现有的国家民族志研究方法主要关注国家-社会动态,本文在此基础上建立了一个框架,将中国地方国家内部的权力拓扑重新概念化为一个关系模式(在日常实践中(重新)形成的统治权力关系)和关系嵌入(国家行动者所处的地位和主体性)领域。第三,文章进一步说明了中国地方国家的权力模式(政治经济权力与技术权力的相互作用、领土权力与跨领土权力的相互作用)是如何通过国家日常生活中的正式规则和默示规则而不断被重构的,有时被重新演绎,有时被挑战。因此,文章提供了一系列新的切入点,以打开中国地方国家的黑箱,并探索中国和其他国家的地方国家和城市政治的关系性质和人种学视角。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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