‘Inter-city cooperation fever’ in China: Its trajectory, mechanisms and adjustment strategy

In the context of re-territoriazation during China's shift towards regionalization, the ‘inter-city cooperation fever’, involving imprudently over-promoted, along with issues such as excessive imbalance in resource allocation, intensification of governance frictions, and imbalance in the distribution of local fiscal interests, have caused severe crises in China's urbanization. Understanding the causes and adjustment mechanisms of these crises in inter-city cooperation fever is crucial to the promotion of sustainable urban development.

Combining the geopolitical concepts in city regionalism and the increasing number of local-led inter-city cooperation efforts with intertwined dilemmas worldwide, this paper proposes a new bottom-up re-territorialization concept of “competitive geopolitics”, to clarify the formation mechanism of the formation, crisis, adjustment, and continuous trajectory of inter-city cooperation. In China's “inter-city cooperation fever”, the competitive relationship among local actors is more obvious. This research conducts an empirical study on the inter-city cooperation zones in Jiangsu Province, China. The research results show that the inter-city cooperation fever is dominated by horizontal territorial politics among regions, involving three aspects: the dynamic territorial redistribution politics in which collaborators jointly adjust the local economic order under the transformation of the economic environment, the flexible administrative divisions that establish and maintain the results of interactive games and their political vulnerability, and the political and economic measures of superior governments and the risk of failure under the construction of policy discourse. In addition, in China, these three mechanisms all follow the government-led regionalism and are regulated by the “promotion-oriented” entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese government. This paper aims to promote academic discussions on geopolitics in the context of inter-city cooperation in China and, from the perspective of local competitive relationships, provides a method for observing inter-city cooperation projects that are gradually being implemented on a large scale from a long-term perspective.