On the frontier of party-state capitalism: mapping the geopolitical economies of China’s Greater Bay Area

Developing and operationalizing a heuristic framework for analyzing China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) as a conjunctural formation, the paper documents the mutual constitution and complex interweaving of geopolitical and geoeconomic relations in this cross-border regional space. Straddling an unstable fault line in the world system, the GBA is a fast-evolving and potentially volatile frontier zone of party-state capitalism. An ambitious region-building project with few, if any, precedents or templates, the GBA is a novel experiment in the production of new and recombinant spatial forms, discourses, and logics, the long-run outcomes of which are diverse and unpredictable, even as they are sure to be consequential. Thinking about the GBA requires simultaneous attention to the geoeconomic and the geopolitical, not least at the nexus of party-statecraft, multi-actor and multi-scalar governance, “security,” and new conceptions of national development. Moreover, thinking with the GBA can be taken as a (constructive, if challenging) prompt to explore new styles of methodological practice in geographical political economy, where the geopolitical has an endogenous but disruptive presence.