Regional Integration and Governance Reshuffling in the Making of China’s City-Regions

This book for the first time thoroughly investigates the extent of economic and institutional integrations and the underlying governance reshuffling process of China’s city-regionalism. By using the Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou sub-region (SDH) in southern China as an empirical case, this book provides convincing evidence that China’s city-regionalism is essentially a state-orchestrated and institution-based process. Perspectives from “market-industry-infrastructure” and multi-level governance (MLG) have been provided to systematically examine China’s city-regionalism. This book has essentially made a definitive contribution to China’s regional governance. Methodologically, it shows how China’s city-regionalism can be examined through a problem-solving and case-by-case paradigm, through building a bridge between an empirical slogan and an inclusive theoretical term for institutional integration and through MLG and its integrative approaches in China. Exhilarating findings are presented using extensive tables, graphs, and maps along with the integration of quantitative and qualitative methods. Undergraduates, graduates, and researchers who are interested in China’s city-regionalism and regional governance would be the readership of the book, and officers from different levels of government as well as policymakers will find the book inspiring.

Introduction: Background and Research Significance.- Conceptual Background: The City-Region and its Economic and Institutional Integration.- Empirical Background: Policies, Practices and Evolutions to City-Regional Integration in China.- Analytical Framework and Research Method.- The Assessment of Economic and Institutional Integrations of SDH.- Exploring Reshuffling Process of Governance Structure to Enable the Industrial Integration of SDH: A Case Study of SSSCZ.- Exploring the Reshuffling of the Governance Structure to Enable the Infrastructure Integration of SDH: A Case Study of SGSIR.- Conclusions.

Dr. Xianchun Zhang currently serves as the associate professor in the school of public affairs, Zhejiang University (ZJU). He has been a member of the Institute of Land and Spatial Planning of Zhejiang Province, and Urbanization and Spatial Governance Research Center of ZJU since 2021, and sits on the peer review board of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). Prior to joining ZJU, he was a research fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-2020).    

Dr. Zhang’s research interests cover urban and regional governance, land spatial planning, urban spatial growth and land policy, with particular reference to the current phenomenon of urban regionalization in China with scale reconstruction and national space theory. He is the author of Evaluating the institutional performance of the Pearl River Delta integration policy through intercity cooperation network analysis, and his work widely appears in peer-reviewed international journals such as Land Use Policy, Urban Geography, Landscae and Urban Planning, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Urban Studies, Annals of the American Assocation of Geographers, etc. He is the PI of one national research project granted by the NSFC and participates in several major projects and key projects granted by the education department of Zhejiang Province, NSFC, the National Social Science Fund of China as well as the China Ministry of Education.