Tak-Wing Ngo: Competitive and Cooperative Regionalism in China's Multi-Scalar Politics.

Recent literature has underscored the increasing importance of sub-national territorial units as sites of growth, competition, and political contention in a changing global order (Keating1998; Sellers 2002; Brenner 2004; Ward, Jonas 2004). Sub-national territorial growth and competition are shaped both by domestic and global forces, the most important domestic factor being the devolution of state power and the decentralization of economic control. Under certain conditions, such decentralization has enabled local governments and stakeholders to craft their development policies to maximize the advantage accruing to their own localities, a process occurring in tandem with current developments in the global capitalist economy where cities and metropolitan regions have become the focal points of exchange and accumulation (Sassen 2012). This paper argues that state re-scaling in China follows a different logic compared with Western countries. Drawing on fieldwork findings on development zones in a number of regions in China, the paper documents the manner in which local authorities mobilize policy instruments to create multiple scales with overlapping jurisdictions.