On capitalism’s cusp

The paper presents a critique of persistent tendencies in (macro)economic theorizing to draw binary distinctions between states and markets, and between liberal-market capitalism and its (more statist) others. Against this dichotomous perspective, a case is made for conjuncturally sited investigations of reconfigured capitalisms and recombinant economic forms. The ambitious scheme to construct a ‘Greater Bay Area’ (GBA) in China’s Pearl River Delta, with its inchoate remit to transcend the two-systems divide between ‘free market’ Hong Kong and the ‘state capitalism’ of the mainland, is taken as a case in point. The GBA scheme entails the construction of a new political economic scale, imagined as a developmental horizon and as a space for experimentation in economic statecraft.