Rezoning at the threshold of two systems: regionalised party–statecraft in China’s Greater Bay Area

During China’s reform era, dominant narratives described a transition away from centralised planning in favour of mutually reinforcing processes of liberalisation and decentralisation. Under Xi Jinping, the talk has increasingly been of the recentralisation of authoritarian-state powers and party discipline. Questioning both reform-era transition narratives and equally simplifying claims about their recent reversal, the paper argues for an enriched treatment of party–state spatiality, understood as a polymorphic and multi-scalar process, rather than simply a more complex one. In the emergent Greater Bay Area megaregion, ‘new era’ zoning strategies are being repurposed as drivers of pathfinding reforms animated by the party–state, in contrast to received readings of zones as single-purpose instruments of liberalisation.