Scale-building in the party-state: the governance of China’s metropolitan regions

This paper explores the emerging governance patterns in Chinese metropolitan regions (城市群 chengshiqun). In the scholarly debate on city-regional governance in the West, a prominent position holds that governing large urban regions entails a rescaling of state territories. In China, the central government plays a prominent role in the scale-building of China’s metropolitan regions. This is not only evident in the first stage of the post-reform policies, involving major reforms of state scales for the purpose of economic and urban development. Drawing on three case studies (the Yangtze River Delta, Guanzhong–Tianshui and Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei metropolitan regions), it is shown that the Chinese central government also plays a strong role in the current stage of metropolitan regional development. It is argued that the trajectory of metropolitan scale-building in China is a result of the hierarchical administrative system impeding horizontal cooperation between subnational entities of the party-state.