Locality under the deepening reach of the state: The industrial park regeneration in Quanzhou city

Abstract

The regeneration of dilapidated industrial sites in urban China is challenged by the participation of a variety of actors with the state deepening its reach into such projects to impose control and facilitate industrial upgrade. However, there is relatively scant knowledge about the interactions between the localised actor dynamics and the far-reaching state. To address this knowledge gap, this paper leverages understanding the state as a process and the concept of locality to investigate the complicated actor relationships at the project level. A case study was conducted on the regeneration of an industrial site in Quanzhou city. It is found rather than imposing one-way firming control, state and local actors make negotiation and collaborative efforts to achieve the development goals for the industrial park. The deepening reach of the state enables a blur of demarcation between state as rule makers and society as rule recipients, where microscale capacity is facilitated according to the nation-state’s selective development goal. The nation-state’s function is therefore materialised through the hierarchical policy-making process, arranging local delegating agency and opening up room for negotiations driven by proactivity in the locality. It is suggested in this paper that the understandings of locality and state processes in industrial site regeneration are enhanced by providing empirical evidence in the non-neoliberal context.