Article

Progress in Human Geography

2014, Vol. 38(2) 221–247
‘Socialism with Chinese ª The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132513476822
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development, variegated
neoliberalization and the dialectical
differentiation of state spatiality

Kean Fan Lim

University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract
While ‘neoliberalization’ is increasingly used to conceptualize concrete realities of China’s economic
development, it is not employed in dialectical relation with China’s prevailing developmental ideology –
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This paper offers a fresh framework and research agenda from which
to examine this relation. It argues that neoliberalization across China is a variegated process, formed and
fractured by actually existing uneven state spatiality and the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) ostensibly
contradictory historicization of a Marxian socialist end-state. How neoliberalization works simultaneously in/
through multiple sites in China and consequently reproduces the CPC’s ideological legitimacy has become a
theoretically significant question for research on geographical political economy.

Keywords
cross-scalar sociospatial dialectic, geographical political economy, ideology, ‘nationally strategic new areas’,
socialism with Chinese characteristics, uneven development, variegated neoliberalization

We must integrate the universal truth of Marxism
with the concrete realities of China, blaze a path
of our own and build a socialism with Chinese
characteristics – that is the basic conclusion we
have reached after reviewing our long history.
(Deng, 1982: n.p.)
[P]erhaps the most interesting aspect of neoliber-
alization arises out of the complex interplay of
internal dynamics and external forces. (Harvey,
2005a: 177)
G20 counterparts that their respective govern-
ments adopt current account deficit or surplus
targets of less than 4% of GDP. This proposal
drew an intriguing response from China’s Vice-
Foreign Minister Cui Tiankai: ‘The artificial set-
ting of a numerical target cannot but remind us of
the days of a planned economy’ (Bloomberg,
2010). At one level, Cui was probably offering
a witty counterpoint: indeed, it was China that
had operated as – and some might argue it still

I Introduction Corresponding author:

Department of Geography, University of British Columbia,
In November 2010, the United States (US) Trea- 1984 West Mall, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada.
sury Secretary Timothy Geithner proposed to his Email: keanflim@geog.ubc.ca
222
is – a centrally planned economy. On closer read-
ing, however, there might be a more profound
underlying meaning to Cui’s remarks that exem-
plifies a scalar differentiation within the Chinese
state apparatus’s politico-economic ideology:
freedom of financial and commodity flows across
the global economy is strongly preferred, while
the notion of ‘a planned economy’ at this scale
– led by a hegemonic US government that heavily
influences the terms of market exchange – is
deemed an undesirable barrier to capital accumu-
lation. This outlook strongly suggests China is
not unlike what Harvey (2005a: 64) terms a ‘neo-
liberal state’, within which ‘the freedom of busi-
nesses and corporations (legally regarded as
individuals) to operate within [an] institutional
framework of free markets and free trade is
regarded as a fundamental good’. Juxtaposed
against this outlook, however, is the fact that the
Communist Party of China (CPC) continues to
weave socialist principles – in particular what
Deng Xiaoping (1982) refers to as the ‘universal
truth of Marxism’1 – through its domestic socio-
economic policies. This apparent contradiction
raises a theoretically significant question that
remains unaddressed in politico-economic stud-
ies of China: what is the function of neoliberaliza-
tion in the CPC’s quest to secure ‘common
affluence’ (gongtong fuyu) within/for a ‘harmo-
nious society’ (hexie shehui)?
To address this question, it is necessary first to
understand that neoliberalization in and through
Chinese state space does not occur in a post-
ideological vacuum. Neoliberalization, as Zhang
and Ong (2008: 10) observe, has taken on the
appearance of ‘an inexorable process that renders
all national spaces intelligible or commensurable
in accord with predetermined universal norms’.
This perception of inexorability in turn engen-
dered formalistic conceptualizations in the social
sciences that ‘assess whether particular nation-
states are more or less ‘‘neoliberal’’ in terms of
a preconceived collection of attributes’, assess-
ments that ‘tend to give short shrift to the role
of situated phenomena in shaping outcomes’
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
(p. 10). In China, however, the increasing influ-
ence of neoliberal logics within Chinese policy-
making circles is entwined with – if not sub-
sumed under – the national strategy to actualize
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. For this
reason, the apparent willingness of Chinese
policy-makers to embrace the logic of a self-
regulatory ‘free’ market at the global scale does
not – or, indeed, cannot – translate into a whole-
sale adaptation of neoliberal logics at the national
scale. Taking the constitutive role of this ‘situ-
ated phenomenon’ into account, this paper raises
an equally plausible proposition: geographically
variegated neoliberalization, driven and cush-
ioned by the Chinese state, could function as the
precondition of/for a historicized totality known
as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
The subsequent discussion aims to achieve
two interrelated objectives. First, it explains
why ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ is
not an absolute entity that can be neatly period-
ized and packaged into a geographically uni-
form ‘variety of capitalism’ (pace Hall and
Soskice, 2001); neither does this ideological
vision reflect, in spatial practice, received
notions of the ‘capitalist developmental state’.
Rather, China’s contemporary socialistic evolu-
tion is expressed through different sociospatial
forms, in tandem with variegated modes of neo-
liberal regulation. The inclusion of neoliberal
logics in politico-economic governance neces-
sitates a recurring series of territorialized rein-
stitutionalization (cf. Brenner et al., 2010).
This proactive reorganization of state space is
aimed at directing new capital investments into
poorer areas (particularly in the western inte-
rior) while sustaining, at the same time, the rates
of capital accumulation in more affluent coastal
city-regions. Through ameliorating the pro-
nounced interprovincial income disparities,2 the
CPC’s primary policy intention is to obviate the
emergence of sociospatial crises that may desta-
bilize its control over the national political
economy. Territorialized reinstitutionalizations
thus do not simply function as economic tools
Lim
that deepen the application of market logics;
they are social countermovements that pre-
empt revolutionary ruptures that could poten-
tially become, in Marxian terms, new ‘locomo-
tives’ that power historical evolution.
Second, the paper presents a fresh conceptual
framework and research agenda that examines
how the external pressures to reshape Chinese
economic geographies paradoxically negate
and fortify the CPC’s similarly paradoxical
approach to create ‘Chinese characteristics’ to
complement ‘the universal truth of Marxism’
(after all, if Marxian ‘truth’ is really ‘universal’,
would it be necessary to place it in relation to
unique characteristics?). The proposed frame-
work and agenda explore how the selective dif-
ferentiation of state spatiality in relation to
actually existing sociospatial inequality – an
emergent process this paper identifies as
‘decentralization as centralization’ (yidianweiz-
hong) – works to legitimize the CPC’s grasp on
politico-economic power. It does appear,
indeed, that the Marxian ‘locomotives’ that
power history in and through China are being
geo-institutionally reconfigured to power a
timeless engine – that engine is the CPC.
To foreground the theoretical significance of
this reconfiguration process, this paper argues
that China’s economic transformations must be
conceptualized as a cross-scalar sociospatial
dialectic. This dialectic is defined and expressed
as the dynamic interplay of ostensibly opposi-
tional processes, originating in and/or occurring
at different geographical scales, within a spa-
tially delimited social formation (e.g. the popula-
tion living within a city-region). ‘Socialism with
Chinese characteristics’, as will be argued, is a
geographic tension: the permeation of (puta-
tively) non-socialist practices (e.g. increasing
privatization of production, the growing role of
financialization, expanding industrialization and
the concomitant proleterianization of farmers,
etc.) fuse dynamically with the quest for a class-
less and prosperous society across Chinese state
space.3 It is this threefold placement of socialistic
223
principles in relation to highly varied domestic
sociospatial contexts; the (neoliberal) institu-
tional guidelines of the ‘Washington Consensus’;
and the profit-maximizing strategies of TNCS –
now including many Chinese state-owned enter-
prises (SOEs) – that determines the ‘Chinese
characteristics’ of what Deng conceives as the
‘universal truth of Marxism’.4
The paper will be organized in three parts. Sec-
tion II places the growing global-scale hegemony
of neoliberalism in relation to China’s post-1949
politico-economic development. The sociospatial
expressions that emerge from the dialectical
fusion of socialistic policies with neoliberal logics
in China will be presented in section III. Strategies
emergent at two scales over the past decade – the
delineation of three cross-provincial regional
developmental programmes and six intra-urban
‘nationally strategic’ new areas – are fore-
grounded as theoretically significant research
platforms. The section explains how these strate-
gies are symptomatic of the sociospatial tensions
that arise from earlier rounds of selective neoliber-
alization. The importance of examining varie-
gated neoliberalization as a sociospatial function
of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ – and,
more crucially, as pre-emptory geo-institutional
leaps that consolidate the CPC’s state power – is
re-emphasized in the conclusion.
II The (im)possibility of totalizing
neoliberalization
1 Neoliberalization as
neo-developmentalism?
The global system of capitalism is constituted
by a cyclical process of boom (resulting in over-
accumulation) and bust (resulting in massive
devaluation). This tendency is intensified fol-
lowing the dollar’s de-link with gold in 1971,
which precipitated a rapid and colossal increase
in short-term global financial flows, mostly for
speculative purposes rather than to fund trade
and foreign direct investments (FDIs). The
224
quest for a reduction of geographical barriers to
financial flows and trade, in conjunction with
what is now known as the new international
division of labour (Fröbel et al., 1980), contrib-
uted to the contemporary hegemony of ‘neoli-
beralism’, a political-economic governance
ideology that (1) entails individual states to
effect market-like rule to protect private prop-
erty and ownership rights regardless of citizen-
ship, and (2) minimizes, if not eradicates,
‘price-distortions’ through the abolishment of
regulations that impede market access for pri-
vate individuals.
The principal and most influential proponent
of neoliberal reason is arguably the late Univer-
sity of Chicago economist Milton Friedman (see
Crouch, 2011; Klein, 2007; Peck, 2010). Once
concretized as a developmental ideology, neoli-
beralism became an engine set off to shape eco-
nomic policies. While the ideology was put into
practice – with the participation of Friedman
and his allied economists known as the ‘Chi-
cago Boys’ – with mixed success in South
America in the 1970s, it came to historical pro-
minence worldwide through the policies of
Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister of the UK,
1979–1990) and those of Ronald Reagan (Pres-
ident of the USA, 1981–1989). Friedman
advised both leaders. Interestingly, Deng
Xiaoping, another of Thatcher’s contemporaries
and then newly appointed leader of China, also
received a crash course from Friedman in 1980,
but the Deng administration opted not to go
down the path of Latin American economies
by selling off state-owned assets and opening
up the entire national territory to the transna-
tional flows of capital. For this reason, China’s
national-scale developmental trajectory is an
apposite arena from which to theorize how neo-
liberalism works as a flexible developmental
ideology that generates geographically varie-
gated impacts.
As is now clear, a national state apparatus, in
its integrated position as the absolute sovereign
power over social formations within state
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
territory and as the driver of transnational finan-
cial flows through its independent ability to
implement monetary policy, remains a central
generator and mediator of neoliberalizing strate-
gies. This point was obscured by the post-1989
euphoria in advanced capitalist economies, nota-
bly by neoliberal proponents in the Anglophone
world. Writing just after the collapse of the Soviet
Union and the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s
(1992) highly influential ‘end of history’ thesis,
Johnson (1993: 63) laments that ‘[t]he seeming
victory of the state-as-referee conception has
given American social science in particular an
ethnocentrism and an ideological quality that
seem to have erased all Western memory of
the state from Plato’s Republic to Hobbes’s
Leviathan’. A keen believer in how economic
activities are inextricably entwined with the
‘guiding hand’ of the ‘plan rational’ state, John-
son (1982) is unconvinced that the putative ‘free
market’ could self-regulate for the common good.
Japan’s post-war economic development, to
Johnson, was propelled by the industrial policies
of what is now widely known as the ‘capitalist
developmental state’.
While China’s developmental approach –
particularly the enlargement of domestic spaces
for market exchange after 1978 – appears simi-
lar to Johnson’s (1982) conceptual prototype,
key differences are observed through two criti-
cal geographical perspectives (pace Beeson,
2009; Xia, 2000). First, at the national level, the
presupposition of the ‘developmental state’ as
‘capitalist’ overlooks a crucial function of the
state apparatus – its capacity to rescale capital
allocation and the accumulation process to
ameliorate uneven economic-geographical
development. The state apparatus and its socio-
economic policies are assessed by developmen-
tal state theorists at the national level without
ascertaining the redistributive intents and
effects of spatial strategies implemented at the
subnational scales (cf. Brenner, 2004; section
III.2). National-level capital redistribution takes
two forms in China: direct form, through the
Lim
reallocation of fiscal revenue by the central gov-
ernment, and indirect form, through state spatial
strategies that designate where SOEs’ capital
investments and FDIs are (al)located. The sec-
ond redistributive form occurs because the pre-
determined socialist goal of ‘Common
Affluence’ impels the Chinese state to ensure
capital flows and fixity are as balanced as possi-
ble across state space (more in section III).
Second, the conceptualization of developmen-
tal statism is not extended dialectically to the
global scale to show how they exist in tension with
other states that advocate the construction of a
self-regulatory global ‘free’ market. It is not inad-
vertent that Japan’s economic development stag-
nated after a currency appreciation agreement (the
Plaza Accord) was signed in September 1985.
Similarly, the economy of South Korea – another
state commonly held to be an exemplary develop-
mental state – spun into crisis in 1997–1998 after
its government believed transnational financial
market liberalization would enhance the
performance of domestic Korean firms. Over the
last decade, the relevance of the developmental
state concept vis-a-vis intensifying neoliberaliz-
ing processes is increasingly called into question
(see, inter alia, Beeson and Islam, 2005; Glass-
man, 1999; Low, 2004). The rationale of this
critical evaluation is clear: the ability of these
economies’ ‘national champions’ (e.g. Toyota,
Samsung) to shift and/or stretch production net-
works overseas – and hence the need for ‘free’
market access to foreign product and labour
markets – has intensified global-scale neoliberali-
zation. While this phenomenon appears at first
glance to be analogous to China’s recent ‘Go
Abroad’ (zouchuqu) developmental approach (to
be elaborated in section III), the ideological basis
is distinct in the Chinese context: China’s devel-
opmentalist orientation, bound a priori within
Marxian temporal parameters and a single-party
political system (see section II.2), necessitates the
proactive differentiation of state involvement in
economic activities at different scales (now
including the global scale) to accommodate the
225
demands of the neoliberally oriented ‘Washing-
ton Consensus’.5 A focus on China’s state spatial
strategies over the past decade, specifically how
these strategies accommodate and/or reignite
neoliberalizing impulses in relation to the global
economy, would thereby offer a more incisive
platform from which to theorize the develop-
mentalist orientation of the CPC.
This approach begins with the presupposition
that state intervention drives and cushions the
global-scale neoliberalization process. If the mar-
ket is self-regulatory anywhere, there should not
be macroeconomic intervention at the intra- and
interstate levels. As the aforementioned ‘Geithner
Proposal’ indicates, neoliberalization is an impos-
sibility without proactive state intervention. It is
even plausible that states are inherently anti-
market because they do not believe in self-
regulating markets in the first place; what counts
as ‘markets’ – and, indeed, as ‘free’ markets – to
individual states is thus open to interpretation.
Peck (2010) sums up this dialectic incisively:
Neoliberalism . . . has only ever existed in
‘impure’ form, indeed can only exist in messy
hybrids. Its utopian vision of a free society and
free economy is ultimately unattainable. Yet
the pristine clarity of its ideological apparition,
the free market, coupled with the endless
frustrations borne of the inevitable failure to
arrive at this elusive destination, nevertheless
confer a significant degree of forward momentum
on the neoliberal project. Ironically, neoliberal-
ism possesses a progressive, forward-leaning
dynamic by virtue of the very unattainability of
its idealized destination. (Peck, 2010: 7,
emphases in original)
Put another way, then, neoliberalism as a
totalizing ideology exemplifies what Žižek
(1989) calls a ‘social fantasy’; it is a represen-
tational imaginary that is able to sustain its
hegemonic existence because of its very onto-
logical impossibility:
[T]he stake of social-ideological fantasy is to con-
struct a vision of society which does exist, a
226
society which is not split by an antagonistic divi-
sion, a society in which the relation between its
parts is organic, complementary . . . The notion
of social fantasy is therefore a necessary counter-
part to the concept of antagonism: fantasy is pre-
cisely the way the antagonistic fissure is masked.
In other words, fantasy is a means for an ideology
to take its own failure into account in advance.
(Žižek, 1989: 142, emphases in original)
It is arguably this ‘social fantasy’ of a free market
utopia that masks an ‘antagonistic fissure’ – i.e.
the primacy placed on the incessant exploitation
of uneven economic-geographical development
(hereafter uneven development) under the rubric
of state-endorsed market ‘laws’ rather than more
benign and holistic socioeconomic development
(cf. Harvey, 2005b; Polanyi, 1944; Smith, 1984).
Indeed, neoliberalization is co-constituted in
practice by what Marx calls ‘primitive accumula-
tion’, a systematic process by which elites
(politicians and capitalists) consolidate their
power through expropriating assets from the
people (notably farmland and free access to
natural resources), in turn compelling the masses
to commodify their labour power (triggering
the ‘proletarianization’ process, in Marxian
determination).
The more successful the primitive accumula-
tion process, the broader the pool of ‘industrial
reserve army’. This outcome, which suppresses
wages and deepens uneven development, leads
Harvey (2005a: 19) to interpret neoliberaliza-
tion ‘as a utopian project to realize a theoretical
design for the reorganization of international
capitalism or as a political project to re-
establish the conditions for capital accumula-
tion and to restore the power of economic
elites’. The notion of utopianism, Harvey adds,
‘primarily worked as a system of justification
and legitimation for whatever needed to be done
to achieve this goal. The evidence suggests,
moreover, that when neoliberal principles clash
with the need to restore or sustain elite power,
then the principles are either abandoned or
become so twisted as to be unrecognizable’
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
(p. 19). Wade (2003) succinctly describes this
‘twisting’ in his critical discursive analysis of
the ‘Washington Consensus’:
What [it] does not include are proactive industrial
policies to nurture new industries and new tech-
nologies and to diffuse innovations to established
industries – that might have the unwanted conse-
quence of raising the competitive pressure on
industries in the industrialized countries. This is
definitely not on today’s development agenda.
Indeed, words like ‘technology’, ‘national inno-
vation system’, ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘competi-
tiveness’, and ‘universities’ are conspicuously
missing from the thinking of development organi-
zations like the World Bank and the bilateral
donors. So too are words like ‘distribution of
power’, ‘elite capture’, ‘trade unions’, and even
‘freedom of association’. The poor are to be lifted
up by supplying them with missing assets and by
gaining the knowledge with which to manage
them better, not through their own engagement
in collective action. Thus lifted up, they will be
as good-natured as the sheep they tend. (Wade,
2003: xliv)
What Wade (2003) does not address in his oth-
erwise incisive critique is the conspicuous
absence of different ideological terminologies
(and the consequent policies that emerged due
to different ideological moorings) such as
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This
absence in itself reflects what Gibson-Graham
(1996) call ‘capitalocentrism’, a situation in
which:
other forms of economy (not to mention noneco-
nomic aspects of social life) are often understood
primarily with reference to capitalism: as being
fundamentally the same as (or modeled upon)
capitalism, or as being deficient or substandard
imitations; as being opposite to capitalism; as
being the complement of capitalism; as existing
in capitalism’s space or orbit. (Gibson-Graham,
1996: 6)
Indeed, there seems to be an implicit conces-
sion in Wade’s comment that these develop
Lim
mental discourses have come to represent the
eternal-cum-ecumenical new normal; that ‘uto-
pianism’ is now strictly defined by neoliberal
parameters. Perhaps, in the heady days of the
early 1990s, neoliberal policy-makers in
Washington forgot about their Beijing counter-
parts’ resolute resolve to contextualize the ‘uni-
versal truth of Marxism’ across (and possibly
beyond) Chinese state space.
2 China after 1949: (already) living in
different times
The CPC’s attempt to resolve developmental
contradictions in the contemporary conjuncture
foregrounds – and is arguably undergirded by –
a unique interpretation of a major tenet of Marx-
ian historical materialism, namely, how ‘modes
of production’ succeed one another chronologi-
cally through social revolution. The ultimate
socioeconomic end-state of Marxian historical
evolution is an upper-stage ‘socialist mode of
production’ – communism – ruled directly by the
proletariat, with the state functioning in a faded
capacity. Much has been written on this classic
prediction over the last century, and the aim of
this paper is not to review this extensive litera-
ture. Rather, this paper explores a dialectical
phenomenon not fully addressed by received
historical-materialist conceptualizations of
China: it is Chinese policy-makers’ simultaneous
affirmation and negation of Marxian historical
materialism that drives the reinstitutionalization
of state space in China.
This spatial dialectic evolved in three ways.
First, former CPC Chairman Mao Zedong’s
attempt to introduce ‘socialism’ to a newly uni-
fied China (which essentially was a territorial
patchwork of diverse economies) in itself con-
tradicted Marx’s formulation: it was the weak
(rather than strong, as Marx determined) and
geographically uneven existence of the capital-
ist mode of production that provided both the
conditions for the successful CPC-led revolu-
tion prior to 1949 and the obstacles to fully
227
realize, in Marxian determination, a proletar
ian-led socialist mode of production across the
country thereafter. This led to a second contra-
diction: a socialist epoch first emerged before
it had the opportunity to develop its existential
preconditions (through the capitalist mode of
production). Following an extensive review of
historical resources, Li (2006: 64–65) explains
how Joseph Stalin, the former leader of the
Soviet Union and a fervent advocate of policy
radicalism in the 1920s and 1930s, advised Chi-
nese policy-makers in 1948 to keep the eco-
nomic status quo of China unchanged should
they emerge victorious in the civil war with the
Nationalists. Gradualism, rather than radical-
ism, was the recommended developmental
approach to socialist transformation. It was
arguably because of Stalin’s advice – which
took into account the economic-geographical
foundations that the CPC inherited – that
Mao (1949) initially decided to engage capital-
ists in his quest to build a socialist mode of
production:
China’s private capitalist industry, which occu-
pies second place in her modern industry, is a
force which must not be ignored. Because they
have been oppressed or hemmed in by imperial-
ism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism, the
national bourgeoisie of China and its representa-
tives have often taken part in the people’s demo-
cratic revolutionary struggles or maintained a
neutral stand. For this reason and because China’s
economy is still backward, there will be need, for
a fairly long period after the victory of the revolu-
tion, to make use of the positive qualities of urban
and rural private capitalism as far as possible, in
the interest of developing the national economy.
(Mao, 1949: n.p.)
That gradualism was soon abandoned. This
third contradiction was induced by the CPC’s
aforementioned a priori historicization of ‘new
China’ as socialist. Rather than dismiss this act
as an ideological tool to disguise reality, this
paper argues that a priori historicization
becomes precisely the central driver of Chinese
228
economic-geographical development to the
present day. To reapply Žižek’s (1989: 142;
cf. section II.1) conceptualization, the goal of
ideology is not to conceal a reality that is ‘less
illusory’ or ‘more real’; rather – in a manner
akin to the ‘end of history’ undertones of the
neoliberal doctrine that automatically view
non-compliant entities as ‘anomalies’6 – it con-
structs the ‘social fantasy’ that is the social real-
ity, and the primary ideological concern is how
to address the ‘antagonistic fissure’ that threa-
tens this new reality.
For this reason, the declaration of a socialist
epoch in China became at once a social totality
and a spatial process. The political act of
Marxian temporal framing produced its own
socioeconomic necessity and geographical con-
tingency: to be in and of a socialist epoch, it
would be necessary to launch socioeconomic
policies that were aligned to Marxist-Leninist
principles, but this alignment was (and still is)
a contingent process – its success depended on
whether socialist ideals and policies can be
smoothly implemented across a highly disparate
and geographically uneven national social for-
mation. It was this eagerness to accelerate the
transposition of ‘social fantasy’ into reality
(i.e. universalize the Marxist-Leninist model
of socialism across Chinese state space) that led
Mao Zedong to turn to Stalin’s Short Course7
for guidance (Li, 2006). The outcome – which
unfortunately generated catastrophic conse-
quences – was radical economic Stalinization
in the immediate years following the establish-
ment of ‘new China’:
Between 1950 and 1953, Mao consciously and
deliberately sought to repeat Stalin’s actions
between 1921 and 1925 as described in the Short
Course. Mao almost literally relied upon this
work as a do-it-yourself handbook for building
socialism. Mao’s general line, which summarized
Stalin’s basic ideas on how to build socialism,
became a mini handbook for building socialism
in China in the 1950s. He was more radical than
most other Chinese leaders in pursuing a Stalinist
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
vision of China, and more so than conventional
wisdom would have us believe. There was no
place in Mao’s vision of a socialist economy for
market forces or a private economy (Li, 2006:
186–187).
The rolling series of contradictions generated
by the socialistic historicization of China from
1949 thus exemplifies the paradoxical interpre-
tation of Marxian historical materialism by Chi-
nese policy-makers. On one hand, the temporal
logic of historical evolution is indeed what
Deng made it to be – a ‘universal truth’. It was,
as aforementioned, through a decisive round of
revolution in 1949 that Mao launched a socialist
epoch in/for China, following which he fortified
the ‘superstructure’8 (i.e. new social institutions
and ideas) to cement state-society relations.
Addressing the geographical contingency asso-
ciated with socialistic historicization, on the
other hand, would prove to be a greater chal-
lenge. Under the Mao administration, the neces-
sary push for sociospatial egalitarianism was
paradoxically built upon the contingency it
sought to extinguish – uneven development.
As such, Whyte (2005: 6) correctly problema-
tizes the conventional account that portrays
Deng Xiaoping as trading off social equality for
economic efficiency: this account ‘diverts atten-
tion from other features of the stratification sys-
tem of Mao-era China, many of which were
decidedly not egalitarian either in intent or con-
sequences’. Rather, Whyte adds:
in China the combination of virtually total sup-
pression of markets in favor of bureaucratic allo-
cation as well as of voluntary changes in
residence and employment makes the dominance
of one’s bureaucratic location rather than one’s
individual human capital or other social back-
ground traits (and one’s resulting ‘market posi-
tion’) much greater as a general rule. (Whyte,
2005: 6)
Uneven development, quite clearly, remained
the ‘antagonistic fissure’ throughout the Mao-
era socialistic quest (cf. Fan, 1995; Wei, 1999).
Lim
Recent social-scientific research shows how
‘Mao’s invisible hand’ – e.g. socioeconomic
foundations laid during the Mao era, the hukou
(household registration) institution that under-
girds rural-urban differentiation, geographically
sensitive ‘adaptive governance’ – continues to
extend deep into the Chinese political economy
(e.g. Chan and Buckingham, 2008; Heilmann
and Perry, 2011; Kueh, 2008; Lin, 2006). As
outgoing Chinese President Hu Jintao empha-
sizes in his valedictory speech at the 18th Party
Congress, Mao’s Marxian historicization of
China as a priori socialist has not effaced the
contingent determinants of an advanced social-
ist stage:
We must be soberly aware that China is still in
the primary stage of socialism and will long
remain so. This basic condition of China has not
changed; nor has the principal problem in our
society, that is, how we can meet the ever-
growing material and cultural needs of the peo-
ple with backward social production; nor has
China’s international position as the largest
developing country in the world. (Global Times,
2012)
Hu’s point that ‘the basic condition of China has
not changed’ offers an interesting historical
reconnection of China’s post-1978 reforms with
the period immediately following the 1949
establishment of ‘new China’: through the rein-
troduction of the profit-motive in domestic eco-
nomic practices; the dovetailing of transactional
practices with that of the global economy,
particularly following China’s entry into the
WTO in 2001; and the willingness to permit
proletarianization through relaxing rules on
domestic population movement, China’s post-
1978 reforms can be construed as reapplying
Mao’s initial approach to accommodate the
capitalist mode of production in the transition
to advanced socialism. However, the need to
negotiate neoliberal logics within a socialist
developmental stage raises two further questions.
First, how would the potentially exploitative
229
effects of neoliberal governance be circum-
vented? Second, what are the roles of sociospa-
tial revolutions – the aforementioned Marxian
‘locomotives of history’ that power the shift
from capitalism to socialism – in a ‘once-and-
for-all revolutionalized’ China? The present
answer to these questions appears as such: any
sociospatial revolution arising from dissatisfac-
tion with capitalistic exploitation could endan-
ger the CPC’s rein on politico-economic
power, and, as a consequence, these sociospatial
ruptures would either be pre-empted or sup-
pressed (cf. Wang, 2009). This pre-emptive
necessity is arguably why Chinese Premier Wen
Jiabao underscored, in his 2011 annual televised
press conference, that ‘reforms’ (gaige) – not
revolutions (geming) – are ‘the eternal flames
of history’ (CCTV, 2011, author’s transcription;
cf. Perry, 2007; Su, 2011).
Hu and Wen’s comments, this paper argues,
are historic; they effectively marked the CPC’s
conclusive interpretation of Marxian historical
materialism. The future of ‘socialism with Chi-
nese characteristics’ is now; socialism in China
is the evolving present, driven in motion by see-
mingly contradictory neoliberalizing impulses
and the CPC’s ‘eternal’ reforms (which, because
of neoliberalization, now has a growing global
reach). The discursive substitution of ‘revolu-
tion’ with ‘reform’ strongly suggests that the
Chinese state apparatus’s primary political goal
is existential timelessness. To achieve this, it
must do everything it can to pre-empt the emer-
gence of revolutionary ruptures across state
space. Yet, precisely because Deng’s govern-
ment decided against Mao-styled geo-economic
insulation, it became increasingly difficult for the
Chinese state to draw a coherent sociospatial
reform blueprint for the entire country. The
pre-emptory process is thus predicated on rela-
tional geo-institutional differentiation: tailored
to actually existing economic-geographical con-
texts across and beyond Chinese state space, the
CPC’s economic reforms – beginning first with
four Special Economic Zones in southeastern
230
China (Shantou, Shenzhen, Xiamen and Zhuhai)
in 1980, and, over the past decade, through an
expanding series of ‘nationally strategic new
areas’ across the country – are evidently intended
to produce locomotives of contemporary and
future flows, fixity and redistribution of capital.
A more incisive theorization of the Chinese
state’s ‘authoritarian resilience’ thus needs to
incorporate the selective and seemingly con-
tradictory spatialization of neoliberal logics
for socialism (cf. Nathan, 2003). So long as
China remains an integral component of the
(neoliberalizing) global system of capitalism,
it is clear that a Marxian-styled socialist mode
of production can never be a spatiotemporal
straightjacket. Stressing ‘the impossibility of
fully formed totalities’ within states, Jones and
Jessop (2010: 1122–1123, emphases in origi-
nal) argue that analyses of contemporary states
should instead theorize ‘coherence and inco-
herence, zones of stability and instability,
deferrals and displacements’. As Figure 1 illus-
trates, the inherent geographical incoherence
of capital fixity and flows in and through China
makes it imperative to theorize ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’ as processes that
simultaneously involve neoliberal initiatives
to create bigger, self-regulatory and borderless
‘free markets’ and redistributive mechanisms
that ensure capital investments flow to less
developed regions. These processes resulted
in the (re)production of uneven economic geo-
graphies, a development arguably turned on
its head by the CPC through a rolling series
of strategic territorial (re)institutionalizations
over the past decade.
III Chinese socialism as a
geographic tension
1 Neoliberalization in and through Chinese
state space
Post-Mao reforms in China have been associ-
ated simultaneously with fast-paced economic
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
growth – China’s GDP growth rate averaged
*10% annually between 1979 and 2011 – and
uneven economic-geographical development.
This phenomenon has its roots in Deng Xiaop-
ing’s willingness to accept uneven economic-
geographical development as a trade-off for
opening Chinese borders to transnational capital
flows. The spatial expression of Deng’s eco-
nomic policies was guided by a distinct geogra-
phical theory – the ‘ladder step’ approach (tidu
lilun). This approach delineated Chinese state
spatiality into three economic belts: the eastern
(coastal), central, and western. Deng gave one
belt (the eastern seaboard) the priority in
ascending the development ‘ladder’. He
assumed that the fruits of development in the
‘first mover’ belt would diffuse downwards to
other rungs of the ladder (see Fan, 1995; Wang
and Hu, 1999). In a 1988 speech entitled ‘Two
Big Pictures’ (liangge dajü), Deng summed up
his time-oriented theoretical approach to
economic-geographical development:
the coastal area must accelerate its opening up to
enable this broad region of 200 million people to
first develop, from which it will stimulate even
better development in the interior. This is a matter
that involves a big picture. The interior must
understand this big picture. (Deng, 1993: 277–
278; author’s translation from Mandarin)
Deng, however, identified an equally impor-
tant ‘big picture’, which entailed people in the
coastal provinces to reciprocate the state’s
decision to first implement reforms in their
provinces by accepting the subsequent redistri-
bution of accumulated value accruing from
economic liberalization for the development
of the interior:
upon attaining a certain level of development, the
coastal areas are requested to give more energy to
assist in the development of the interior, this is
also a ‘big picture’ . . . It is an obligation for eco-
nomically advanced areas to help those that are
more backward, and it is also a major policy.
(Deng, 1993: 277–278; author’s translation)
Lim 231

The CPC as driver of Neoliberalizing impulses

‘socialism with Chinese
characteristics’
Commitment to the
“universal truth of Marxism”
Commitment to socio-
spatial egalitarianism
(Deng, 1993)
Promise of ‘Common
Affluence’
Driven by still-active
Integrates “Washington Consensus”
Aim to reduce tariffs and
augment unencumbered
access to potential markets
Negates
for TNCs
Absolute belief in the
virtues of the privatization
of economic activities

Reaffirms/ Enlivens/
Revises (Re)produces through Encumbers
strategic (re)institutionalization

New institutional developmental arenas

Gradually phases out the ‘Ladder step’ developmental approach
Three major cross-provincial regional programs launched since 1999
Six ‘nationally-strategic new areas’ launched, five of them since
2006 (ref. Table 2)
Unique geo-economic integration policies with extra-border Chinese
economies since 2003, namely Hong Kong, Macau & Taiwan
(through CEPAs & ECFA, respectively)

Figure 1. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’ as a cross-scalar sociospatial dialectic.

As is now well documented, Deng’s decision to
gradually integrate Chinese state space into the
global economy produced colossal changes in
the flows, fixity and redistribution of capital
over the past three decades. With deeper eco-
nomic integration, the place-specific contradic-
tions of market-oriented development have
concomitantly become more pronounced (cf.
section I; The Economist, 2011; Wang, 2008).
All the major coastal city-regions, such as
Shenzhen and Guangzhou in the Pearl River
Delta and Suzhou and Shanghai in the Yangtze
River Delta, have generated significant infla-
tionary pressures on wage-costs, consumer
goods and real estate. A cause of this inequality
was arguably the emergence of what Oi (1992:
101–102) refers to as ‘local corporatist states’,
each of which ‘coordinates economic
enterprises in its territory as if it were a diversi-
fied business corporation’. The corporatization
of decentralized governance manifests itself at
the macro level through land-use changes: local
state cadres try to enrol prime agricultural land
into (urbanizing) circuits of capital, in turn pro-
ducing a ‘great urban transformation’ at signif-
icant social and environmental costs (Harney,
2009; He and Wu, 2009; Hewitt, 2008; Lin,
2009a; Tsing, 2010).
An expanding literature reveals how primi-
tive accumulation – a distinct precondition and
expression of neoliberalization (see section
II.1) – has become a prevalent driver of eco-
nomic development in China. Looking at trans-
formations in the Shanghai rural landscape,
Buck (2007) shows how primitive accumulation
is related to the subsumption of labour to capital.
232
Lin (2009b: 441) highlights how major city gov-
ernments in Guangdong province ‘scaled up’ their
development policies through the ‘forceful
annexation of suburban cities and counties’.
While Webber (2008a, 2008b) believes there are
economic and non-economic logics that underpin
the primitive accumulation process, Walker
(2006: 1) views the violent captures of rural space
and resources, which have triggered ‘a tidal wave
of peasant protest’ over the past two decades, as a
clear reflection of ‘gangster capitalism’ at work.
Against these varied interpretations of the causes
and implications of primitive accumulation across
China, one pattern is clear: Deng’s (1993: 64) fear
that post-1978 Chinese social formations would
split into distinct ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ (liangji
fenhua) was certainly not unfounded.
Indeed, as neoliberalization across China
intensifies, the concomitant exacerbation of
uneven development has meant that, if Deng’s
(1993: 277–278) injunction to balance out socio-
economic disparities is to remain valid, the defer-
ment of socialistic development in time is
insufficient per se; something must be done to
change space. One key challenge must be taken
into consideration, however: China’s public and
private economic sectors intermesh in place-
specific ways that are probably not found else-
where. To be sure, private capital investments
have become more important in China’s domestic
economy and, over the past three years, rules have
been relaxed to permit foreign venture capitalists
to operate within China. But one characteristic
stays unchanged: the major economic actors
within the Chinese economy remain the SOEs.9
Interrelated to the SOEs’ economic practices is
a sprawling state-controlled financial system.
As Walter and Howie (2011) explain, complex
off-budget arrangements, SOE borrowings and a
non-convertible exchange rate sustain a financial
system that looks increasingly internationalized
but remains undergirded by older arrangements
that directly affect the allocation of domestic cap-
ital. Also, to take the CPC’s recent indication as a
guide, the intertwined activities of Chinese state-
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
linked economic actors will remain integral to the
‘socialist market economy’:
We should unwaveringly consolidate and develop
the public sector of the economy; allow public
ownership to take diverse forms; deepen reform
of state-owned enterprises; improve the mechan-
isms for managing all types of state assets; and
invest more of state capital in major industries and
key fields that comprise the lifeline of the econ-
omy and are vital to national security. We should
thus steadily enhance the vitality of the state-
owned sector of the economy and its capacity to
leverage and influence the economy. (President
Hu Jintao; Global Times, 2012)
At first glance, this state-economy entwine-
ment, also construed as ‘centrally managed
capitalism’ and ‘state neoliberalism’ (Lin,
2011; So and Chu, 2012), logically makes it eas-
ier for the Chinese state to implement a develop-
mental agenda oriented towards sociospatial
egalitarianism. Not only does the CPC retain a
high degree of autonomy over the nascent pri-
vate capitalist class, it has co-opted this class
into its governance orbit (for the rationale of this
co-option, see Dickson, 2008). As such, it is
able to strongly influence national economic
development through direct orders and/or
moral suasion. However, the strong state control
over the economy sacrifices another form of
autonomy characteristic of effective ‘capitalist
developmental states’: it is difficult, if not
impossible, for the Chinese state bureaucracy
to be autonomous from the corporate strategies
of SOEs (cf. Evans, 1995). The situation
becomes more complicated as the majority of
SOEs are affiliated with local governments,
each of which pursues its own developmental
agenda and which may in turn destabilize
Deng’s vision of even development. To draw
from Howell’s (2006: 274) observation, post-
1978 China has evolved into a ‘polymorphous
state’, within which exists ‘a deeper process of
state fragmentation that fosters contradictory
and complex patterns of state behaviour’.
Lim
As Figure 1 shows, these ‘contradictory and
complex patterns of state behaviour’ can be seen
through the Chinese government’s selective
endorsement of neoliberalization at the global
and subnational scales. At the global level, the
central government’s push for global free trade
and investments is accompanied by its staunch
refusal to succumb to US-led pressures to alter
its fixed exchange rate regime, an arrangement
which ensures China-based producers enjoy
propitious terms of trade and economic stability
(cf. Broz, 2002; Lim, 2010). Indeed, well-
capitalized China-based firms, particularly the
national sovereign wealth fund (China Invest-
ment Corporation) and large SOEs (e.g.
CNOOC and SINOPEC), need the ‘freedom’
at the global scale if they are to expand into new
markets and successfully fulfil the state’s ‘Go
Abroad’ market expansion programme. The
launch of this programme – which Gonzalez-
Vicente (2011) identifies as an extra-territorial
expression of ‘state entrepreneurialism’ – was
primarily due to the large overaccumulation10
of US dollars under China’s fixed exchange rate
system (Lim, 2010; Nolan, 2012). Given the US
government’s preferred post-subprime crisis
strategy of printing and injecting dollars into
money markets (known as ‘quantitative eas-
ing’), China’s surplus capital stock needs to be
quickly and regularly reinvested to preclude
future devaluation. Chinese firms launching
outward FDI – which surged from US$2.7 bil-
lion in 2002 to US$60.07 billion in 2011 (China
Daily, 2012a) – would thus benefit directly from
less regulatory barriers imposed by foreign
states and/or supranational institutions. This
quest for unfettered market access overseas is
arguably the main reason why China joined the
WTO in 2001 and, more importantly, willingly
became bound to the WTO’s goal of reducing
barriers to market access at the global scale.11
Contrary to popular zero-sum conceptions of
Sino-US relations, then, US (neoliberal) hege-
mony is in fact not unwelcomed by the Chinese
state. If anything, US hegemony – expressed
233
and effected through the ‘Washington Consen-
sus’ – has, in a most intriguing twist, become the
sine qua non of China’s socialistic development
(cf. Figure 1).
The Chinese state’s global-scale endorse-
ment of neoliberal logics generated new vulner-
abilities, however. After the US government
announced its plan to launch a second round
of ‘quantitative easing’ in November 2010, the
Chinese Vice Finance Minister Zhu Guangyao
expressed immediate concerns about this inter-
vention by the US government in global money
markets:
As a major reserve currency issuer, for the
United States to launch a second round of
quantitative easing at this time, we feel that
it did not recognize its responsibility to stabi-
lize global markets and did not think about
the impact of excessive liquidity on emerging
markets. (Reuters, 2010)
The presupposition of Zhu’s concern – that
national governments should not intervene
excessively in international money markets –
is paradoxical, to be sure, since the fixed-rate
yuan is in itself a calculated act of state interven-
tion. What is more significant in Zhu’s com-
ments is the acknowledgement that Chinese
macroeconomic strategizing has become
increasingly susceptible to the interventionist
policies of other economies (cf. the point raised
earlier about states being inherently anti-‘free’
markets), an ironic aspect which could affect its
future ability to reinvest overaccumulated
domestic capital (in dollars and/or yuan) abroad
(cf. Nolan, 2012).
Vis-a-vis this global-scale vulnerability, the
importance and urgency of crafting capital
accumulation opportunities from within Chi-
nese state space became more pronounced.
While the Chinese state has been cautious in its
‘down-scaling’ of neoliberal logics in order to
preclude further sociospatial inequality, it
appears increasingly keen to overcome the lim-
itations of this ‘down-scaling’ process. Indeed,
234
it now appears to be in the interests of the Chi-
nese state to differentiate the institutionalization
of neoliberal governance logics at the subna-
tional scale in order to produce new (re)invest-
ment opportunities for global circulatory
capital (of which it is now an integral part; cf.
Figure 1). The emergence of Chinese state space
as a relational and reflexive entity (in relation to
neoliberal ideology) in turn reinforces Peck’s
(2010: 10, emphasis in original) observation
that neoliberalization is a process that ‘denotes
the form of state/economy relations, not a linear
path towards a purely free-market state’. As
Wang Hui (2009) puts it, state-capital co-evolu-
tion is fundamental to the post-1978 neolibera-
lization in/of China:
Chinese neoliberalism has at times expressed its
contradictions with the state in an anti-political
(or anti-historical, or even anti-socialist – in its
traditional sense) way. But these oppositions
seem incapable of really concealing neoliberal-
ism’s intimate connections with state-directed
economic policy. For neoliberalism, in truth,
relies . . . upon its inherent links to the state.
(Wang, 2009: 19)
A fruitful way to extend these insights would be
to assess neoliberalization in and through China
as an ideologically premeditated and geographi-
cally variegated dialectic: this process is
entwined with the socialistic approach to over-
come actually existing uneven development by
strategically reproducing uneven development
(see Figure 1). Recently a nascent literature has
begun to shine analytical light on state rescaling
strategies in China (Li and Wu, 2012; Ong,
2004; Smart and Lin, 2007; Su, 2012). To
simultaneously broaden and narrow the investi-
gation of territorial rescaling, this paper argues
that it is useful to push forth empirically sub-
stantiated theorizations of how state space is
(re)institutionalized by the CPC at the intra-
urban scale and strategically patterned at the
national scale to accommodate and/or negate
neoliberalizing impulses (cf. Brenner et al.,
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
2010; see section III.2). This cross-scalar,
process-oriented approach potentially generates
two contributions. First, the geographically tar-
geted fusion of socialist principles with ‘free’
market principles – which produces a new series
of sociospatial tensions – in and through China
underscores the conceptual futility of framing
China as a ‘variety of capitalism’ or ‘develop-
mental state’. Nor is it useful, as has become the
norm in the social scientific and business studies
literature, to construe China as a coherent entity
that is ‘transitioning’ towards a ‘market econ-
omy’, as if time will ensure a totalizing market-
ization of social life (pace Coase and Wang,
2012; Lardy, 2012; Wang, 2003; cf. Nonini,
2008). If there is any ‘transition’, it is Deng
Xiaoping’s promise that ‘Common Affluence’
will come after some people ‘get rich first’; that
an advanced socialist totality is, since 1949,
already in the making (see section II.2).
Through reinforcing the ability to shield Chi-
nese sociospatial formations from the very pro-
cess – neoliberalization – it allows and
(selectively) endorses, the CPC has begun chan-
nelling new capital investments to less devel-
oped areas, particularly the western interior.
This process is inherently dialectical: on one
hand, the Chinese state apparatus – directly
through its macroeconomic and spatial strate-
gies and indirectly through its aforementioned
arsenal of SOEs – appears to be producing a dif-
ferentiated pattern of reinstitutionalization to
embed ‘free market’ logics and produce spatio-
temporal fixes for targeted investments, while,
on the other hand, it simultaneously negates
some of these logics (in the name of ‘rebalan-
cing’ economic-geographical development)
through broadening and deepening state invol-
vement in economic practices within the tar-
geted spatiotemporal fixes (cf. Deng, 1993:
277–278). An analysis of variegated neolibera-
lization in and through China could thus begin
from the place-specific intersections of
politico-economic processes that originate from
and flow across different scales, namely (a) the
Lim 235

Table 1. China’s 10 economic challenges, identified in the proposal of the 12th Five-Year Plan.
Number Economic challenge
1 Increasing constraints of resource environments
2 Relationship between investment and consumption is unbalanced
3 Income distribution gap widened
4 Scientific and technical innovation capacity remains weak
5 Asset structure is unsatisfactory
6 Thin and weak agricultural foundation
7 Lack of coordination in urban-rural development
8 Co-existence of contradictory economic structure and employment pressures
9 Apparent increase in social contradictions
10 Persistent structural and systemic obstacles to scientific development
Source: Suggestions on the 12th Five-Year Plan by the Communist Party of China (p. 3, Mandarin document; NDRC,
2011). Author’s compilation and translation.

global economy, (b) the nation state, (c) individ-
ual provinces and (d) prefectures and counties.
Space, as section III.2 shows, is not an epiphe-
nomenon when it comes to the interplay
between neoliberalizing dynamics and the
developmental parameters of ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’ – its role is central.
2 China’s new ‘national strategy’ of/for
socialism: decentralization-as-
centralization?
In the build-up to the 12th Five-Year Plan
(2011–2015), China’s central government can-
didly acknowledged the gamut of current chal-
lenges engendered by the market-oriented
reforms and development of the past three
decades, one of which is uneven development
(see Table 1). The analysis of ‘state spatial stra-
tegies’, which Brenner (2004: 94) defines as the
use of ‘political strategies oriented towards the
reproduction, modification, or transformation
of inherited frameworks of state spatial interven-
tion at various scales’, offers a fertile launchpad
from which to understand how Chinese policy-
makers turn the challenges of uneven
economic-geographical development into strate-
gic advantage. As Brenner (2004) observes,
insofar as a national political economy is posi-
tioned vis-a-vis the global system of capitalism,
modification to/in state space is at once contin-
gent and necessary:
The restructuring of state spatiality rarely entails
the complete dissolution of entrenched political
geographies . . . [it] is uneven, discontinuous, and
unpredictable: it is best conceived as a layering
process in which newly emergent state spatial
projects and state spatial strategies are superim-
posed upon entrenched morphologies of state spa-
tial organization. Thus conceived, the spatiality of
state power is at once a presupposition, a medium,
and a product of the conflictual interplay between
inherited geographical parcelizations of state
space and emergent political strategies intended
to instrumentalize, restructure, or transform the
latter towards particular sociopolitical ends.
(Brenner, 2004: 107, emphases in original)
Indeed, neoliberalizing processes reshape and
reproduce variegated central-local relations
across China that in turn redefine – or poten-
tially de-legitimize – the material expressions
of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.
Interestingly, vis-a-vis problems engendered
by the penetration of market logics within the
Chinese political economy, the CPC’s primary
policy response in the past decade – under the
236
leadership of Hu Jintao – has not been to
eradicate these logics. On the contrary, a two-
pronged approach is adopted: (1) to enhance
neoliberalization overseas through an expansio-
nist geo-economic strategy (as discussed
above); and (2) to test out more spatially delim-
ited regulatory experimentations domestically
that enhance the targeted absorption of global
capital flows on one hand and ease the domestic
problems of uneven geographical development
on the other. That these experimentations inevi-
tably form and fracture spatial hierarchies offers
glimpses of the dialecticism of China’s macro
spatial logic of development (see Figure 1): the
quest for national-level sociospatial egalitarian-
ism in relation to pressures for global free trade
and capital flows entails domestic regulatory
differentiation that in turn enlivens global-
scale neoliberalization – the process repeats
itself.
The domestically variegated regulatory
experiments – which remain undertheorized in
the social-scientific literature – are currently
evident at two scales: cross-provincial regions
and intra-urban economic zones. Proactive
cross-provincial spatial planning only became
more prominent in the decade following 1999,
during which the Chinese state launched three
broad regional development programmes,
namely the Great Western Opening Up (xibu
dakaifa), the Northeast Revitalization (dongbei
zhenxing) and the Rise of the Central (zhongbu
jueqi). While fiscal monies have been redistrib-
uted to the provinces involved to launch
concrete developmental projects, these pro-
grammes entailed no specific institutional
(re)formulations at the provincial level (for a
detailed overview, see Li and Wu, 2012; Liu
et al., 2012). The more crucial goal of these pro-
grammes appears to be the production of cross-
provincial geographical imaginations. This
goal is to materialize through a discursive-
ideological strategy: the name of each pro-
gramme began to be included in individual
provinces’ policy documents, while the mass
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
media began to discuss province-specific eco-
nomic development policies in relation to the
broader regional strategy (e.g. how the urbani-
zation of capital and labour power in Chongqing
is connected to and helps drive the Great West-
ern Development programme). Developing
regional consciousness is important as individ-
ual provincial governments have been working
disparately, particularly since the early 1990s,
and interprovincial (and, by extension, interur-
ban) collaboration has proved very difficult
(author’s personal communications with Chi-
nese urban planners, 2012). Intriguingly, the
delineation of three major regions of develop-
ment bears striking similarity to Mao’s ‘Three
Front’12 spatial developmental approach in the
mid-1960s (cf. Li and Wu, 2012); the key differ-
ence is that these regions’ developmental
programmes are to be crafted with their respec-
tive positions in the global capitalist – rather
than geopolitical – system in mind.
Geographically targeted (re)institutionaliza-
tions were and are expected to be implemented
at the intra-urban level, with six ‘nationally stra-
tegic new areas’ (guojia zhanlüe xinqu) identi-
fied as bordered zones within selected cities to
‘move first, experiment first’ (xianxing xian-
shi). The ‘new area’ concept is actually not
novel, although its scale of implementation has
widened considerably since 2006 (see Table 2).
Following the success of the first four Special
Economic Zones in the provinces of Guangdong
and Fujian, the world-renowned Pudong New
Area in Shanghai was approved for develop-
ment in 1990, and has since been transformed
into a city-regional ‘motor’ of China’s eco-
nomic growth. This intra-urban (re)institutiona-
lization was not extended elsewhere in China
for 14 years until the Binhai industrial region
adjacent to the northeastern city of Tianjin was
designated China’s second ‘nationally strategic
new area’ in 2006. From 2009 to 2012, four
more ‘new areas’ were demarcated. Two ‘new
areas’ are in the western interior, namely Liang-
jiang New Area in the city of Chongqing and
Lim 237

Table 2. China’s ‘nationally strategic new areas’, 1990–2012.

Area Concise overview
Shanghai Pudong  The oldest of the new areas, initiated for development in 1990; probably the
most widely known worldwide.
 Now the national base of many TNCs and big domestic firms; a major financial
centre; as well as a major global seaport. Plans underway to launch China’s first
free trade zone (a ‘mini Hong Kong’) in 2013.
 It is arguably the success of this new area that led China’s central government to
formulate similar spatial strategies in other cities.
Tianjin Binhai  Relatively established; was already a designated industrial development zone for
several years when it was ‘upgraded’ to zone of ‘national strategic significance’ in
2006.
 Since the institutional redesignation, perhaps the most high-profile develop-
ment has been the establishment of Airbus’s first non-EU assembly facility.
 Tianjin has also become a zone of financial innovations. GDP growth per annum
has regularly hit or exceeded 20% since 2007. The development of this area is,
surprisingly, not covered in much of the social science literature to date.
Chongqing Liangjiang  Officially unveiled as ‘new area’ in June 2010.
 Planning commenced several years before, during the 2006–2010
developmental phase.
 Like Binhai, the area around Chongqing has experienced industrialization in the
past decade. It is the first inland nationally strategic new area.
 The primary developmental aim is to redirect more capital flows to the western
region, as part of China’s ‘Great Western Opening Up’ strategy. Current plans
are to develop high value-added manufacturing capacities and deepening firms’
production chains in the region, as well as to experiment with ambitious
reforms to enhance social welfare.
 The inclusion of social reforms alongside industrialization strategies has
highlighted the tensions associated with socialistic development in
contemporary China.
Zhejiang Zhoushan  Approved for development in July 2011; located off the coast of Ningbo, in
Archipelago Zhejiang province.
 Designated to boost the development of China’s ‘oceanic economy’ and ‘land-
ocean integration’ (luhai tongchou), it is an intriguing site from which to examine
the commodification of aquatic nature.
Gansu Lanzhou  Approved for development in August 2012; located in the arid and mountainous
northwestern interior.
 Integral to the ‘Great Western Opening Up’ strategy: designated to absorb
manufacturing industries relocating from coastal provinces.
Guangzhou Nansha  Approved for development in September 2012; located at the centre of the
Pearl River Delta, just south of Guangzhou, in between two other specially
designated zones, Hengqin (in Zhuhai) and Qianhai (in Shenzhen).
 An integral part of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau economic development
agreement to enhance the regional integration of the Pearl River Delta (PRD)
metropolitan region (yuegangao yitihua).
 Aids in the industrial restructuring and upgrading of the PRD as lower-end man-
ufacturing activities relocate due to cost pressures.
 Expected to experiment in policies regarding China’s financial reforms (jingai)
and integration of labour markets between Guangdong province and the
Hong Kong and Macau SARs.
Source: Author’s compilation.
238
Lanzhou New Area, which overlaps the city of
the same name in Gansu province. The other
two are located along the coast, namely
Zhoushan Archipelago New Area, based off-
shore in Zhejiang province, and Nansha New
Area, strategically positioned between two spe-
cialized new zones (Hengqin, in Zhuhai, and
Qianhai, in Shenzhen) in the Pearl River Delta.
It appears that several more of these ‘nationally
strategic new areas’ will be identified across the
country in the coming years (Xinhua, 2012).
The unfolding of this seemingly patterned
development raises two major research ques-
tions. (1) What does it mean, in both ideological
and practical terms, to speak of a place as
‘nationally strategic’? (2) If a place is ‘strategic’
in the ‘national’ sense, what is the ‘national
strategy’?
To arrive at an understanding of what a
‘national strategy’ of economic development
might look like, it would be helpful to begin
with the pre-existing state spatial form of the
contemporary conjuncture. This brings to ques-
tion the causal effect of economic-geographical
unevenness. The last decade of high economic
growth has been based on what Chinese presi-
dent Hu Jintao terms ‘unbalanced, uncoordi-
nated and unsustainable development’ (Global
Times, 2012). A national strategy thus inevita-
bly builds on – and attempts to change – this
uneven spatiality. A critical examination of how
actually existing uneven geographies comple-
ment one another offers useful insights on how
the CPC addresses and absorbs the contradic-
tory pressures associated with global economic
integration. So long as the targeted zones of
reinstitutionalization are ascertained to be
‘nationally strategic’, the spatial logic goes
beyond that of interurban competitiveness.
These ‘new areas’ are possibly designated to
circumvent – if not overturn – the oft-
debilitating, race-to-the-bottom competition by
local governments (see section III.1; cf. Howell,
2006). Thus fortified with new (centrally
approved) institutions tailored to their pre-
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
existing economic-geographical positioning
within national state space, China’s ‘nationally
strategic new areas’ are intended to be more
competitive at the global scale. In other words,
unevenness is harnessed by the central govern-
ment, with the place-specific competitive
impulses directed outwards to the global econ-
omy. Each designated ‘nationally strategic new
area’ could thus become a central competitive
node for the country because its positional
importance has been ‘scaled up’ to the global
level. Decentralization, in this regard, trans-
poses into a new form of centralization that pro-
pels and reproduces China’s ‘socialist market
economy’.
At the national level, the Chinese central
government’s emergent decentralization-as-
centralization strategy transcends dichotomous
conceptualizations of politico-economic centra-
lization and decentralization. Putting into prac-
tice the power to reconfigure national state
space, the central government appears to be
effecting a more balanced domestic allocation
of capital (and, by extension, labour power).
This in turn reinforces its control over local
practices that may deviate from national goals.
Furthermore, as one planner in China remarked,
‘whenever the central government launches a
project, many people at the local level automat-
ically respond with much fervour. There is no
problem getting people [at the local scale] to
do things’ (personal communication, Beijing,
2012; author’s translation). This insight
strongly suggests how interprovincial and inter-
city competition have not devalued perceptions
of the central government’s importance; rather,
relations with the central government are highly
valued because it is through the central govern-
ment that a locality ‘jumps scale’ and, almost
instantly, assumes a propitious economic-
geographical position globally. The formation
and evolution of the ‘nationally strategic new
areas’ thus brings into focus a new central-
local dynamic that shows, on closer reading,
how ‘developmentalism’ is constituted in and
Lim
through Chinese state space (cf. Beeson, 2009;
Howell, 2006).
There are three interrelated dimensions to
the emergent decentralization-as-centralization
dynamic, namely politics, policy and practical-
ity. First, the act of redrawing administrative
boundaries involves cross-scalar spatial poli-
tics. The identification and designation of ‘new
areas’ takes place in what Peck and Theodore
(2010: 169) refer to as ‘fields of power’. These
‘fields’ are intersections of ‘adaptive connec-
tions, deeply structured by enduring power rela-
tions and shifting ideological alignments’; they
foreground the ‘intrinsic politics to the policy
transfer process’ (p. 169). Given that the Chi-
nese state apparatus is a heterogeneous entity
within which exist different perspectives on
development (see, for example, Kuhn, 2010;
McGregor, 2010), it is expected that the spatial
politics will play out before and after the ‘new
areas’ are designated ‘nationally strategic’. It
is currently unclear what kind of central-local
relations lead to the choice of a location as
‘nationally strategic’ while others are passed
over. The decision-making process could be
totally top-down, with provincial policy-
makers having little influence, or it could be
an outcome of aggressive lobbying of the cen-
tral government by provincial and metropolitan
policy-makers. Ascertaining the nature of this
process is methodologically challenging, to be
sure, as it is hard to penetrate policy-making cir-
cles (especially at the central level) to obtain
first-hand data, but there might be alternative
sources of information (e.g. interviews with
senior members of enterprises, local urban plan-
ners, reporters) from which solid inferences
could be made. Given that the potential outcome
of this research approach is a clearer under-
standing of the macro spatial logic underpinning
the CPC’s strategies to actualize ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’, it is certainly worth
trying.
The next research focal point is a critical
assessment of the policies introduced in each
239
‘new area’ and how these policies are discur-
sively (re)presented. It is certain that the desig-
nation of an intra-urban area as ‘nationally
strategic’ would be accompanied by a fresh set
of policies. The primary aim of policy analysis
is to ascertain how new regulatory processes
and parameters – particularly how they facili-
tate market exchange and/or more extensively
involve private producers in the organization
of everyday social life – differ from the pre-
existing ones. If the new policies are designated
to ‘move first, experiment first’, how long these
experiments last and whether they are retained
or discontinued become further points of
inquiry. Apart from policy content, a correlated
research focal area is the discursive justification
of the new policies and the statistics that are
made public. To follow newly appointed Chi-
nese President Xi Jinping’s (Nanfang Ribao,
2012) philosophy that ‘empty talk harms the
nation, practical work leads to national flourish’
(kongtanwuguo, shiganxingbang), public dis-
courses and statistics are critical materials
against which evaluations of policy rationale
and effectiveness in the new areas can be made.
Specifically, discourses by policy-makers offer
another avenue to explore how market-
oriented reforms (e.g. the ‘financial reforms’,
or jingai, to be launched in Nansha New Area
and two other zones in the Pearl River Delta; see
Table 2) are to nurture a socialist mode of pro-
duction. At the theoretical level, the integrated
focus on new policy contents and their accompa-
nying political discourses facilitates an investiga-
tion of how ‘deepening neoliberalization’ –
which Brenner et al. (2010: 209) define as the ‘the
growing interdependence, inter-referentiality and
co-evolution of market-oriented reform efforts
among territorial jurisdictions, spatial scales and
policy fields’ – plays out in and through the
‘nationally strategic new areas’ vis-a-vis endur-
ing socialist principles.
This leads to the third interrelated dimen-
sion – practicality. The objective of combining
market-deepening reforms with socialist ideals
240
within the ‘new areas’ is not to produce nation-
wide institutional homogeneity; the aim is to
engender patterned variants of developmental
permutations that, working in tandem, help to
propel the entire political economy. Indeed, the
concentration of processes in the ‘new areas’ are
not random; the act of ‘bordering’ – and the new
policies implemented within the bordered
zones – are deliberately crafted to create a driving
effect towards a macro potentiality (in China’s
context, a ‘Harmonious Society’ constituted by
balanced, coordinated and sustainable develop-
ment). This said, there is every possibility that the
desired actuality will not materialize; that these
spaces will constantly remain spaces of socialist
potential, in need of reintervention. Put another
way, the processes emerging in and through the
‘new areas’ are purposive and propulsive, but not
definitely transformative.
In summary, the geo-institutional differentia-
tion of ‘nationally strategic new areas’ in China
is the latest round of spatial reconfiguration
aimed at resolving tensions arising from neolib-
eral and socialist practices. Yet it must be
emphasized that these strategies are deontologi-
cal; they provide a preview of emergent sites
and, by extension, the macro spatial logic of
development. Corresponding to what Lefebvre
(1991: 33) terms ‘spaces of representation’, they
are notional determinations that designate what
spaces should become in order to be fully ‘real’.
The primary underlying link between these stra-
tegies is the role of the state as a producer and
mediator of neoliberal logics; through formulat-
ing geographically differentiated regulations of/
for capital accumulation and then directly
participating in the actualization of these differ-
entiated spaces through SOE investments,
Chinese policy-makers essentially aim to create
different ‘spatial fixes’ for transnational capital
flows, driven by both private firms and SOEs.
This is proactively leavened by the twofold
redistribution of state finance and the power to
make mistakes (shicuoquan). These new state
spaces in China are hence tentative amalgams
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
of (market-oriented) productive forces and
place-based social relations.
IV Conclusion: from the
geographically impossible to the
geographically inevitable?
In contemporary China, only socialism with Chi-
nese characteristics can develop China, benefit
people and revitalize the nation. (Xi Jinping,
newly appointed Chinese president; China Daily,
2012b)
Every child in China is schooled in the ‘univer-
sal truth of Marxism’ from the moment s/he
attends primary school. Despite China’s dee-
pening integration into the global system of
capitalism, the central importance of Marxism
is such that it remains enshrined in the national
education law: ‘In developing the socialist edu-
cational undertakings, the state shall uphold
Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and
the theories of constructing socialism with Chi-
nese characteristics as directives and comply
with the basic principles of the Constitution’
(Chapter 1, Article 3).13 However, the ways in
which Marx’s ‘universal truths’ now co-exist
and co-evolve in China with neoliberalism, the
reigning global governance ideology, receives
almost no focus. While the curriculum admir-
ably espouses the virtues of sociospatial egali-
tarianism, the concrete realities of socialism in
China are shaped by capitalistic demands – the
majority of which originate from the SOEs and
foreign investors – that in turn produce varie-
gated sociospatial consequences. Specifically,
it is not clear how neoliberalization in and
through China – which, according to Marxian
logic, has already moved beyond the capitalist
mode of production (see section II.2) – fortifies
and fractures simultaneously the putatively
‘universal’ status of Marxian logics (cf. Deng,
1982). This paper is an attempt to add concep-
tual clarity to this ideological interpenetration
through a critical geographical perspective.
Lim
‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’
demands but simultaneously defies geographical
definition. The selective institutional differentia-
tion of state spatiality and the concomitant
accommodation of neoliberal logics epitomize
a seemingly unending cause-effect relationship.
While the Chinese state’s decision to actively
(re)produce economic-geographical unevenness
within its territory may, at first glance, suggest
neoliberalization has gained further traction in
China, this decision must be assessed as a
dynamic, place-specific negotiation of what
appear to be oppositional forces (i.e. socialism
and neoliberalism). The unfolding of this nego-
tiation in and through Chinese state space offers
distinct contextual springboards to theorize what
Brenner et al. (2010: 211) call ‘the uneven devel-
opment of neoliberalization, and the neoliberali-
zation of regulatory uneven development’. These
springboards potentially challenge an increas-
ingly pervasive interpretation of China’s devel-
opment as a triumph of neoliberalism over
socialism/communism; as ‘neoliberalism with
Chinese characteristics’ (pace Coase and Wang,
2012; Harvey, 2005a; cf. Ma, 2009; Nonini,
2008).
Challenging this interpretation involves
addressing two distinct but crosscutting ques-
tions. (1) Has neoliberalism really become the
ideology par excellence in China, or has it
become a precondition of socialist/communist
development? (2) If there really is ‘neoliberal-
ism with Chinese characteristics’, (how) are
these ‘Chinese characteristics’ socialist in prac-
tice? As this paper has argued, it is more apposite
to interpret variegated neoliberalization as a pre-
condition of – rather than an alternative to –
‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ because
the production of a ‘socialist market economy’
entails a deepening structuring of everyday social
life within China around market exchange on one
hand and the Chinese state’s consolidation-
cum-expansion of SOEs’ economic influence
on the other. Section II.1 has shown how neoli-
beralization is intrinsically undergirded by an
241
‘antagonistic fissure’ – uneven development
(cf. Žižek, 1989: 142). This ‘antagonistic fis-
sure’ is, interestingly, what Deng sought to
defer to the future as he put into practice the
‘ladder step theory’ of economic-geographical
development in the early 1980s (cf. section
III.1). Evidence over the past decade suggests,
however, that the CPC is ready to make even
development a prominent spatial issue. Its ratio-
nale is not surprising: to follow Žižek (1989:
143), the key to identifying and overcoming
ideological limitations is ‘to detect, in a given
ideological edifice, the element which represents
within it its own impossibility’. For the CPC to
get closer to its goal (i.e. ‘socialism with Chinese
characteristics’) while it simultaneously nego-
tiates the pressures of neoliberalization, this
‘element’ has to be uneven development (see
Table 1; Deng, 1993).
That uneven development would become the
prominent source of China’s socialistic
advancement was unimaginable during the Mao
era (and possibly today); as China deepens its
integration within the global system of capital-
ism, however, this phenomenon has become a
geographical inevitability. ‘If capitalism sur-
vives through uneven development . . . if capit-
alism is uneven development, then, surely, we
need to search out an adequate theoretical
framework to encompass this fact’ (Harvey,
2005b: 88, emphasis in original). Increasingly
central to the evolution of the contemporary
global system of capitalism (and its prevailing
governance ideology, neoliberalism) and yet
simultaneously striving to enhance a histori-
cized socialist totality, China presents a contex-
tually rich but contradiction-ridden arena from
which to ‘search out’ this theoretical frame-
work. Taking up and extending Harvey’s
(2005b) cue, this paper has proposed a concep-
tual framework that takes, as its basis, ‘socialism
with Chinese characteristics’ as a geographic ten-
sion. The actualization of this historicized end-
state is encumbered by the ‘antagonistic fissure’
that is uneven development, yet it is this
242
unevenness that enlivens both the Chinese state
and, indeed, the ‘Washington Consensus’ (see
section III.1). While it cannot be determined a
priori whether the Chinese state’s ‘move first,
experiment first’ policies in the strategically
reinstitutionalized areas will succeed, it is, iro-
nically, this potential for failure that justifies
new rounds of geographically variegated insti-
tutional experimentations. Every round of insti-
tutional experimentation is, indeed, an
exemplification of a Beckettsian ‘try again, fail
again, fail better’ spirit.
In an interesting twist, it could be China’s
‘national strategy’ of state-driven policy experi-
mentations, rather than TNCs operating sepa-
rately from and against national governments,
that cause what Crouch (2011) terms ‘the
strange non-death of neoliberalism’. Aided by
its national monetary policy and a strong ‘invi-
sible hand’ over SOEs’ corporate strategies,
CPC-driven territorial reconfigurations reflect
the paradoxical integration of uneven regulatory
development as an intrinsic driver of its multi-
scalar ‘eternal reforms’. A new research chal-
lenge for geographical political economy,
then, is to understand how sociospatial contra-
dictions in China are transposed, through geo-
institu-tional differentiation, into new develop-
mental preconditions in relation to the global
(neoliberalizing) context (cf. Figure 1; Table
2). Specifically, the challenge is to ascertain
how – or, indeed, whether – uneven develop-
ment can be transposed from a developmental
effect to a developmental source. The empirical
outcomes of the recursive cause-effect relation-
ship between actually existing uneven develop-
ment and state spatial strategies are of
significance because, as aforementioned, it
remains unclear how market-based regulations
and practices can fulfil the CPC’s integrated
socialist goal of ‘Common Affluence’ and ‘Har-
monious Society’.
What is clear, for now, is that the days of a
centrally planned economy are not over in
China. The major difference from the Mao era
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
is how this central planning is reconfigured
through the dialectical differentiation of Chi-
nese state spatiality and the variegated adapta-
tion of neoliberal logics across different
scales. Rather than allow private, non-state
capitalists to shape uneven development in an
ad hoc and potentially socially debilitating man-
ner (which in turn foments conditions for social
revolutions), the inclusion of private capitalists
in the CPC and the central government’s tight
grip over the national capital account (which
concentrated a huge amount of foreign currency
reserves in Beijing) creates colossal leverage for
the CPC to shape the domestic and (increas-
ingly) global allocation of financial investments
(the allocative power applies, to a lesser extent,
to the flows and fixity of Chinese labour power
as well). This leverage helps to pre-empt socio-
economic crises intrinsic to neoliberalization
and, by extension, sustains the CPC’s sociopoli-
tico legitimacy. As such, the production of
economic-geographical unevenness is, in the
Chinese context, not what Myrdal (1957: 26)
refers to as a ‘historical accident’; it is not an
outcome of the abstract laws of transnational
capital and labour flows; rather, it is an ideolo-
gically driven, institutionally differentiated and
inevitably recursive spatial tool that generates
pre-emptory territorial leaps towards an as-
yet-unknown future known as ‘socialism with
Chinese characteristics’.
Acknowledgements
I have benefited tremendously from the comments
of Jamie Peck, Henry Yeung and Xiaobo Su on ear-
lier drafts of this paper. My sincere gratitude also
goes to the anonymous referees for providing very
insightful feedback, and to Professor Noel Castree
for his encouraging comments and editorial
assistance. All responsibility for the arguments
presented in this paper remains solely mine. Over
the two years it took to transpose thoughts into text,
the support from Stephanie Lim, my dearest wife,
has been the proverbial still point of the turning
world – thank you.
Lim
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any
funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-
for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. While the existence of ‘universal’ truths in Marxism
remain moot per se, three characteristics are certainly
not ‘universalized’ by Karl Marx and Frederick
Engels: (1) the design of a Marxist state apparatus that
holds power over the proletariat within the contempo-
rary international system of nation states; (2) the spe-
cific temporal moment when this state apparatus
hands over power absolutely to the proletariat; and
(3) strategies to address recurring uneven economic-
geographical development. As such, it is arguable that
the ‘Chinese characteristics’ that accompany the puta-
tive ‘universal truths’ of Marxism are these three con-
tingent characteristics: precisely because these
characteristics are contingent, there is a degree of pol-
icy flexibility for the CPC to justify its existence as the
leader of the Leninistic ‘dictatorship of the proletar-
iat’, and by extension, to use state space strategically
to further legitimize the perenniality of a one-party
governance system.
2. The need to redress economic-geographical inequal-
ity, as recent statistics suggest, is pressing: the average
income in 2010 of a resident in the province-level cit-
ies of Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin is at least five
times more than a resident in the three provinces with
the lowest per capita GDP, namely Yunnan, Gansu
and Guizhou (The Economist, 2011). A report by the
Chinese Household Finance Survey Center of Cheng-
du’s Southwestern University of Finance and Eco-
nomics put China’s 2010 Gini coefficient at 0.61,
which, according to World Bank figures, is substan-
tially above the average of 0.44 for all countries
(Caixin Online, 2012).
3. Contrary to the Marxian dialectical method, the scale-
sensitive approach in this paper does not predetermine
‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ contradictory forces: forces
may contradict one another at one scale and combine
complementarily at another. For instance, full-blown
neoliberalization contradicts the CPC’s aim to pro-
duce a domestic ‘socialist market economy’, but is
in fact necessary to support the continued expansion
of the Chinese economy at the global scale (see section
243
II). As such, this paper argues that a multiscalar con-
ceptualization of China’s economic development
offers a more incisive understanding and critique of its
ongoing, dialectical quest for a ‘socialist market
economy’.
4. The end-state of this pursuit is inevitably imaginary
because no one, arguably even policy-makers within
the top echelons of the Chinese state apparatus, knows
what the (geographical) form of ‘socialism with Chi-
nese characteristics’ looks like. However, this imagin-
ary is inherently material (rather than idealistic and/or
illusory) because it is shaped by concrete geohistorical
events and, in turn, engenders direct impacts on socio-
economic policies implemented in and beyond China
(see sections II and III).
5. Originally coined in 1989 by the economist John Wil-
liamson, the ‘Washington Consensus’ describes 10
common policy prescriptions shared by the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the
US Treasury Department for then-floundering Latin
American economies. These prescriptions were pro-
free market, particularly the call for market-
determined currency exchange rates, the privatization
of state enterprises, and the abolition of regulations
that impede market entry. Williamson has since been
at pains to distance his conceptualization from neoli-
beralism, but fails to convince, given that the 10 pre-
scriptions are indeed integral to the three
institutions’ approach to development since the
1990s (cf. Harvey, 2005a; Peck, 2010).
6. This arguably came to a head in the lead up to the 2012
US Presidential Election. Both presidential candidates
– Barack Obama and Mitt Romney – engaged in vig-
orous ‘China bashing’ in many of their campaign
speeches (see CNN, 2012).
7. The Short Course was a collection of Stalin’s thoughts
on and approaches to be socialist; it was compulsory
reading in the Soviet Union between 1938 and 1956.
8. As it became increasingly clear that a primary focus on
economic strategies was not yielding desired results,
Mao (1977: 130) began to critique Stalin’s policies
in 1961, placing particular emphasis on the impor-
tance of central state power: ‘Commodity exchange
laws governing value play no regulating role in our
production. This role is played by planning, by the
great leap forward under planning, by politics-in-
command. Stalin speaks only of the production rela-
tions, not of the superstructure, nor of the relationship
244
between superstructure and economic base . . . Stalin
mentions economics only, not politics.’ This emphasis
arguably continues to undergird the CPC’s govern-
ance of the Chinese political economy today.
9. Of China’s Top 500 Enterprises for 2011 (based on
2010 revenue), 316 are SOEs (guoqi), while 184 are
privately owned (minqi). SOE-ownership is differen-
tiated by place: they are either central government-
owned (zhongyang qiye) or provincial government-
owned (difang guoqi). While there is an increase in the
number of minqi (from 169 in 2009), it is important to
note that the top 38-ranked are SOEs, while the first
minqi to make the ranking – Huawei – was placed
39th. For the full list and a series of discussions (pub-
lished in Mandarin), see Sina.com (2011). This inter-
esting information points to two potential research
directions: (1) how the Chinese state continues to
influence domestic and global economic growth
through the SOEs; and (2) the extent to which private
enterprises are allowed to wield influence in the
domestic economy.
10. In September 2012, the People’s Bank of China held
approximately US$3.3 trillion in foreign exchange
reserves.
11. The dialecticism of this process is evident when
viewed from the angle of the WTO. Through accept-
ing a member state (China) that wants to ‘play the eco-
nomic game’ partly on its own ideological terms, the
WTO has generated its own contradictory element
within itself. The question for the WTO is arguably
not whether it should have admitted China, but
whether the development of its member economies,
increasingly integrated with the Chinese economy,
can be sustained without subjecting (at least) some
Chinese investment and trading policy-making pro-
cesses within its regulatory realm. Both parties thus
produce and face tensions by virtue of becoming a part
of the other.
12. In view of potential geopolitical threats from different
directions (the Soviet Union in the north, Vietnam and
the USA in the southeast and east, respectively), Mao
Zedong’s government decided in 1964 to designate
China’s coastal belt as a ‘first front’ of defence, and
the southwestern interior as the ‘third front’. All areas
in between are categorized as the ‘second front’.
13. The full text of the Education Law of the People’s
Republic of China can be accessed here: http://www.
china.org.cn/english/education/184669.htm.
Progress in Human Geography 38(2)
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