‘Emptying the cage, changing the birds’: state rescaling, path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong

Lim, Kean Fan

Abstract

This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicization of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustrate the dynamic entwinement between state rescaling and institutional path-dependency: the Wang administration launched this industrial policy in spite of potentially destabilizing effects on the prevailing national structure of capital accumulation. This foregrounds, in turn, the constitutive and constraining effects of established, national-level policies on local, territorially-specific restructuring policies.

Citation

Lim, K. F. (2016). ‘Emptying the cage, changing the birds’: state rescaling, path-dependency and the politics of economic restructuring in post-crisis Guangdong. New Political Economy, 21(4), 414-435. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2016.1153054

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 4, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Mar 15, 2016
• Publication Date: Mar 15, 2016
• Deposit Date: Feb 14, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 14, 2017
• Journal: New Political Economy
• Print ISSN: 1356-3467
• Electronic ISSN: 1469-9923
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 21
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 414-435
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2016.1153054
• Keywords: State rescaling, Guangdong, Double relocation, Industrial policy, Wang Yang, Institutional path-dependency
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/780377
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2016.1153054
• Additional Information: The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available in New Political Economy 2016 http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13563467.2016.1153054