Spatial egalitarianism as a social ‘counter-movement’: on socio-economic reforms in Chongqing

Abstract Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million m2 of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal access to social benefits as current urban residents, the paper explains how the quest for equitable urbanization magnifies two nationwide dimensions of institutionalized uneven development, namely (i) the caste-like categorization of populations according to ‘urban’ and ‘rural’; and (ii) the coastal bias in national economic development. The paper concludes that this state-driven pursuit of spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing expresses the dialecticism of economic development in China: it is a social ‘counter-movement’ against the effects of an uneven spatiality that was instituted to drive and deepen the marketization of Chinese society.


Introduction
Beginning in 2007, the Chinese state apparatus launched a series of pathchanging socio-economic reforms in Chongqing, a city-region 1 in southwestern China. Widely taken in policy-making, academic and media circles as representative of a unique 'Chongqing model' or 'Chongqing experience' of development, these reforms arguably placed Chongqing amongst what Shin (2012) terms the 'unequal cities of spectacle and mega-events in China'. An emergent trend across China, mega-events like the 2008 Beijing Olympics or the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games were putatively intended to produce a national 'unified space' that could at once enable 'capital accumulation and socio-political stability for further accumulation' (Shin, 2012, p. 729). Unlike these one-off events, however, Chongqing did not become a national 'unified space' through displacing or deferring pre-existing social problemsthe overarching objective was to resolve them. Hitherto untested on a large scale, these reforms arguably became a 'spectacle' in China because they wrestled proactively with national-level institutional constraints.
In spite of what appears to be a 'win-win' developmental approach, particularly against a backdrop of immense nationwide inequality, 2 the quest for greater social equity in Chongqing did not receive universal acclaim in China. Labelled neo-Maoist for launching 'red song' singing campaigns (changhong) and portrayed as disregarding the rule of law in its 'anti-Mafia' crackdowns (dahei), the Chongqing government came under further scrutiny for implementing the socio-economic reforms. Perhaps the most contentious characteristic of these reforms is the largescale state investments required to embed capital accumulation processes in tandem with the enhancement of socio-spatial equity. On one hand, the Chongqing government successfully pushed for the demarcation of a 'nationally strategic' economic development zone known as the Liangjiang New Area; on the other hand, it implemented a host of policies in the Chongqing urban area aimed at easing uneven spatial development associated with (i) the institutionalized organization of social life according to 'urban' and 'rural', a Mao-era legacy; and (ii) the coastal bias in the bid to build a 'socialist market economy', a definitive feature of Deng Xiaoping's first-wave 'liberalization' reforms launched after 1978. Displacing or deferring social problems to other time-spaces, for these critics, was seemingly preferred to confronting them together with the pursuit of economic goals.
Taking this intense scrutiny as the analytical point of departure, this paper aims to add conceptual clarity to the post-2007 socio-economic reforms in Chongqing. Rather than construe the events occurring within Chongqing as an endogenous expression of Maoist resurgence, the paper explores how local and extra-local factors interacted to shape urban-rural integration in Chongqing. As will be shown, the broad directions for the reforms were launched by the Chinese central government in March 2007. The municipality was chosen as a base for reforms for locational and administrative reasons: it was part of the vast interior hinterland that, over the last three decades, had been unable to keep up with the pace of economic growth in the coastal regions. Yet it was and remains the only municipality in interior China governed directly by the central government. This unique spatio-temporal positioning allowed the central government, then led by Hu Jintao, to address directly two aspects of uneven development that were prevalent at the national scale, namely the urban-rural 'dual structure' and the coastal-interior economic disparity. The 'Chongqing experience' is thus more accurately an expression of and a potential solution to the underlying socio-economic tensions associated with the Communist Party of China's (CPC's) seemingly contradictory approach to 'liberalizing' the Chinese economy on the back of institutionalized uneven spatial development. Yao Zhongqiu (hereafter Qiu Feng, to use his official pen name), a prominent Chinabased public intellectual, puts this relational positioning in perspective: The 'Chongqing model' contains all the problems that exist in the 'China model' of development, the only difference is that some of these problems were magnified in Chongqing. Hence when we reflect on the 'Chongqing model', we need to be aware of this point, we need to view it against a broader expanse. (Part of academic discussion at the Unirule Institute of Economics, Beijing, 6 December 2012; transcript published in China Review, 15 January 2013, n.p.; author's translation) To grasp the connections between the reforms in Chongqing and the 'broader expanse' in which they are situated, this paper develops an analysis that draws on and develops Karl Polanyi's (1944/2001, 1957 substantivist conceptualization of economic practices. For Polanyi, the contemporary economy is 'instituted' by three 'modes of integration', 3 namely redistribution, reciprocity and market exchange. All three modes would be present at any one time, although one mode might be more dominant than the others. Through this analytical framing, this paper argues that the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing illustrate the importance of state-driven redistribution in easing pre-existing and potential social tensions engendered, paradoxically, by the effects of an uneven spatiality instituted for economic development by the same state apparatus. It conceptualizes the redistributive quest for spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing as a protective act against the effects of instituted uneven development. Viewed against the CPC's concomitant policies to deepen market-like governance in Chinese society, this quest corresponds to what Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001 terms 'the double movement' in emergent market societies, namely that social counter-movements would inevitably check the continuous expansion of markets. The subsequent four parts of the paper will demonstrate how this countermovement is expressed in and through Chongqing. Section 2 discusses how Polanyi's substantivist approach to economic analysis is developed to examine the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing. The geo-historical context of Chongqing's politico-economic evolution is then presented in section 3. Section 4 begins by explaining the socio-economic rationale of one main reform, the construction of large-scale public rental housing (gongzufang), in relation to another policy to facilitate 'household registration' conversion for rural residents (nongmin hukou zhuanyi). To achieve this objective, the section juxtaposes two sets of empirical materials, 4 namely, (i) narrativesboth affirmative and antagonisticon the redistributive policies to provide largescale public rental housing and deepen reforms of the hukou (household registration) institution; and (ii) quantitative data presented by the different actors. Drawing from the empirical analysis, the paper concludes by (re) focusing on the state's role as a driver of a social counter-movement through strategic redistribution. The bigger question crystallized through the Chongqing case is the extent to which future 'double movements' within the Chinese political economy might continue to be determined by institutionalized uneven spatial developmenta tool of socio-economic control that, while serving the CPC so well since it launched its 'socialist high tide' in 1958, appears to be under colossal strain in the current conjuncture.

The (re)institutionalization of socio-economic embeddedness in China: a substantivist conceptualization
Economic substantivism is an analytical approach postulated by Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( / 2001Polanyi ( , 1957Polanyi ( , 1977 in contrast to the formalism that characterizes neo-classical economics. The primary characteristic of substantivism is that the 'economy' cannot be abstracted and theorized as an entity that is self-regulated by ecumenical laws of evolution. By extension, an economy can never be distinct from its constitutive socio-spatial formation. 'While substantivist explanations are crafted in context rich and institutionally saturated settings', Peck (2013Peck ( , p. 1555) explains in an incisive exploration of Polanyian analytical approaches, 'formalism implies a preference for parsimonious reasoning, prefabricated models, and singular logics, like the rational-choice paradigm'. Indeed, conditions of scarcitythe analytical basis of the rational-choice paradigmdo not solely determine economic choice (Polanyi, 1957); economic processes, as Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001) observes of pre-and non-capitalist economies, are intrinsically predicated on social goals: The outstanding discovery of recent historical and anthropological research is that man's economy, as a rule, is submerged in his social relationships. He does not act so as to safeguard his individual interest in the possession of material goods; he acts so as to safeguard his social standing, his social claims, his social assets. He values material goods only in so far as they serve this end. (Polanyi 1944(Polanyi /2001 The emphasis on 'social relationships' as determinant of economic practices is crucial not only for the understanding of the intrinsic motivations of individual behaviour; politico-economic institutions also need to ensure their practices do not undermine social stability. In the contemporary conjuncture, these institutions are invariably established inside and/or alongside individual state apparatuses. Insofar as these state apparatuses claim to be representative of 'the people' (who arguably constitute the state's primary 'social assets'), their respective economic strategies would be entwined with the need to safeguard their social legitimacy amongst the people they govern. This entwinement is especially pronounced in China because the ruling CPC functions in/as a oneparty state apparatus whose social relevance must be regularly demonstrated in practice to preclude potentially violent revolutions. 5 To comprehend the dynamics of Chinese politico-economic evolution, the CPC is conceptualized as an embedded social actor in the first instance; as a mediator and driver of economic policies to achieve its self-determined social goal, i.e. a 'Harmonious Society' (hexie shehui) defined by an egalitarianism end-state known as 'Common Affluence' (gongtong fuyu). Indeed, it is this long-standing ideological commitment that positions Chinese socio-economic evolution against Polanyi's (1944Polanyi's ( /2001) definition of a 'disembedded economy', that 'instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system'. Strong market regulation, characterized by the disembedding circulation of three 'fictitious commodities' (land, labour power and money), effectively means social actors would be subservient to the prerogatives of private capitalist producers. Because the CPC remains committed to creating a communistic end-state, 6 it is obliged to preclude 'fictitious commodities' from fully dictating the organization of social life. As will be addressed shortly, the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing exemplify this obligation. Polanyi's (1957Polanyi's ( , 1977 conceptualization of the economy as an 'instituted process' forms the core of this paper's analytical framework. He identifies three major 'forms of integration' that 'institute' the modern (capitalist) economy, namely redistribution, reciprocity and market exchange. Of these three forms, redistribution and reciprocity are 'two principles of behavior not primarily associated with economics' (Polanyi, 1944(Polanyi, /2001. As this paper will show, it is precisely because of this non-association that they are important for a market economy: 1. Redistribution: This integrative process presupposes the centralization of goods and money by a powerful social institution, or what Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001) calls the 'institutional pattern of centricity': it 'provides a track for the collection, storage, and redistribution of goods and services … [I]n all economies of kind a similar need exists, be the group ever so numerous. And the larger the territory and the more varied the produce, the more will redistribution result in an effective division of labor, since it must help to link up geographically differentiated groups of producers'. As Polanyi (1977, p. 37) elaborates, 'In the case of redistribution … the movement cannot proceed without an established center from which redistribution takes place. Redistribution is not an individual pattern at all; and even when started on a small scale, it would depend upon the prior existence of a recognized center'. In the Chinese context, the central state apparatus had, since its establishment in 1949, sought regularly to reproduce its position as the 'recognized center' in the nationwide allocation of means and output of production. The underlying justification for this redistributive commitment is to preclude social tensions and set the Chinese political economy on the path towards an unknown end-state known as 'socialism with Chinese characteristics' (cf. Lim, 2014). Yet, in Polanyi's parlance, the very ability of the central state apparatus to hold itself as the 'recognized center' and produce an 'effective division of labor' is predicated on reciprocity between socio-economic actors located in different geographical regions. 2. Reciprocity: An act of transfer which is not price-determined, but from which an act of transfer with an approximately symbolic value is expected in return (either in future or immediately). These transfers reveal specifically the relationships between actors (e.g. kinship networks); they generate trust and are fundamental to the creation of social harmony. In the non-capitalist societies of Western Melanesia, Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001 observes, reciprocity was characterized by the 'institutional pattern of symmetry': an arrangement of 'duality' facilitated the exchange of goods, disguised as gift-giving, between the coastal and inland villages. Yet Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001) was quick to add that the origins of 'institutional symmetry' were unclear, and that it would be 'impracticable' for this process to exist on its own in the long run. Rather, 'symmetry and centricity will meet halfway the needs of reciprocity and redistribution; institutional patterns and principles of behavior are mutually adjusted' (Polanyi, 1944(Polanyi, /2001; see discussion on redistribution above). Within contemporary China, institutional symmetry can be observed in two domains. First, reciprocity is (to be) derived through the quest for spatial balance between the coastal provinces and the vast interior hinterland. In a 1988 speech, then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping issued an injunction to every Chinese citizen residing in the coastal provinces to reciprocate the state's decision first to implement reforms in their provinces by accepting the subsequent redistribution 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 economically advanced areas to help those that are more backward, and it is also a major policy' (Deng, 1993, p. 278;author's translation). Yet, as the Chongqing case shows, the attainment of inter-regional reciprocity isor, specifically, has to besimultaneously premised on institutional centricity. Second, the Chinese state apparatus established reciprocal relations with the private capitalist classincluding those located abroadwith the understanding that its one-party rule is beyond question. Domestically, these relations were institutionalized by the Jiang Zemin government after Jiang personally called on private capitalistsdenigrated as 'class enemies' during the Mao-erato be given the right to join the CPC. The intriguing 'co-option' of domestic private capitalists into the CPC, as Dickson (2008) explains in elaborate detail, arguably produced a 'duality' in which state-linked and private economic actors could coexist insofar as the CPC's institutional centricityor, indeed, its institutionalized existential immortality 7remains unchallenged. 3. Market exchange: The competitive buying and selling of commodities whose values are determined by forces of supply and demand and expressed through monetary prices. The 'market', as an institutional system, is constituted by redistribution and reciprocity: 'the validating and organizing factor [of market exchange] springs not from the individual but from the collective actions of persons in structured situations. Exchange as a form of integration is dependent on the existence of a market system, an institutional pattern which, contrary to common assumptions, does not originate in random actions of exchange' (Polanyi, 1977, p. 37). This market system, Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( / 2001 avers, 'fictionalizes' three entitieslabour (power), land and moneyas commodities. These 'commodities' are 'fictitious' because they cannot innately be produced for sale; their saleable 'nature' is a material construction constituted by and contingent on processes of redistribution and reciprocity. Redistribution is not the only necessary process for market-building, however; if the participants choose to disrespect rules and disrupt the terms of exchange (i.e. lack of reciprocity), exchange relations could break down. As such, the 'free' market is a deontological entity; changing and often contested redistributive and reciprocal processes determine the degree of 'freedom' in and the geographic extent of any market (cf. section 4).
These three forms of socio-economic integration are taken as occurring simultaneously and symbiotically rather than chronologically. In a subsequent development of The great transformation, Polanyi (1957, p. 256) makes clear that the 'forms of integration do not represent "stages" of development. No sequence in time is implied. Several subordinate forms may be present alongside of the dominant one, which may itself recur after a temporary eclipse'. This clarification is important in methodological and analytical terms, as Peck (2013Peck ( , pp. 1556 explains: 'particular modes of integration should not be expected to secure monopoly positions within actually existing economies, which are heterogeneous and hybrid; economic logics and rationalities are plural, warranting parity of analytical esteem across modes of integration'. In relation to a diverse economy like China, Peck and Zhang (2013, p. 388) believe this presupposition of plural economic logics and rationalities occurring in tension with one another is more helpful for theoretical (re)construction: What if, instead of positioning the principle of market coordination in a sequential and historical relationship with social regulation and institutional embeddedness, in a temporal reading of the double-movement metaphor (as if marketization and socialization only see-saw against one another through time), this was replaced with a simultaneous and geographical conception of the contradictory coexistence of the integrative principles of market exchange, reciprocity and redistribution within fundamentally heterogeneous economies? This conception, in which variegated capitalisms necessarily (co)exist with their others, in contradictory and often crisis-prone hybrids and in webs of mutually constitutive relations, might enable a critical but theoretically 'positive' understanding of China's development path. (Peck & Zhang, 2013, p. 388;emphases in original) Through the Chongqing case, this paper examines how Polanyi's three integrative mechanisms intersect within a 'fundamentally heterogeneous' Chinese socio-economy. On one hand, this place-specific intersection appears different from the national-scale combination of these mechanisms; on the other, it is expressive of national-scale structural contradictions. Taken together, these phenomena highlight antagonisms associated with the Chinese central government's attempt to expand economic liberalization and its seemingly contradictory commitment to ease a crucial precondition of the liberalization processuneven spatial development (cf. Lim, 2014). That the post-2007 redistributive strategies took centre-stage as a social 'countermovement' in Chongqing, this paper argues, in itself indicates the inability of reciprocal economic relations to exclusively enhance social equity at the national scale. More crucially, insofar as the CPC continues to expand its marketization drive, the Chongqing reforms represent the socially protective part of what Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001) terms a 'double movement': The one was the principle of economic liberalism, aiming at the establishment of a self-regulating market, relying on the support of the trading classes, and using largely laissez-faire and free trade as its methods; the other was the principle of social protection aiming at the conservation of man and nature as well as productive organization, relying on the varying support of those most immediately affected by the deleterious action of the marketprimarily, but not exclusively, the working and the landed classesand using protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention as its methods. (Polanyi 1944(Polanyi /2001 Parallel to Polanyi's (1944Polanyi's ( /2001 observation of earlier societies, the socioeconomic reforms in Chongqing demonstrate the entwinement of redistribution and reciprocity as modes of economic integration. The growing dominance of market exchange in China presupposes the existence and exchange of personal assets protected legally by a strong 'established center'. Yet the same 'established center' is required to hold market actors in check; it is required to ensure the social inequality ensuing from marketization (which is now acute in income and geographic terms) does not undermine the stability of the market economy.
There is no doubt that only one institution possesses the institutional centricity so crucial for market co-ordination in the current conjuncture; there is also no doubt only one institution possesses the power to introduce, in Polanyi's parlance, 'protective legislation, restrictive associations, and other instruments of intervention' to protect Chinese society from the concomitant problems of marketlike governance (Polanyi, 1944(Polanyi, /2001). This institution is the CPC. In the following discussion, this paper argues that state-driven redistribution is not a zero-sum approach (i.e. more state involvement = contracting markets); rather, the reshaping of Chongqing's socio-spatial structure overlaps the reconfiguration of the city-region's industrial structure. The socioeconomic reforms in Chongqing are of theoretical significance in this aspect: while Chinese state power is commonly perceived to be increasingly captured by capitalists (which paradoxically include factions in control of state-owned enterprises), these reforms illuminate the state's role as a social leader whose overall goal is to produce 'Common Affluence' without precluding the production of new industrial spaces. What the reforms in Chongqing exemplify, then, is a dialectical attempt by the central government to keep highly contingent capital investments within the Chinese market economy while also fulfilling Deng's 1988 commitment to spatial egalitarianism.

Chongqing as the 'big platform' of experimental reforms
Chongqing is one of the four 8 province-level cities (zhixiashi) in China. Originally part of Sichuan province, the core urban area of Chongqing and three surrounding districts were rescaled into a city-region and became directly governed by the central government on 18 June 1997. Interestingly, Chongqing was previously a zhixiashi: during World War II and the Chinese civil war , Chongqing was the temporary capital of the Republic of China 9 (governed by the Nationalist Party which later relocated offshore to Taiwan). While the CPC removed Chongqing's province-level status after it became the official government of China, the city's locationmore specifically, its relative isolation in China's south-western interiorwas prized for geopolitical reasons. Shielded by several mountain chains and far from potential naval landings by foreign armed forces, Chongqing became central to Mao Zedong's 'Third Front' defensive strategy (sanxian jianshe). 10 Many industrial and military complexes were consequently relocated to or constructed in the city-region.
Socio-economic development in Chongqing would continue to evolve concomitantly with China's state spatial strategies in the post-Mao era. After Deng Xiaoping implemented economic reforms in 1978, the 'ladder step' geographical theory (tidu lilun) became the basis of socio-economic reconfiguration. This approach fundamentally inverted Mao's 'three Fronts' policy: like Mao's government, the Deng administration delineated Chinese state spatiality into three economic belts, namely eastern (coastal), central, and western. However, Deng overturned Mao's preference to develop China's interior hinterland by giving the eastern seaboard absolute priority in ascending the economic 'ladder'. He assumed that the economic fruits of development in the 'first mover' belt would diffuse systematically downwards to other rungs of the ladder and, as previously mentioned, issued an injunction 11 that interior provinces must patiently await the reciprocal assistance from (coastal) provinces that first attained economic growth (see section 2).
The 'ladder-step' logic was first expressed in 1980 through the formation of four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in China's south-eastern region. 12 Until 1994, selected coastal provinces also benefitted from preferential fiscal redistribution to accelerate their respective developments. For more than two decades, then, Chongqing's economic growthlike many cities and provinces in China's western interiorlagged behind provinces along the coast. National income inequality worsened correspondingly. As one academic/planner from Sichuan province puts it: Be it value-added production based on imported raw materials, or simple trade, the eastern region was first to connect with the world. As such, the broad western region could only provide supply-side support for the east, supplying natural gas, minerals, of course, incessantly supplying labor power … Against this background, the western region became a base of raw materials and labor power, but because of no good redistributive structure, the ultimate outcome is faster development in the eastern region and slower development in the west. It is clear that the ladder step theory did not work. (Interview, March 2012, Chongqing; author's translation) It was only in the mid-1990s, after the Three Gorges Dam national energy project was launched, that Chongqing (re-)emerged as a strategically significant city. Because of the sheer size and scale of the dam construction, many settlements in the upstream valleys of the Yangtze River had to be flooded. An estimated two-thirds of the eight million affected residents were originally located in Sichuan province, the majority of them living in poverty. This engendered a colossal logistical and governance issue: the Sichuan provincial government, which already had a huge and relatively poor population under its charge, was confronted with the challenge of resettling and then re-employing the affected residents without further straining its administrative and fiscal resources.
At that conjuncture, there were proposals to create a new province in the Three Gorges region. 13 It soon became apparent, however, that the central government was keen to avoid the costly administrative duplication and politics associated with establishing a new province. The primary policy concern, as the former Premier Li Peng put it in a 1986 diary account, was to prioritize the dam-building project over the redrawing of provincial boundaries (Li, 2003). Since Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, was too far away from the flooded areas, Chongqing was identified as a more logical 'scalar fix' for the population resettlement issue. To ease the financial impact on the Sichuan government, the central government agreed to administer the districts of Fuling, Wanxian and Qianjiang, then amongst the poorest areas in Sichuan, as resettlement zones. These districts were subsequently merged with Chongqing's core urban zone to form the sprawling Chongqing Municipality. Through this territorial rescaling, it is intriguing to see in the Chongqing experience yet another geo-historical twist of fate: demoted by Mao, the city-region's strategic location emplaced it as a zhixiashi for the second time in its history.
Given the politico-economic (and, by extension, ideological) significance of forming the first province-level city in China's poorer western interior, the central government began to use Chongqing to spearhead the cross-provincial Great Western Development (xibu dakaifa) program. Following the redistribution of the power to 'move first, experiment first' (xianxing xianshi quan) in a gamut of policy portfolios since 2007, massive changes took place. Working on the basis of the Chinese central government's '314' developmental strategy for Chongqing in 2007, then newly appointed Party Secretary Bo Xilai and mayor Huang Qifan proposed to the central government a list of policy advances, one of which was to produce the country's third 'nationally strategic' economic development zone called the Liangjiang New Area (the other two then were Pudong in Shanghai and Binhai in Tianjin). This proposal, which would give the Chongqing government greater flexibility in both land use planning and policy design, was complemented by an integrated strategy to effect localized supply-chain integration; to attract targeted transnational corporations (TNCs) to relocate their offshore operations to Chongqing; and to connect Chongqing to Amsterdam in the European Union (EU) through a borderless rail link, an unprecedented move that effectively cuts transcontinental transport time to 13 days (Dushikuaibao, 7 March 2011). At the same time, large-scale socio-economic reforms were launched (for a time-line of developments, see Table 1).
On the social front, the Chongqing government believed the city-region's social safety net needed to be fortified simultaneously. As the then Party Secretary Bo Xilai puts it, 'amongst our country's four province-level cities, Chongqing's rural area and population are higher than those of Beijing and Tianjin combined, if we do not do a good job at urban-rural integration, the core city area [of Chongqing] may advance significantly, but the areas to the south and north would stagnate, urban-rural disparity would then be widened … Chongqing must become a big platform for [policy] experiments'  . On 30 November 2013, the Chongqing government announced a series of decisions detailing how administrative autonomy is to be granted to Liangjiang New Area; allows the New Area greater flexibility to respond to national and global economic opportunities . Indicates a continuity of the spatial project launched by the Bo Xilai-Huang Qifan administration; whether social reforms will be expanded remains unclear This two-pronged developmental approach led to a surge in both GDP and fixed capital formation (see Figure 1).  Viewed in relation to Bo and Yang's comments, the implication of this colossal increase in fixed capital formation is clear: the state apparatus, rather than self-regulating markets, must proactively ensure the urbanization process allows everyone systematically to 'cross the river'. This belief arguably differentiates the reforms in Chongqing from those in other city-regions. What the Chongqing government purports to mitigate are the social costs and spatial consequences associated with urban-based industrialization. Indeed, the tense relations between urbanization, land use changes and wealth redistribution already reverberate across China (see Lin, 2009;Tsing, 2010;Wu, 2008). One particular social tension, according to Youqin Huang, a prominent analyst of developments in China's national housing policies, is triggered by the massive inflation in property prices in the decade that followed the commodification of housing provision across China 14 : [H]ousing prices have skyrocketed in cities, with the national average housing price increasing by 250% in the decade between 2000 and 2010. The housing price-income ratio classifies much of China as 'severely unaffordable' in terms of housing. In big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, a modest apartment can cost multiple millions of yuan to purchase, and thousands of yuan to rent, making housing affordability the top concern of most low-and middle-income households. As a result, millions of migrants have been completely left out of the 'Chinese dream', with few owning homes in cities and most living in extremely crowded, poor quality dwellings. (In The Diplomat, 14 May 2013, n.p.) Of particular significance, Huang adds, is the connection between housing unaffordability and one's hukou status, which in turn accentuates the tension between housing commodification, a post-Mao development, and the hukou institution, an enduring product of the 'socialist high tide' of 1958: Migrants are generally more vulnerable in the housing market due to their lower incomes and the discriminatory Household Registration System, or hukou system (often called an internal passport system), under which migrants are not considered 'legal' residents in cities despite living and working in there over the long-term. Without local urban hukou, migrants are not entitled to welfare benefits such as subsidized housing. Even in Shenzhen, the city of migrants, local hukou is required to access low-income housing. In others cities like Beijing, several years of local hukou is required before applying for low-income housing. (In The Diplomat, 14 May 2013, n.p.) Because residents holding urban hukou almost always enjoy better social benefits than those holding rural hukou, rural residents often find themselves disenfranchised and discriminated against when they relocate to cities. While the abolishment of this institutionalized inequality is regularly touted, its structure remains intact and is seemingly intractable (Chan & Buckingham, 2008). In Chan's (1994) evocative terms, these migrants continue to live in 'cities with invisible walls'. These seemingly intractable issues pertaining to the provision of low-income housing and other social benefits to non-urban hukou residents in the city would be addressedor 'magnified', to once again borrow Qiu Feng's terms (see section 1)in Chongqing. As the next section will explain, the Chongqing government undertook an extensive construction of public rental housingat a highly ambitious 40 million m 2 between 2010 and 2012to accommodate the anticipated rural-to-urban migration following the implementation of a flexible hukou conversion scheme (see Table 2). Of particular significance is the integral role of these socio-economic policies in the (re) industrialization of Chongqing. The interplay of redistribution, reciprocity and market exchange in and through Chongqing thus offers an intriguing window to explore the possible forms of China's 'socialist market economy' and, more broadly, those of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics'.

Socializing capital accumulation through urban-rural integration
Against the afore-mentioned backdrop of escalating housing prices across China, Chongqing's then Party Secretary Bo Xilai made a sudden announcement in December 2009: in the decade to follow, his government would launch a series of large-scale public rental housing projects to provide affordable housing to low-to-middle income Chongqing residents (estimated to be 30-40 per cent of the total population). If unease was the initial reaction for (nominally) private developers, 15 surprise would probably be next: the construction of the symbolically named Minxin Jiayuan (Good Home of People's Hearts)the first project of public rental flatsbegan at the end of February 2010. The timing of Bo's announcementwhich targeted housing a third 16 of the population in Chongqing's urban centreappeared highly strategic in retrospect: it dovetailed with the Chinese State Council's January 2010 injunction to tackle the afore-mentioned nationwide housing price inflation.
The reason why the public rental housing projects generated strong oppositional response was arguably because of the scale of state involvement. According to one Chinese analyst, 'the very reason why Chongqing's public rental flat construction stands out in China is not because it is new or unique, but because of its scale. Bo [Xilai] was very ambitious, and his policy had the effect of signifying [property] market capture by the state at the expense of individuals [guojin mintui]. It seemed like a step back to the old days, and this made [private] firms uneasy' (Interview, March 2012). Another scholar participant in a policy forum in Chongqing said: 'Some people liken the Chongqing reforms to the Great Leap Forward (GLF)everything is about da ban ['do it big', a key slogan of the GLF era]; this is because of the upfront approach of the Chongqing government about its intervention. In reality it's not so strange, actually many state-owned enterprises are involved in da ban on a daily basis!' (Author's field notes, Chongqing, March 2012) On the other hand, as Wen Tiejun, a prominent China-based economist, observes, the largescale, state-driven approach to socio-economic development in Chongqing cannot be taken as an anti-market measure. Rather, this approach is the sine qua non of industrialization in Chongqing, a process that would not otherwise be automatically taken up by the private sector: The advantage in Chongqing is the ability to concentrate energies and launch huge projects (jizhong liliang gan dashi) … Because the developmental capital in Chongqing is too high, most ordinary private firms would be ineffective on this front; moreover, because the developmental parameters are to a large extent outcomes of the discussions between the Chongqing government and the central government, Chongqing received 12 beneficial policies. As such, the developmental capital could only be taken on by sizeable state-owned enterprises. (Wen, 2011, p. 65;author's translation) Building on these observations, this paper argues that the objectives of largescale socio-economic reforms and the ways they are financed must be understood in relation to the Chongqing government's simultaneous goal to expand market-like governance (see section 2). To begin with, the provision of rental housing is not simply a redistributive process; although the project is publicly owned and administered, it produces and functions through a marketa rental market. In other words, while the government functions as a commodity producer that does not commit to the extraction of supernormal profits from its customers, it nevertheless is still a producer that extracts rent through commodity exchange. By unilaterally establishing the exchange value of rental apartments, the Chongqing government aims to undercut what private producers are otherwise expected to charge. Property speculation is totally precluded through the prohibition of a secondary resale market for rental flats (cf. Table 3).
Viewed as an integrated developmental approach, these reforms strongly reflect an attempt to reduce discontent from the city's lower-income residents and engender positive reciprocity from potential migrants (from Chongqing's rural districts as well as other provinces) who might otherwise decide against moving into or near the Chongqing core urban area where major industrial zones (particularly Liangjiang New Area, the flagship industrialization project of the Chongqing government) are located. Clearly, then, social stability is a crucial ingredient for the fulfillment of nationally mandated industrialization objectives in and through the city-region. As Chongqing's mayor Huang Qifan explains: The large-scale construction of public rental housing not only guarantees weaker groups the ability to lead life with dignity, it will also improve Chongqing's investment environment and stimulate the local economy. In addition, Huang and Tang Zongwei, the deputy director of the Liangjiang New Area Administrative Committee, elaborate how the large-scale state investments in public rental housing cannot be defined narrowly as a process to reduce social discontent. Rather, these investments are integral to the national strategy to establish Chongqingand Liangjiang New Area in particularas the economic fulcrum (jingji shuniu) of interior China: The entry of rural workers into the city cannot lead to new poverty enclaves, nor can they be allowed to buy houses, as they can't afford it. Since there are several million people waiting to enter the city [i.e. Chongqing], we must find a way to solve their housing needs … so long as you are a worker in Chongqing, so long as you have worked for three, five years, the city needs you to work, then you can apply for rental housing. For new university graduates who enter Chongqing, so long as a firm employs you, then you can apply for rental housing. In sum, our housing safeguard system runs on the basis of urban-rural integration. (Huang Qifan, interview with www.news.cn, 8 March 2012;author's translation) 17 Just within Liangjiang New Area we aim to construct around 8.5 million m 2 , this does not include the public rental housing planned elsewhere in Chongqing municipality … The meaning of our public rental housing project is distinct from conventional notions; our project is to assist those who are just about to commence employment or become entrepreneurs. These groups of people come from everywhere, they either do not have housing or temporarily cannot afford housing; if you don't assist, they can't settle down. Hence our public rental housing is targeted at a million university graduates, researchers and highquality industrial workers; it is to help them enter Liangjiang, to help them integrate in this city, and it simultaneously resolves the problem of industrial support. (Tang Zongwei, interview with 21 st Century Herald, 27 November 2013; author's translation) Within the broader reform package, the rental housing project's socioeconomic objective complements another urban-rural integration policy, namely the flexible conversion of rural migrant workers' hukou into 'urban' status (see Table 2). As Youqin Huang's comments in section 3 indicate, most migrant workers nationwide could not qualify for subsidized public housing in cities across China. The reform of hukou institutions in Chongqing is a spatially targeted attempt to unhinge this enduring Mao-era legacy. Central to this attempt, the Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan was at pains to point out, is a recognition of peasant migrants' inherent right to be treated equally as full Chinese citizens, not just as a-social units of labour power: Assuming a city has three million registered residents and seven million peasant workers, after a few decades, when the city does not need these rural workers, they To mayor Huang, the impossibility of launching instant reforms is precisely why the hukou institutional reforms must be implemented in stages. After all, socio-spatial transformationwhich is akin to forming a bridge for a large party to cross a wide and deep riverrequires time: The urbanization process cannot envisage a situation where, after two groups of people were kept apart for thirty or forty years, several hundred millions of rural workers are accumulated in cities and then suddenly it is announced their hukou will be changed. This [hukou conversion] should not be a sudden occurrence, it should begin now, it should be a natural and continuous transformation process. (Interview with China Economy and Informatization, 18 January 2012; author's translation) Huang's emphases on 'fairness', 'justice' and 'citizen rights' in Chongqing is clearly an attempt to broaden the entitlements of what Smart and Lin (2007) term 'local citizenship'. For Smart and Lin (2007, p. 286), 'local citizenship' is an extension of local governmental commitment and redistribution; it is a recognition 'of the way in which China's distinctive system of household registration combines with the collectivist/exclusivist elements of the key social institutions of the danwei (enterprise) and the village to produce a system in which entitlements of citizenship are determined locally'. There is a nuance in the redetermination of local citizenship in Chongqing, however. While the large-scale hukou conversion of peasants into 'non-agricultural' citizens and, concomitantly, the provision of social services to accommodate their relocation to urban areas are indeed 'determined locally', they are at once an outcome of centrally redistributed experimental power (i.e. the xianxing xianshi quan; see section 2). Indeed, it was only after China's President Hu Jintao issued a '314' integrated development strategy for Chongqing in 2007 that the city-region's policy-makers immediately went about launching policies to reduce the inherent rural-urban barriers (chengxiang bilei; Table 1). The 'local' attempt to enhance citizenship rights in Chongqing is thus more aptly conceptualized as a trans-local redistributive effect.
One primary expression of this effect is the provision of public rental housing to rural residents expected to convert their hukou to the 'nonagricultural' (or, more simply, 'urban') category. Expanding housing supply to support hukou reforms (50 per cent of rental housing stock allocated for new peasant migrants) is a redistributive counter-movement against the straining impacts of housing price inflationas mentioned before, a phenomenon triggered by the nationwide commodification of housing provision (cf. Polanyi, 1944Polanyi, /2001section 3). This counter-movement is particularly important as spiraling housing prices would have the strongest impact on newly minted urban residents who, like their predecessors in many of China's urban-industrial parks, are most likely to be employed in low-wage, labourintensive industries or service sectors in Chongqing's urbanizing industrial areas (particularly in the 'nationally strategic' Liangjiang New Area).
To be sure, because the Chongqing government's redistributive focus is circumscribed to controlling land rather than finance or labour power (two other 'fictitious' entities Polanyi regards as potentially debilitating for social cohesion), the provision of public rental housing will not completely preclude other counter-movements (e.g. protests against labour and environmental exploitation by firms, already commonplace in the coastal cities). Put another way, the ongoing quest for spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing is never going to be a total resolution of extant social ills in China. Rather, its expression is dialecticalspecific 'freedoms' of market exchange are negated so as to sustain the function of market mechanisms. For this reason, these reforms represent at best an attempt to negotiate an inherited institutional precondition of the CPC's ongoing bid to develop a 'socialist market society'uneven spatial development. Assessed in terms of its national significance, the overarching objective of the Chongqing reforms is more accurately to perpetuate and proliferate market exchange without exacerbating the socio-spatial inequality that already exists at the national scale. Indeed, as will be elaborated shortly, these reforms were never meant to be a Maoist-styled, anti-market counter-revolution.

The (market) value of the Chongqing 'counter-movement'
As the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing gradually became reality, oppositional voices grew concomitantly. Specifically, the Chongqing reforms triggered a nationwide debate on 'making a bigger cake' (zuoda dangao, or growing the accumulated capital) in relation to 'sharing the cake well' (fenhao dangao, or redistributing existing gains). This debate illustrates two seemingly incommensurable conceptions of socio-spatial justice: to some, redistributing resources to enhance socio-spatial justice was the antithesis of expanded capital accumulation, while others viewed the enhanced stability accruing from redistribution as the precondition of expanded accumulation. In reality, however, the approach to local governance over the past three decades suggests clearly that 'cake sharing' is less important than 'cake making'. 'To compete for foreign investment', Wu (2009, p. 842) observes, 'local states [in China] maintain a stable social order and invest heavily in productive infrastructure such as roads and airports, while being reluctant to roll out welfare services'. Where and when redistributive policies are implemented, they tend to take on a distinct bias towards economic production, which in turn raises the question of what areas are considered strategic to GDP growth and are hence deemed worthy of fiscal support (Oi, 1992). It was arguably for this reason that the huge costs of public rental housing construction and hukou conversion in Chongqing became the primary focal point of prominent critics. How, indeed, could a social counter-movement contribute simultaneously to growing the cake of capital?
Speaking to Investor Journal, Mao Yushi, the Chairman of the Unirule Institute of Economics in China and winner of the Cato Institute's 2012 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, believes the Chongqing government is overextending its finances through debt-financing in order to generate political populism: The construction of rental flats is an attempt by the government to curry favour with the people, but where is the government's money from? From taxpayers.
[…] Without the creation of wealth, there is no wealth to redistribute, is Chongqing more efficient than other places in wealth creation? The strong development of state-owned enterprises in Chongqing … is a way to decrease efficiency in productivity. In such a situation, where do you find so much money to do good things for people's lives? It's very possible that [the policies] depend on bank credit. (Interview with Investor Journal, 26 March 2012; author's translation) Wu Jinglian, a highly influential economist and a senior economic advisor to China's State Council, echoes Mao's views: Such populism means sparing no expense to please the population, but it caused many problems for Chongqing's budget. One cannot invest such huge resources while having little regard for where such resources come from. One also has to consider whether such investments produce returns. (South China Morning Post, 26 March 2012) The theoretical assumptions of these comments exemplify what Polanyi has observed to be a movement towards the establishment of a 'self-regulatory market'. As Wu Jinglian has argued elsewhere, only two possible developmental trajectories exist for the Chinese economy in the current conjuncture: one involves the 'perfection' (wanshan) of market reforms, with political power circumscribed by the rule of law, the other a 'cul-de-sac' (qiongtu) characterized by state capitalism and crony capitalism (China Entrepreneur, 10 September 2013). For Mao Yushi, the market is quite simply 'the most successful institution' in the course of human history (interview with Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, 4 June 2012). Placed in relation to empirical facts in China, however, this market fundamentalism is shaky in two ways.
First, the argument that the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing were untenable because they reflect populist politics needs unpacking. In concrete terms, the pressing needs for alleviating what was (and remains) a growing rich-poor divide in China's largest municipalitywhich in itself is an outcome of the coastal and urban bias in earlier developmental strategieswould have been sufficient to merit state (pre-emptive and ameliorative) action (cf. section 3). Interestingly, Wu Jinglian showed he has never forgotten class struggle with an observation that 'socioeconomic contradictions [in China] have already reached a critical point. We cannot continue to blunder; a revolution would happen if we continue to blunder' (China Entrepreneur, 1 November 2013). Mao Yushi has similarly acknowledged that 'the biggest drawback of markets is the creation of rich-poor inequality. Markets create this problem, hence it cannot be resolved by markets. Its correction has to come from extra-market forces' (interview with Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, 4 June 2012). Such is the serious nature of social problems in contemporary China, Mao Yushi went on to illustrate at book length the colossal worries of the national populace since the 1978 'liberalization' reforms (see Mao, 2013). These observations raise an intriguing question for the conceptualization of 'politically popular' socio-economic reforms in Chongqing: if the need to ease social tensions is so pressing; if the people are already intensely worried by the reforms brought about by deepening market-like rule; and if market mechanisms cannot ease these tensions, would programs to ameliorate these tensions constitute a 'blunder' on the part of the CPC? China-based scholar Qiu Feng offers an interesting counterpoint on the interconnections between political populism (mincui zhuyi), 'crony capitalism' and the Chongqing reforms: I very much dislike those who criticize [on the basis of] populism. We can see on Weibo [China's version of Twitter] people from Chongqing's political circles who claim China's biggest danger in future is populism. I wrote a commentary on this: what lies before our eyes is crony capitalism (quangui zibenzhuyi), what we now need to consider is how to solve this problem. Populism is a reaction to crony capitalism, there is first crony capitalism before there is populism. Now many intellectuals follow the wave to oppose populism, they equate the 'Chongqing model' to populism. I feel there should not be such a definition: resolving problems associated with people's livelihoods is separate from populism.
The second problematic assumption is associated with the approach to resolving problems associated with people's livelihoods, namely the involvement of credit markets in the redistributive process in Chongqing. At one level, this concern about potential budgetary delinquency is warranted: many local governments in China have indeed encountered difficulties repaying debt to (nominally) private creditors. It could indeed be argued that lax regulation and monitoring of lending practices to government-linked institutions is an ingredient that feeds crony capitalism. This situation is well summed up by Larry Lang, a prominent Hong Kong-based analyst of Chinese economic development: Honestly speaking, I am really worried about the local governmental debts in China. In 2009, local governments could still borrow from new sources to repay old creditors; by the end of 2012, what they did was blatantly request extensions of repayment deadlines. And does everyone know that between 2012 and 2014 about 35 per cent of the financial loans will mature? I do not dare to imagine what measures our local governments and banking system will adopt to address wave after wave of maturing debts. (Lang, 19 December 2013, n.p

.; author's translation)
It should be clear, however, that the cause for worry is not about whether state agencies should borrow from credit marketsit is about the ability to repay. In this regard, Mao Yushi's point that fiscal redistribution should not involve debt-financing becomes paradoxical: in a capitalistic system, wealth creation is driven by debt. Mao Yushi ostensibly assumes that only private firmsrather than state-owned enterprises and/or state agenciesshould undertake debt because of their presupposed 'efficiency' at wealth creation, while the redistributive process (which, in China, includes financing state-owned enterprises) should not imbricate wealth creation processes (which theoretically means any activity that qualifies for debt-financing). The public scholar Qiu Feng offers a different interpretation of the debt-financing issue: Of course, many people criticize these explorations in Chongqing, they claim that the Chongqing government has undertaken a lot of debt from banks, that its finances are already bankrupt. To be honest, this kind of argument is strange because almost all local governments are shouldering heavy debts, most local governments debt-finance their 'projects for face-creation' (mianzi gongcheng) or 'projects for political results' (zhengji gongcheng). To just criticize Chongqing based on this point seems unreasonable. What can be investigated is how much has been done [in Chongqing] to improve people's lives. (In China Review, 2013) In an interesting parallel with Polanyi's (1944Polanyi's ( /2001) observation that 'individual motives' determine the nature of redistribution, Qiu Feng calls attention to the objectives of redistributive policies in Chongqing. The redistributive process, for Qiu, cannot be assumed to be negative ab initio; it is important to evaluate whether redistributive policies can enhance socioeconomic development. This paper concurs with Qiu's contention. As section 4.1. has shown, the housing project is entwined with the hukou conversion and industrialization drives. If the Chongqing government had chosen not to 'invest'the term Wu Jinglian uses to describe fiscal redistributionin the expansion of housing stock (rental or ownership-based), the investment risk would first be borne by real estate corporations, before being ultimately transposed onto individual buyers through a quasi-cornering process (current low-income urban residents and new migrants need somewhere to stay after all, which translates into definite demand for housing). Yet the Chongqing policy-makers determined that the lower-income strata of Chongqing's urban migrants would find privately supplied apartments unaffordable (see section 4.1.). This meant the lower-income strata could not generate effective demand for privately supplied housing unless high-risk credit provisions were given.
Viewed in relation to this alternative, the Chongqing government's involvement as a housing stock supplier is a means to reduce social risks of housing debt defaults by lower-income earners à la the US sub-prime mortgage crisis of 2007-8. Specifically, it illuminates the negative relationship between excessive housing debt and the suppression of effective consumer demand. As it has become clear in many cities within China and even across East Asia, when housing supply is controlled by private property groups (usually an oligopoly), many individuals would take upand be locked in byhousing debts that extend over very long terms (30-35-year repayment periods are commonplace). Whether individualsespecially new rural migrantsin Chongqing are able to satisfy their loan obligations over two to three decades is moot per se (the US national sub-prime housing market crash is a case in point); the more crucial question, rather, is the impact of long-term property debt servicing on economic expansion: when individuals have to devote significant portions of their disposable income to repay housing loans, their ability to purchase consumer goods naturally decreases.
Given the inverse correlation between high housing debt and effective consumer demand, the public rental housing project in Chongqing offers a potential economic 'return', to use Wu's parlance. It frees up disposable income, which raises the propensity for direct consumption and/or an increase in savings (and which then fuels new rounds of investments). This thus fulfills a key developmental objectivethe expansion of domestic demandof China's twelfth 5-Year Plan (2011-2015. The 'counter-movement' internal in the Chongqing public rental housing project, assessed against this broader politicoeconomic context, transposes into a necessary supply-side 'investment'. To address the critiques of these 'investments' directly, it would be more pertinent to assess the feasibility of the repayment channels. There were also differences on this point. Writing for the Financial Times ( However, Liu's and Wu's assumptions and empirical calculations were called into question when assessed against the official accounts of the Chongqing budget and the planned repayment channels of the public rental housing financial package. To begin, the notion of an international deficit warning level applies only to national economies (and even so, the 3 per cent limit is a relative rather than an absolute indicator). The causality of this cross-scalar relation was overlooked: Chongqing is administratively a subnational economy, which means it has a redistributive relation with what Polanyi (1977, p. 37) calls an 'established center'i.e. the Chinese central governmentthat governs a larger politico-economic jurisdiction (see section 2). The fiscal revenue figures for Chongqing would therefore need to account for the Chinese central government's financial redistribution to Chongqing. Liu's and Wu's figures did not include this financing component; in addition, Wu did not consider extra-budgetary revenue figures, a glaring omission considering the information is publicly available. Because no standard rule states that fixed asset investments need to be solely financed through the redistribution of taxpayers' monies, the issue concerning state-driven projects that involve credit is whether the projected repayment channels are feasible (more on this shortly). As such, while fixed capital investments in Chongqing have indeed soared over the past five years (Figure 1), whether they offer concrete financial returnsand in turn vindicate the state's redistributive 'investments'is contingent on the ability of these investments to drive and benefit from the accompanying series of industrialization projects.
The inaccuracy of Liu's and Wu's interpretations is further underscored by new information on Chongqing's budgetary health and debt repayment channels (for detailed summary see Table 3). According to comprehensive statistics provided by an anonymous spokesperson from the Chongqing Finance Bureau, the city's fiscal standing remains stable: Over the past ten years in our city, deficit has yet to appear in budgetary composition at the beginning of the year and the closing of accounts at year end … There are three sources of fiscal revenue for local governments: apart from direct revenue, there are carry-over funds from the previous year and transfer payments from the central government. To be sure, statistics officially released by Chinese state agencies are not inherently more accurate or reliable (cf. Wang, 2010). What these figures offer is a benchmark from which assessments of subnational governments' budgetary discipline could be made, and it is this benchmark that casts a shadow on Wu's and Liu's assertions. More detailed assessments of potential budget delinquency could be made after the Chongqing government took the extra stepa rare one in China's contextof providing information on the funding and repayment streams for the rental housing construction (Table 3). Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan explains: Through the trust of and guarantees from the government, we raised 80 billion yuan from banks, insurance companies, social protection funds and other social financing units. Of this 80 billion yuan loan we have used 50 billion yuan in the last two years [2010][2011], in addition to the assigned land [valued at 30 billion yuan] and government-allocated funds. The central government already allocated 9 billion yuan, the local government allocated 10 billion yuan. This year [2012] the central government will allocate more than 10 billion yuan, which totals around 30 billion. (Interview with www.news.com.cn, 8 March 2012;author's translation)  Targeted residents: . Homeless families or families whose current living space is less than 13 m 2 per person; and . Individuals who are employed within the Chongqing core urban area and other stipulated urban zones; and . Individuals with a monthly salary not above 2,000 yuan; or a 2-person family unit with a combined income not above 3,000 yuan; or a bigger-than-2 person family unit with an average income not above 1,500 yuan . Rental rates established at around 60% of market prices (2010 levels) . Quota: 50% for peasant workers, 15% for new university graduates and 35% for existing urban residents with housing difficulties . Key qualifier: Individuals who meet the above conditions do not need to hold Chongqing hukou status Rental and ownership restrictions: . Tenants are allowed to purchase their rental units from the state at just above cost price after residing for 5 years . Tenants opting not to buy can continue to rent so long as they meet the prevailing requirements Operating costs: . Of particular significance in the repayment plan is the function of land as at once a 'fictitious commodity' and a social good. As section 2 has explained, redistribution can scale back the 'freedom' in markets. In the instance of housing provision for the lower-income populace, land valued at 30 billion yuan was stripped of its 'fictitious' façade (i.e. exchange value = zero yuan). This redistributive process illustrates one crucial form of institutional continuity: the ability to determine what land is to be 'fictionalized' as a commodity exists because the CPC never relinquished the Mao-era institution of land nationalization. As such, it is able to prioritize use value over exchange value in cases it deems to be more socially effective. Whether this prioritization is less economically 'efficient' is a non-issue because, to follow Mao Yushi's afore-mentioned acknowledgement, market mechanisms inherently generate and are unable to overcome social disparities (cf. Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, 4 June 2012). Because the fiscal capacity of the Chongqing government would be smaller than those of the market actors combined, plans must be in place to enable the government to demonstrate its ability to recover the costs 'invested' in the social facilities. Otherwise its policies would be financially irresponsible. That Huang acknowledged the importance of bank credit as a financing channel is unsurprising; as Qiu Feng has emphasized, debt-financing is commonly used by many local governments across China. Of theoretical significance is Huang's detailed delineation of how the 'debt can be balanced out'. Specifically, the entwinement of the 'balancing' process with market mechanisms is telling. As Table 3 shows, the rental rates are not fully subsidized by the state; rather the costs can only be recovered because part of the available real estate would be rented or sold at market-determined prices. The redistributive process of 'defictionalizing' the value of land is thereby contingent on the ability to perpetuate its 'fictional' characteristic as a commodity. If anything, this illustrates a tension that is intrinsic to the CPC's official pursuit of a 'socialist market economy'.
Through the analysis of the funding rationale, it is clear that the state-driven social counter-movement in Chongqing is not about the 'state versus the market' or 'politics versus economics'. It is about the interaction between the state apparatus and market mechanisms; it is about politics determining economics through spatial reconfiguration in order to enhance social development. For these reasons, the seemingly high-cost investments to effect spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing cannot be taken as antithetical to deepening marketizationor, more precisely, to deepening state-led marketization. The very raison d'être of spatial egalitarianism is to facilitate the socio-spatial absorption of peasant migrant workers that would in turn support the incoming industries (a substantial number of which are state-invested). Because entwinements with market mechanisms have been instituted for the regulation of social life, what will concretely define 'development' in China will inevitably involve market exchange. As the repayment plan for the Chongqing reforms indicates, a social counter-movement in China may never be external to markets; its ostensibly non-market objective, expressed paradoxically in market-like ways in Chongqing, could be at once for markets.

Conclusion
For peasant workers who enter a city today, on what basis should their children feel, 20 years later, that they are still rural residents rather than the local residents of that city? If historical evolution cannot find a connection point here, then our generation would be lamentable; it would be one with no foresight or sense of justice. (Chongqing mayor Huang Qifan, interview with Chongqing Wanbao, 25 August 2010a; author's translation) The urban-rural dual structure is the primary obstacle restraining the integration of urban-rural development. (Communiqué of the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Congress of the CPC, Xinhua, 12 November 2013) Two decades ago, the proclamation 'Development is the absolute principle' (fazhan shi yingdaoli) by China's then leader Deng Xiaoping arguably triggered GDP worship across the country. In the subsequent decade, 'development' was narrowly interpreted as the inexorable quest to maximize surplus value capture through the market exchange of commodities. The inevitable consequence was pronounced socio-spatial inequality. It was this national context of economic-geographical unevenness and rising social angst that led Shaoguang Wang (2002, n.p.) to proclaim 'social equity is also the absolute principle'. After Hu Jintao became China's leader in 2003 and launched the ideology 'Scientific Perspective on Development', the quest to reconcile highspeed economic expansion with more equitable redistribution gained momentum. As Hu would later add, 'development is the absolute principle, [but] stability is the absolute task; without stability, nothing can be done, whatever we have achieved will also be lost' (www.chinanews.com, 1 July 2011; author's translation). In this regard, Hu's '314' injunction for experimental reforms in the Chongqing city-region is evidently a spatial expression of a shift in the CPC's developmental ideology ( Table 1). The 'absolute' task of producing social stability in China, as the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing indicate, has to be predicated on the impeachment of instituted uneven development.
This paper has presented a substantivist analysis of two interrelated socioeconomic reforms to actualize spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing. These reforms are, namely, the large-scale public rental housing provision and the equally large-scale conversion of peasant migrants' hukous. Expanding on Polanyi's (1957) view of the economy as 'instituted' by redistribution, reciprocity and market exchange, the discussion has explored how these three modes of integration intersect in Chongqing to produce the 'stability' necessary for the national-scale expansion of (capitalistic) industrialization. This intersection in turn underscores the fluid and trans-local nature of social embeddedness in China: it is constituted by centrally instituted redistributive policies and interregional reciprocity that were set in motion by earlier layers of instituted uneven development (see sections 3 and 4). By extension, it disrupts the prevailing assumption in Polanyi-inspired studies that unproblematically takes the national scale as the primary scale of socio-economic integration.
That location plays an active role in determining socio-economic change reinforces and refines the Polanyian conceptualization of the 'double movement'. For Polanyi, the 'double movement' represents an opposition between market mechanisms and the social formations within which these mechanisms are situated (see section 2). This 'double movement' is intrinsically a paradox because it is through oppositional forces that a socio-economic formation evolves in a forward motion. Through generating strong debates and attention nationwide, the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing brought attention to issues stemming from the CPC's own marketization drive on the back of institutionalized uneven development. Yet the decision to launch the 'countermovement' in a geographically targeted location indicates how the opposition internal to the 'double movement' is place-specific: it simultaneously pushes against and is hemmed in by the broader state spatiality in which it is located.
This phenomenon in turn raises a searching question that demands elaborate research on its own: why did the CPC persist with the 'dual structure' to the point of having to generate its own (spatial) contradiction? The fact that no operational budget has been drawn up to overcome this Maoera legacy at the national scaleeven after the official acknowledgement of its encumbrance at the 3rd Plenum of the 18th Congress in November 2013is telling: institutionalized spatial unevenness remains of constitutive value for the regulation of Chinese economy and society (cf. Lim, 2014). This value arguably generated strong opposition to the quest for spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing. Ironically, however, the strong opposition reflects how vested interests have come to dominate economic development in China. More importantly, it illustrates the intrinsic connection of these interests to national socio-economic policies instituted as far back as 1958. The reason why intense opposition emerged almost right from the beginning of the reforms in Chongqing is symptomatic of a fear that the CPC was genuinely prepared to remove the 'primary obstacle' to urban-rural integration. Yet the emergence of this fear reflects the emancipatory potential internal to the pursuit of spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing. Its existence suggests that fresh developmental undercurrents are forming; that the future evolution of Chinese economy and society could have a new spatial basis.
In view of this potential, the socio-economic reforms in Chongqing presented in this paper contradict conventional portrayals of 'Maoist' resurgence in the municipality. Contrary to Mao's favoured dialectical approach of launching an 'affirmative' event through the 'negation' of another separate event, the Chongqing government has demonstrated that, with effective redistribution, 'affirmation' (economic growth through marketization) need not be based on 'negation' (uneven spatial development). If anything, the social 'counter-movement' instituted in and through Chongqing is a targeted form of anti-Maoism cloaked in the spirited melodies of the municipal government's favourite 'Red Songs'. Supported by the rapidly industrializing Liangjiang New Area, the overarching objective of the Chongqing socioeconomic reforms is clearly to emplace spatial egalitarianism as the corollary of the quest for a 'socialist market economy'.
The increasing importance of spatial justice on the marketization agenda indicates historical evolution in China is close to coming full circle. Between 1950 and 1952, the CPC centralized and facilitated the egalitarian redistribution of a 'fictitious commodity'landfor poor peasants across the newly established nation-state. Through the Land Reform Act known colloquially to have 'altered the heavens and changed the earth' (gaitian huandi), the entire populace experienced common affluence for the first time in the history of 'new China'. Integrating the national economy on this egalitarian basis, the land reforms arguably constituted the first mega-event launched by the CPC. As the contemporary Xi Jinping leadership contemplates unleashing a new wave of economic growth through nationwide urbanization, the quest for spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing suggests that, if the proposed urbanization process unfolds on the basis of social equity, the newest and most beautiful mega-event could yet already be in the making.
to Trevor Barnes, Jamie Peck, three anonymous referees and managing editor Fran Tonkiss for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper. The warmth and help from friends and respondents in China have made the research experience especially enjoyable and fruitful. Amidst a path composed of much challenge, the unbending support of my wife, Stephanie Lim, has doubled my strength and kept me believingthank you.

Notes
1 Whilst officially designated a city, the term 'city-region' is used to describe Chongqing for two reasons. First, it occupies a huge land mass of 82,400 km 2 , more than double the size of Taiwan; second, a significant portion of this land mass is still farmland and, until July 2012, less than half of the official 29 million population are registered as 'urban' residents. 2 A study conducted by the Chinese Household Finance Survey Center (CHFSC) of Chengdu's Southwestern University of Finance and Economics presented China's Gini coefficient for 2010 at 0.61. Measured in relation to World Bank figures, this figure was substantially above the average of 0.44 for all countries (Caixin Online, 2012). Earlier, Wang's (2010) research illustrated how trillions of yuan were missing from official statistics; two-thirds of these missing funds belonged to 10 per cent of the population. Presuming Wang's study is accurate and that the CHFSC relied on official statistics, the Gini coefficient for China could measure higher than the reported 0.61. 3 In The great transformation, Polanyi (1944Polanyi ( /2001) elaborated on the importance of another mode of integration in pre-capitalist societies known as householding. Defined as 'production for one's own use', householding has seemingly taken a back seat in capitalist(ic) societies. As such, this mode received less focus in Polanyi's 1957 work 'The economy as instituted process'. While the Chinese government defines the Chinese political economy as technically 'socialist' and householding in fact is an instituted economic feature under the Household Responsibility System (jiating lianchan zerenzhi), the intention of householding since Mao-era China has never been about subsistence: it was and remains a function of what is broadly known as 'state capitalism'. For this reason, this paper will only examine the roles of redistribution, reciprocity and market exchange as the modes of economic integration in Chongqing and, by extension, China. 4 The empirical materials presented in this paper consist largely of narratives drawn from policy documents, news articles and academic essays published in Mandarin. These narratives, which reflect the views of major causal actors who were not accessible for interviews, are significant for the analysis employed in this paper. Complementary materials are drawn from the author's personal observations through participation in academic seminars; discussions and interviews with local government officials and scholars; and visits to field sites in Chongqing. The overarching objective of the empirical analysis is not to 'speak for' the socio-economic configuration of a field site 'from a distance'; it is to bring existing theorynamely, the Polanyian frameworkinto contact with the discourses and statistics emerging from the field site. There is no apriori privileging of primary or secondary data; all accessible data that could potentially contribute to theoretical reconstruction was evaluated. economic groups, all with separate profit-seeking interests, it is often said that reforms in China have to negotiate a labyrinth of 'vested interest groups' (liyi jituan). 16 Comparatively, National Bureau of Statistics of China data put public rental housing at an estimated 7 per cent of the national urban housing stock in 2007 (see Man, 2011). Assessed vis-à-vis growing urbanization and housing price inflation, it is clear that following nationwide housing reforms, there has been a marked shift towards the private provision of residential housing. 17 While the post-2007 per capita gross income in Chongqing has risen significantly, the disposable income of rural residents remained relatively low at ∼5,278 yuan per capita in 2010. Per capita disposable income for residents with urban hukou was ∼17,532 yuan (Chongqing Shangbao, 28 January 2011). Comparatively, per capita disposable income for Shanghai's urban residents was 31,838 yuan in 2010, while rural residents earned 13,746 yuan per capita (www.eastday.com, 25 January 2011).