China's Local Entrepreneurial State and New Urban Spaces

Downtown Redevelopment in Ningbo

Han Zhang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137596055
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book, the author seeks to understand China's urban redevelopment from the theoretical perspective of the local entrepreneurial state. China's rapid socio-economic transformations since 1978 have been in large part attributed to China's state transformations. The author closely investigates Ningbo's two downtown redevelopment projects by conducting ethnographic fieldwork and documentary research. It is found that the local entrepreneurial state deploys local state enterprises to undertake strategic urban redevelopment projects, organizes high-profile city/district marketing campaigns in entrepreneurial manners, and develops corporatist intermediations with local business owners for collaborative urban governance. Yet the local entrepreneurial state is multi-layered, with the municipal and district authorities sometimes disagreeing, conflicting, and bargaining with each other. Meanwhile, the relationship between spaces and their users, as well as that between various space users, constantly changes. All these players and their interactions constitute "spatial politics", or the story of conflicts, struggles, negotiations, and collaborations in urban governance. This work, based on six months of fieldwork, will appeal to scholars in the social sciences and experts in Asian Studies.

© The Author(s) 2016

Han ZhangChina’s Local Entrepreneurial State and New Urban SpacesNew Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Society10.1057/978-1-137-59605-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Han Zhang¹

(1)

University of International Business & Economics, Beijing, China

End Abstract

1 A Glimpse of Today’s Laowaitan in Ningbo

There are three rivers passing through the city of Ningbo: the Yuyao River (Yuyao jian g), the Fenghua River (Fenghua jiang), and the Yong River (Yong jiang). The place where the three rivers converge is called the Sanjiangkou (the confluence of three rivers). The traditional downtown of Ningbo is located on the south bank of the Sanjiangkou, where the Ningbo Prefecture (Ningbo fu) used to exist before the Republican era, while the north bank used to be called the Jiangbei’an, which literally translates to “the north bank.”

On the north bank, on the waterfront along the Yong River is a place with a rather romantic name: Laowaitan or “the old bund.” This forms a narrow south-north corridor between the Yong River and People’s Road (renmin lu) and stretches from the New Bridge (xin jiang qiao) to the Ningbo Museum of Art (Ningbo meishuguan) for approximately a kilometer; in width it is often as narrow as 60 meters.

Getting to Laowaitan is not difficult. If you cross the New Bridge from the south bank of the Sanjiangkou, you will first see a spectacular Catholic cathedral in Gothic style. Around the cathedral stand a few restaurants. The history of all these buildings dates back to modern times. If you continue walking north of the cathedral, after passing through the bridge approach of the Yong River Bridge (Yong jiang daqiao) from underneath, you will see several commercial blocks in trendy designs and a fashionable or even petty-bourgeois (xiaozi) atmosphere. Here, on an arch heading south lies the entrance to the Laowaitan.

Middle Road (zhong malu) is a street for pedestrians inside the Laowaitan, and on either side of it are stylish pubs and restaurants serving cuisines from different parts of the world: Z-Rocks Pub (tianxi jiuba) which is famous for its rock music, Z-Asian Kitchen (Waitan 48 hao) offering local Ningbo cuisine, the Shamrock Irish Pub (sanyecao Aierlan jiuba) serving Irish and British food and drink, the Banana Leaf Curry House (jiaoye gali wu) offering South Asian and Southeast Asian cuisine, to name a few. One block to the east of Middle Road lies Outer Road (wai malu), which stretches out along the bank of the Yong River. The pubs on this road put out chairs and tables along the riverside platform, where you can enjoy the breeze blowing in from the Yong River while sipping a glass of beer.

The Laowaitan is usually very quiet, with few visitors in the daytime on weekdays. Visitors appear from time to time and look around, taking pictures of the beautiful architecture. Newlyweds accompanied by wedding photographers can also be found here, using the Laowaitan as a backdrop for photographs.

The best time to visit the Laowaitan is dusk, especially on Saturdays; it is famous throughout Ningbo for its nightlife. After 6:00 pm, the Laowaitan begins to wake up, Middle Road and Outer Road start to bustle, the number of pedestrians and cars increases, restaurants begin to usher in customers, and pubs open their doors for business until midnight. Some visitors may be newcomers, looking around curiously, unsure which restaurant or pub to go to. Others are obviously regulars, as they chat with the owners of pubs with a glass of beer in hand. Foreigners are also part of the crowd: South Indians like to go to the Banana Leaf Curry House, while Caucasians enjoy the Italian cuisine at Da Bossi Restaurant (Yidali zizai canting). On the Yong River bank, some people enjoy beer along the waterfront, while others just stroll on the platform or lean against its handrail, enjoying the breeze and the view of both sides of the Yong River.

On Saturday evenings, from 7:00 to 8:30 pm, there are live performances at the Laowaitan, normally in the park in front of the cathedral. This is part of a promotional campaign called “On Saturday, let’s meet at the Laowaitan” (xingqi liu, xiangyue Laowaitan). The performances are open to everyone and a lot of people come to have a look, including many passersby traveling via the New Bridge.

After 10:00 pm, when most restaurants begin to close, the pubs hit peak hours; Z-Rocks Pub and the Shamrock Irish Pub are usually full of customers from different parts of the world, who enjoy beer, live soccer telecast, billiards, and perhaps performances by Filipino artists. Peak hours continue until around 2:00 am. After that, people who choose to linger can go to Le Cargo Bar (le ka ba), two blocks north of the Shamrock and famous for being open all night. People can dance and drink there until dawn.

Further north is the Ningbo City Exhibition Hall (Ningbo chengshi zhanlanguan) built in Soviet style. The urban history of Ningbo is displayed here, as well as the latest urban planning schemes. The Leisure Boating Club (laiyue youting julebu), a boating club from Australia, also has an office inside the Ningbo City Exhibition Hall; it has its dock on the Yong River. Next to the Ningbo City Exhibition Hall stand two upscale apartment buildings, City Apartment (chengshi gongyu) to the west and No. 5 Mansion (5 hao gongguan) to the south.

Further north of the Ningbo City Exhibition Hall is the Ningbo Museum of Art, which used to be the Ningbo Ferry Terminal (Ningbo gang keyunzhan). A variety of artwork—paintings, calligraphy, ceramics, photography, and sculpture—are on show here. Zhenbaofang, a floating restaurant established on a retired ferry boat, is linked to the Yong River bank via several pontoons along the waterfront owned by the Ningbo Museum of Art (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

Night view of Middle Road in the Laowaitan (photographed by the author in August 2010)

2 The Local Entrepreneurial State and Urban Redevelopment in China

2.1 Research Questions

Laowaitan is a recent development. An ambitious urban redevelopment project was launched in 2002, which has revolutionarily transformed this once-dilapidated historic district into a consumption- and culture-oriented scenic spot. Urban redevelopment has been widely implemented in China at eye-catching speed and scale, making Chinese cities a major arena in the world for urban transformation and urban studies. From the spatial perspective, an important consequence of substantial urban redevelopment is the proliferation of a variety of new urban spaces in Chinese cities. These spaces can be categorized into three major types: (a) new industrial spaces (such as creative industry parks), (b) new consumption spaces (such as shopping malls and pedestrian business streets), and (c) new residential spaces (such as gated communities). Seen from an institutional perspective, these new urban spaces are an articulation of China’s profound socioeconomic transformation. They have significantly changed the landscape of previously socialist Chinese cities and have also been significantly conditioning China’s further urban transformation. The Laowaitan project in Ningbo is exactly this kind of urban redevelopment project that has fundamentally changed land use patterns, forms of the built environment, and the people who use the space in this area.

The particular case I will probe in this book is Ningbo’s downtown redevelopment undertaken by the Ningbo Urban Construction Investment Holding Co., Ltd. (Ningbo chengjian touzi konggu youxian gongsi, NBUCI), a local state-owned enterprise specifically committed to strategic urban development projects designated by the Ningbo Municipal Government. Two representative projects, the Tianyi Square (tianyi guangchang) redevelopment project and the Laowaitan redevelopment project, will be investigated in detail. The time span of this book is over the 12 years of 2000–2011, from the time the Tianyi Square project was launched to the time the Laowaitan was designated China’s “National 4A Tourist Area” (guojia 4A ji lüyou fengjingqu).

While more chapters are devoted to the study of the Laowaitan project, it should be noted that the NBUCI was originally established for the Tianyi Square project. The very nature of the redevelopment regime of the Laowaitan, especially in terms of its land acquisition and financing methods, was first experimented in the Tianyi Square project. The Tianyi Square project had satisfactory socioeconomic outcomes, which then gave the Ningbo authority and the NBUCI the confidence and experience to undertake the more challenging and complicated project of the Laowaitan.

In the Ningbo case, the local state and local business owners establish local urban redevelopment and governance regimes according to the requirements of their locality. This provides an opportunity to probe the diversity of place-specific urban redevelopment and governance regimes and the players involved, the specific ways in which the local state has been transforming and adapting to the changing local and translocal circumstances, and the complex interplay between the local state and the local private sector. In particular, the highly salient entrepreneurial nature of the local state is the key factor setting all those urban transformations in motion.

It has been repeatedly reaffirmed that urban redevelopment and urban governance in China are determined or conditioned by a variety of factors, such as different levels of state power and corresponding policies, and regional variations like geographical location, resource endowment, local culture, and talent structure. For social scientists, the interesting topics for discussion are the social, economic, and political processes and the organizations that make those urban redevelopment projects come into being, and facilitate, regulate, and manage the complex transformations that are derived from those projects. At the same time, undoubtedly, since urban redevelopment projects normally affect various groups of people and various forms of urban spaces, there must be disagreements, conflicts, struggles, and negotiations among them as integral parts of urban redevelopment. It is therefore important to also study the long-term governance mechanisms of those new urban spaces produced by those urban redevelopment projects.

It is quite apparent that the Chinese state at the central as well as at various local levels plays the leading role in steering China’s transformation. In the context of significant fiscal and administrative decentralization, it is particularly meaningful to look into local state behaviors, as can be observed in urban governance. At the same time, the resources, powers, and processes outside the immediate scope of the state, and their relations with the state, namely, state-society relations, may help better understand the nature of the Chinese state from a relational perspective. In addition, the high level of local variations of the mode of state-society interactions may provide a variety of angles to look into the Chinese state in transformation.

As stated by Li, ¹ given the vastness of China’s continental size, ordinary Chinese people obtain their firsthand experiences of the Chinese state primarily by interacting with the local state, and the Chinese state is (re)created through policy practices primarily at various local levels. There are different incentives for different levels of government to perform their duties, which makes disaggregating the state into its component segments and levels a desirable research approach. ² As stated by Wu, ³ therefore, the understanding of China’s urban governance is largely “contextualized knowledge” contingent upon local particularities and historical circumstances. The search for contextualized knowledge of China’s state transformation also entails engaged field research and in-depth case study.

In this case study of Ningbo’s downtown redevelopment over the period of 2000–2011, two specific issues are to be addressed: (a) the entrepreneurial nature of China’s urban local state in urban redevelopment and urban governance, as demonstrated in both the use of local state enterprises of land and property development to launch strategic redevelopment projects, and the high-profile involvement of local state agencies in the promotion of such projects in highly entrepreneurial manners; (b) the extension and creation of corporatist-style organizations for interest intermediation and policy concertation between the local state and local business owners in new urban spaces under the sponsorship of the local state, in the hope of improving urban governance by reconciling state-business relations and coordinating their efforts in local governance initiatives.

While local state-led urban redevelopment and gove...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The “City Operator” and the Tianyi Square Redevelopment Project
• 3. Ningbo’s Historic North Bank
• 4. The Redevelopment of the Laowaitan
• 5. The New Urban Spaces of the Laowaitan
• 6. The Flawed Governance of the Laowaitan and the Coping Strategies
• 7. Conclusion and Discussion
• Backmatter