Encore for Centrally-orchestrated Statism: Unpacking China’s Central-local Relation through the Territory Spatial Planning Regime

Abstract

Scholarships within this decade highlighted the resurgence of centralism – to reinforce the central navigation and to manipulate the local exercise – as challenges towards assertations of “hollowing-out-of-nation-state”. In China, centralism was strategically employed as centrally-orchestrated statism, an encore from the Maoist regime, to secure political loyalty, maintain nation-state’s integrity, and regulate local jurisdictions effectively.

Territory spatial planning (TSP) was promulgated as a novel toolkit to assert the dominance of national apparatuses to oversee China’s local development from above. TSP consolidates national control over spatial resources through a hierarchical planning system, which aligns with levels of local administrations. Despite TSP curtailing discretion for localities, various local experiments leverage national strategies to extend the “planning-for-growth” approaches amidst top-down control. This raises two pertinent questions: (1) Has the national statism achieved effective governance in a top-down manner? (2) How do centrally imposed targets and local development agendas interact in everyday planning practice?

This article substantiates the centrally-orchestrated statism by Comprehensive Watershed Governance (CWG), a branch programme of TSP in Hubei province. In 2022, the Hubei provinciality implemented CWG to pledge loyalty to and solicit grants from the national government. CWG innovatively exploits national initiatives of Joint Protection of Yangtze River to polycentralise urban system and manoeuvred distribution of industries, yet concrete discretions for socioeconomic affairs were retained by municipalities. Overall, this article contrasts current recentralisation with China’s decentralised local governance decades ago. It interrogates the aftermaths of deliberate central orchestration and practical local exercise within a Chinese context.