Revisiting urban governance in China: The manifestation of entrepreneurial neo-managerialism in shantytown redevelopment in Luzhou

Abstract

Recently, China’s central government initiated a series of social policies to alleviate social disparities, providing opportunities to revisit state entrepreneurialism, which is known to have long prevailed in China’s urban governance since the economic reform. By probing into a case of shantytown redevelopment in Luzhou, Sichuan Province, we assert the importance of considering state entrepreneurialism in relation to the state’s managerial pursuit. That is, an actually existing mode of urban governance may be characterised by the shifting dynamics between a managerial and entrepreneurial endeavour of the local state. Viewed this way, we argue for the manifestation of what we conceptualise as entrepreneurial neo-managerialism through the analysis of the shantytown redevelopment at the local scale. In the context of a shrinking discretional space under the power recentralisation of the central state that strives to avoid its legitimacy crisis, the local state, while still under the influence of its entrepreneurial logic of land-based accumulation, enhances its managerial role to respond to the top-down demands of social redistribution from the central state, devising a sophisticated redistributive mechanism of resource allocation. Through these findings, we hope to contribute not only to the literature on China’s state entrepreneurialism but also to the broader urban governance literature by resurrecting the importance of the managerial role of the state.