The Multi-scalar State with Globalizing Visions: Recruiting “High-end Talent” for Urban Development in China

• In Event: 2180 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 01. Cities

Abstract

A variety of recent urban spectacles highlight the efforts of Chinese cities to present themselves as not only welcoming and supportive of entrepreneurship and innovation, but also simultaneously Chinese and globally oriented, and annual international conventions for Foreign-Educated Talent provide such space to circulate this projection. To further dissect these practices by an increasingly self-enterprising urban government, this paper seeks to understand how Chinese cities, in the hope of becoming global, recruit foreign-trained Chinese back for establishing startups and facilitating entrepreneurism. Informed by the literature on urban governance, urban policy mobilities, and urban branding, this paper is based on semi-structured interviews conducted in China and secondary analysis of government documents. I find that the local government increasingly engages in a number of neoliberal practices: 1) urban branding through inter-referencing other cities and quantifying and technicalizing policy process and outcomes; and 2) legitimizing and reproducing the spatial and economic inequalities (among districts). Through these practices, the local Chinese state, as a result of rescaling state power, was selective in adopting neoliberal techniques to facilitate urban growth, and the sovereign power of the national state remains the central force. More broadly, by analyzing the dynamics and politics intrinsic to multi-scalar urban governance, this paper demonstrates the complexity of the relationships between different levels of the Chinese state that relies increasingly on neoliberal practices for development, as well as showcases how intense urban competition reproduces development disparity at different levels.

Author

• Yingchan Zhang, Northeastern University