Green Space Production as a State Project in Urban China

ABSTRACT This study investigates the production of urban spaces shaped by political intentions that transcend capitalist imperatives. We examine the politics of developing Chengdu's greenway project by operationalising state entrepreneurialism—a perspective of territorial logic and capitalist logic in urban governance—through strategic embeddedness and tactical mobilisation. Strategic embeddedness refers to the institutional integration of the market into the state apparatus to achieve the state's strategic goals, while tactical mobilisation refers to the constrained manoeuvres employed by state agencies to mobilise external interests. In Chengdu, state actions strategically embedded market finance into the ecological project of political significance through large‐scale state–capital coordination and tactically mobilised a pro‐growth coalition for financialised housing development. The state politics differ markedly from the new urban politics that mainly serve global mobile capital. In this context, capitalist logic becomes secondary to the contextualised territorial logic underpinning China's ecological agendas. This study contributes to the literature on entrepreneurial cities and state‐led ecological spaces by foregrounding the intentional dimension of statecraft and advancing state entrepreneurialism as a conceptual and analytical framework.