Yi Feng, Fulong Wu
This paper revisits the recent transformation of China’s urban governance through the lens of state entrepreneurialism. Its earlier model was characterized by the commodification of housing, export-oriented industrialization, and land-driven urban expansion. By examining new practices across cities and regions, we find that the model has entered a new stage of ‘strategic statization’. As a framework, state entrepreneurialism includes state mandates and governance techniques. Now, state mandates have become more ‘strategic’, shifting from a local growth mentality to one focused on political objectives and regime stability in a contested geopolitical environment. Governance techniques evolve towards ‘statization’ – a trend that fosters non-entrepreneurial subjects and adopts managerial forms of statecraft. Strategic statization means that the state dominates the definition of priorities and orchestrates diverse stakeholders to achieve them. As a historical material understanding of the political economy, state entrepreneurialism remains a powerful framework that explains the ‘origin’ of earlier neoliberal-like economic reforms in response to globalization and the current trend towards statization in the new polycrisis.