“Picking winners in space,” the subtitle of Kyle Jaros's introductory chapter in China's Urban Champions, conveys his central claim that provincial governments select some cities over others for ambitious urban development plans that serve as the anchor for provincial growth strategies. Just as developmental states of old were said to have singled out individual firms and sectors as “national champions,” China's provincial governments in the 21st century have deployed what Jaros terms “spatial development strategies,” by steering investment flows toward preferred urban clusters at the expense of other cities and sectors within the same province. State-led urbanization in China has become a popular topic of inquiry over the past decade, with studies on land requisition, governance, migration, infrastructure and various dimensions of inequalities. Jaros adds to this literature by identifying provincial governments, rather than city-level officials, as key actors in China's urbanization.
The type of urban development strategy that provincial leaders choose is highly consequential. “Metropolitan-oriented development models,” in which a single city (usually the provincial capital) and its smaller satellite cities benefit from favourable investment policies, produce showcase infrastructure and industries, but also a spike in intra-provincial inequalities, uneven development, unsupportable flows of migrant labour, and even social unrest. By contrast, a dispersed development strategy – in which investment resources are spread across the province through numerous cities and largely rural counties – brings about more stable and equity-enhancing growth patterns. A mixed development strategy, combining more restrained metropolitan growth with some degree of dispersed development, represents a third outcome. As Jaros shows, these vary both across provinces and within provinces over time. He argues that the structure of inter-governmental interactions better explains this variation than do accounts that attribute differences in development policy choices to the preferences or worldviews of provincial leaders or to the dictates of the central government.
At the central level, the Chinese Communist Party leadership has traditionally pushed for dispersed growth strategies over metropolitan-led growth, out of caution for the social and political consequences of creating large restive urban populations. In the Maoist era, dispersed urbanization was predominant. Metropolitan-dominant growth advocates held sway during the spectacular growth of coastal centres in the 1990s. During the Hu Jintao era (2002–2012), the central government pushed for more dispersed patterns of provincial development. But as Jaros demonstrates, central–provincial interactions are insufficient to account for variation in provincial government strategies: the relations with sub-provincial prefectures and counties are also crucial for understanding why provinces chose metropolitan-oriented development, dispersed development, or mixed spatial development, and for why these change over time within a province.
The multilevel framework outlined in chapter three identifies three crucial explanatory variables that account for variation in urban development strategies: the administrative authority of a provincial government relative to its sub-provincial units, the extent to which it controls financial resources within a province, and the political capital and connections of its leaders with the top leadership in Beijing.
A controlled case comparison with four provinces follows in four empirical chapters, tracing the urban development strategies of provincial governments from the 1990s to the 2010s. Hunan province pursued the metro-oriented model from the outset, and like a classic “late developer” in the state-led development literature, it mobilized resources in an attempt to catch up with richer provinces. The Changsha–Zhuzhou–Xiangtan (CZX) cluster became a signature growth region, but at the expense of intra-provincial inequalities and lingering poverty in peripheral areas. Jiangxi province in the 1990s was similar to Hunan in being a growth laggard and lacking an advanced metropolitan centre. Yet Jiangxi leaders pursued a dispersed pattern of urban development, with only a short-lived orientation toward metropolitan development in the early 2000s. Jiangxi had no showcase metropolitan area by the 2010s, but it made impressive gains in the rural sector and in rural poverty alleviation. The relatively prosperous Jiangsu province, known for its regional disparities between north and south, witnessed dramatic switches between the metropolitan and dispersed development strategies over the period under study. Finally, inland Shaanxi province gradually moved toward a Hunan-like metropolitan-oriented model, with the Greater Xi'an region absorbing just over two-fifths of the province's entire fixed asset investment between 2001 and 2010.
In a concluding chapter, Jaros explores the external validity of the argument using quantitative analysis from 26 provincial governments in China, and in a qualitative analysis of selected sub-national governments in Brazil and in India. The urban development strategies in the states of Minas Gerais in Brazil from the 1960s to the 1990s and the states of Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal highlight the similar push-and-pull seen in the Chinese cases, in which state government preferences shifted depending on the alignments with central and sub-provincial units.
In these accounts, it is tempting to think that learning or diffusion effects also matter. Did officials in laggard provinces seek to emulate the rapid growth of Shanghai and Shenzhen and choose metropolitan-oriented development in a mimetic process? The central government certainly became more permissive of such strategies in 2001. In addition, leaders who pushed metropolitan development in one province were often transferred to interior provinces to carry out the same strategy. Jaros addresses these potential rival explanations, showing for example that even a figure such as Meng Jianzhu, who arrived in Jiangxi from Shanghai in 2001, had to trim back his ambitious metro-development plans toward a more dispersed pattern by 2006.
In this impressively researched and thoughtfully written account, the question emerges as to whether all development is in fact spatial. Conventional accounts of state-led development, fixated on industries and firms, tend to overlook the politics of land and location. Economic geography assumes that cities are merely clusters of firms that seek positive spill overs from proximity. In this sense, China's Urban Champions should gain readership beyond the fields of Chinese politics and urbanization, to engage broader debates over development policy and the role of states and market actors in promoting different forms of urbanization.
