The past decade has witnessed a variety of city-regional projects across the world. However, the geopolitical motivation or regional coalition alone cannot fully explain the actual mechanism of city-regionalism in the Chinese context. Drawing on the governance framework of state entrepreneurialism, this article distinguishes between the processes of centrally orchestrated regional imaginary and regional cooperation through multi-scalar alliances in the making of Chinese city-regions. By tracing the latest national strategy of the Yangtze River Delta regional integration and three different cases with concrete practices, this paper suggests that the recent rise of city-regionalism reflects the dynamic development of state entrepreneurialism beyond the urban scale.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.