Introduction

Abstract

This research focuses on the political nature of urban redevelopment from a governance perspective; characteristics of its governance will be analysed within the Chinese authoritarian regime. Urban redevelopment is chosen as the research object because it is significant and complex enough to be a typical case in Chinese economic growth. The main problem in urban redevelopment is the issue of social cooperation among different stakeholders; it is the problem of governance. Theories of governance origin from the developed world and their applications into Chinese context will bring about interesting development of governance studies and exciting reflection of Chinese politics. In this perspective, the most important characteristic of China’s political system, an authoritarian regime can strongly affect the characteristics of governance. Guangzhou, as the third largest city in China and the political-economic centre of south China, has been chosen as the studied site to reveal its political nature in Urban redevelopment. Based on this analysis, a resilient mode of governance in Guangzhou redevelopment can be established. This mode is a small fragment of mirror to reflect the whole political picture of China.

1.1 Miraculous or Miserable? Urban Redevelopment in Economic Growth of China

Urban redevelopment is the object of this study because redeveloping Chinese metropolises is an important and controversial element in the narrative of China’s economic growth. This growth in the last few decades is significant. In terms of the ranking of GDP (gross domestic product) worldwide, China has upgraded from the eleventh in 1990 to the second in 2010. As the result of this rapid productivity growth, living standards and personal income have also significantly improved in this period (Lin 2011). Urbanisation is an important part of such economic expansion. Bai et al. (2012) claim that urbanisation and economic growth are closely connected, according to the analysis of relation between the expansion of built-up areas and the growth of GDP per capita in China. Sun (2011) indicates that GDP per capita can increase by 4.34% when the degree of urbanisation (indicated by the percentage of urban population in the whole population) has increased by 1%.

In terms of urbanisation, the urban population in Mainland China has increased from 18 per cent in 1978 to 52% in 2012; the urban population has grown from 352 to 670 million from 1995 to 2010 (Ye and Wu 2014). Millions of migrants have moved into cities, especially metropolises. The pursuit of economic growth is a huge driving force for the expansion of construction land and upgrading of building environments in urban space. Such changes led to a more efficient and competitive urban economy emerging in China after the mid-1990s (Lin 2011). Indeed, Stiglitz, one of the winners of the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, states that Chinese urbanisation and high-tech innovations in the United States are the two keys for the development of the whole world in the twenty-first century (People’s Daily Online 2005).

Urban redevelopment is an influential activity in extra-large Chinese cities as a part of their urbanisation processes; for the involved population such redevelopment might be miraculous or miserable at the same time. Urban redevelopment has been powerfully driven by Chinese urbanisation while huge amounts of immigrants have stimulated demands for space in urban areas. Redevelopment is more significant in extra-large cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, which have populations of more than 10 million (People’s Daily Online 2005). This is because these metropolises are the most active points for economic growth and migration. However, development in these extra-large cities has been controlled in terms of the availability of new construction land according to national policy; redevelopment in existed construction land is a better choice than developing newly expanded construction land under the political regime (He et al. 2006; Lin 2011).

Urban redevelopment is exciting, dramatic and significant in terms of building brand new departments, shopping malls and offices; but it also brings social conflicts, destroying historical buildings and obliterating Chinese culture. Campanella (2010) in his book, The Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Revolution and what is meant for the World, devotes one chapter, Chap. 5 City of Chai (demolish), to describe urban redevelopment in China. He quotes the work from Huang Rui, a Chinese artist, named Chai-na/China as a symbol of urban redevelopment. Chai (拆) means demolishing and destroying in Chinese; its spelling and pronunciation seem to be similar with the word ‘China’. In Huang’s (2005) view, demolition and destruction might be the most important phenomena in China.

In mass media of China, urban redevelopment is a hot topic. In 2007, a demolition project in Chongqing, a large city in South West China, became the focus of mass media (Tian 2007). The resident of a single house refused to be removed from her home and the house remained while every house around it was demolished; therefore the one remaining house became an island in which the homeowner still lived within an ocean of demolition (Zhou 2007). This dramatic image shocked the whole country; problems in redevelopment entered the field of public debate.

Two years later, on the 13th November 2009 in Chengdu, another large city in South West China, a lady named Fuzhen Tang burned herself to death on the roof of her house to protest against the violent demolition of her property (Sina News 2009). This stimulated more public discussion about redevelopment in television, newspapers and the internet. It seemed that public consensus about protecting property rights, the legal process of governmental behaviour and definition of public interest in redevelopment had been awakened through the stimulation of public debates.

In the last few decades urban redevelopment in China, as a consequence of the urbanisation process in China’s economic growth, is significant in terms of its achievements and conflicts. This process might be described as both miraculous and miserable. It seems the beginning of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities has never been out of date. For its significance and complexity the nature of urban redevelopment deserves to be comprehensively and systematically analysed. Numerous literatures have already explored this topic; my research will join this group of studies from a specific perspective.

This research investigates urban redevelopment from the theoretical perspective of governance and analyses this governance in an authoritarian environment. Governance is a popular concept to analyse urban redevelopment in Chinese metropolises because ideas around governance can provide a deep understanding of the political nature of society. Under the authoritarian system, crucial challenges have been reflected in governance level, namely, how to bring together the various forces that drive development into harmonious relationships and how to solve conflicts.

Redevelopment plays such a crucial and controversial role in China’s development; it is an interesting object for the study of governance. Another reason to support this study is that urban redevelopment is a special objective as an institutional function under authoritarianism. Every important law and rule, such as property rights, tax and fiscal income, legal process, the planning system and autonomy of communities, is reflected in urban redevelopment. Urban redevelopment is a mirror of the whole Chinese political regime; it is also a mirror of China’s society.

1.2 Literature Review and Gaps

Urban redevelopment, accelerated from the late 1980s, is an important part in urban development and transformation, because stricter regulation of land conversion in suburban space has brought urban development back to the inner cities (He et al. 2006). Briefly, research about urban redevelopment and its governance in China have three main concerns, institutional background, property rights of land, and governance in this field. Redevelopment in Chinese cities is based on specific institutional arrangements. Housing reform has led to its marketisation, which in turn has brought prosperity to the urban housing market. Redistribution of power between the central and local state has moved control of property rights over urban land into the hands of local authorities. The local state build-up of the land leasing system through auctions could transform potential land values in the property market into revenue for local authorities (Wu 2002; He and Wu 2005, 2009; He 2007).

Property rights of land in Chinese cities have been defined as land use right in urban land; the local states are the agencies to actually control use rights of land in cities when these lands are nominally belonging to the whole population of China. Such use rights of land have been described as ambiguous; usage rights and developmental rights are separated into the hands of different stakeholders, such as work units, residences, planning and land management departments. The socialist use rights of property are described as economic rights (de facto rights) rather than legal rights; these de facto rights in public housing, work-unit housing and village housing are unsecured and uncertain for long-term consideration. Therefore, potential values of land are open to competition from different agents in the field of urban redevelopment. Capacities to compete are relevant to the hierarchical position of agencies (Zhu 2002, 2004; Lin and Ho 2005; Tian 2008).

Based on this institutional background and property rights, land owners, the local state and developers have formed a coalition to accelerate redevelopment by assembling fragmented property rights. The state has strong incentives to benefit the interests of developers in terms of financial and administrative support, beautification construction and infrastructure improvement; because the local state aims to grasp revenue through promoting the urban image and attracting investment. These activities of the state can also be understood as an extension of the state to newly-emerged field of redevelopment with economic opportunities. Social interests are sacrificed to support such redevelopment in terms of excluding public participation. This mode of governance has some neoliberal characteristics in terms of the relations between market and state, and the approach of the local state to benefit market players.

This reform of governance is responsive to crisis and difficulties rather than a designed blue print. Such governance includes different and paradoxical logics, such as economic growth, consensus among people and social stability. These logics lead to various governance modes, from the cooperation mode to self governance mode, to adapt to increased unstructured complexity (Zhang 2002; Wu 2002; He 2007, 2012; He and Wu 2005, 2009; Lin et al. 2015).

Such governance patterns have been changed in different periods of redevelopment. He (2012) describes two waves of redevelopment and its governance in Guangzhou after the late 1980s. between these two waves, the scale of redevelopment has been transformed from small to large scale; the purpose of projects has changed from improving living condition to reimaging a global city; the result of redevelopment has been changed from increasing use value to exchange values. She concludes that these changes act towards a Neoliberal governance mode in terms of optimal strategy for capital accumulation, such as reducing uncertainty of projects, intentional land deficiency and assembly of fragmented land ownership.

Interaction between entities from state, market and communities in Chinese cities have also been analysed through the regime approach. Zhu (1999) analyses coalitions between local authority, SOEs (State-Owned Enterprises) and developers to realise both economic growth and social stability. He finds that the local state created an attractive climate for industry to increase the tax base and revenue, SOEs contributed to social stability in terms of offering jobs and welfare for workers and developers brought capital and experience into redevelopment. Zhang (2002) elaborates the socialist regime characteristics in Shanghai, citing ‘strong local government followed by cooperative nongovernmental sectors with excluded community organization’ (Zhang 2002, p. 475).

From a regime perspective, this socialist regime is different from its original model in the US because the private sector is relatively less influential and communities in China is still weak. Yang and Chang (2007) also focus on Shanghai to reveal a public–private partnership as a pro-growth regime to developed Zhang’s study in three aspects: isolating the district government as a player with autonomy from the municipality, analysing rent-seeking opportunities in the redevelopment process and pointing to the lessened impacts of the central government. Li and Li (2011) argue that an urban coalition has emerged between public and private actors in the redevelopment of urban villages in Shenzhen, through the biased distribution of resources and urban planning policy.

Since 2009, a new group of policy, the ‘Three Old Redevelopment Policy’, has been experimented in Guangzhou, Foshan and Dongguan in Guangdong Province; an interests-sharing coalition has been established by this policy to include government, developers and communities in redeveloping processes (Li and Liu 2018). Renters, as property users rather than owners, have been excluded from such a coalition, even in upgrading projects as urban regeneration (Li et al. 2021).

In these studies about urban governance in redevelopment in Chinese cities, the main difference from western cases is China’s authoritarian regime which consistently is the dominant factor in urban politics. This authoritarian defines institutional background, property rights of land and governance with Chinese characteristics. In terms of institutional arrangement, the local states are pushed by the central authority to produce land-based revenue; in property rights, use right is a convenient tool for the local state to steer and intervene market behaviours; in governance, the local is the dominant role to establish redevelopment strategies to benefit some selected actors by the supports of public funding and administrative resources.

Besides, after Chinese authoritarian regime has organised quite different pathway of urban redevelopment and economic growth, Chinese cities and western cities have both displayed similar Neo-liberal patterns of governance. In these similar characteristics, the state mobilise public resources to advance the interests of private capital while the public interest might be sacrificed (He and Wu 2009).

Literatures about urban regimes in redeveloping Chinese cities also revealed the influence of China’s authoritarian regime in terms of the role of the state in regimes. Chinese authoritarian style state is more powerful in growth-coalitions in Chinese cities when the private sectors are more influential in American cases. However, such different function of the state in Chinese cities and American ones has produced similar results. The state and developers are included in growth-coalition and communities are more or less exclude in such activities.

The biggest gap in these literature is the lack of real political concern on urban governance; which means that the most important political background of urban governance in China, the authoritarian regime, has not been analysed clearly. My research will connect these two ideas, the authoritarian regime and urban governance, to investigate and establish the special mechanism in Chinese cities. Namely, how could the authoritarian regime affect governance modes and their changes, and how could the governance modes contribute to the survival and development of the authoritarian regime. In reality, the authoritarian regime and urban governance are contemporaneous; however, their separation in a theoretical perspective is meaningful because it emphasises the most important Chinese factors.

1.3 Research Design

1.3.1 Aims and Objectives

This study aims to investigate the political nature of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou in terms of connecting two main aspects, the governance of redevelopment and characteristics of an authoritarian regime. The ideas about governance might be very interesting to be applied in analysing politics in Chinese cities because they originate from a Western context, especially from the UK and some phenomena in governance that have been studied in the UK also appear in Chinese cities.

In the mirror of urban redevelopment, the whole picture of the Chinese political landscape has been reflected. Therefore, the aim of my research is to reveal the political nature of urban redevelopment in an authoritarian environment. The three main research objects of this study are focused on redevelopment, governance and the authoritarian regime; such three objects are interacted in my study. Redevelopment is the raw material for research; features of governance are abstracted from social interaction in redevelopment; dynamics of governance are affected by Chinese authoritarian regime. Research objectives are established from interaction between three objects, namely, the characteristics of redevelopment, governance and the authoritarian regime, and the dynamics of the relations between governance and Chinese authoritarian regime.

In order to achieve a deep understanding of the connection between the governance of urban development and the prevailing authoritarian regime I will choose Guangzhou, a pioneer of China’s reform, as the case to study this topic. The analysis of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou from 1990 to 2015 is the empirical object which facilitates investigation of the political system in Chinese cities.

1.3.2 The Reasons to Choose Guangzhou After 1990

My research aims are concerning about political nature of urban redevelopment in Chinese cities under an authoritarian regime. From this perspective, which Chinese city is appropriate to be analysed? Extra-large Chinese cities is the hot pot of urban redevelopment. In terms of extra-large cities, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen are considered as the ‘First-tier Cities’, a very popular idea in Chinese population, among Chinese cities because of their significance in political, economic and cultural system of China. Therefore, any of these four cities are deserved to be analysed as representative of Chinese cities in terms of their importance. Especially these cities are national economic centres; which means their urban redevelopments are more attractive to capital to invest for profits. It results in active patterns of governance in urban redevelopment. In these four cities I choose Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, a national central city in south China, as the studied case for two reasons.

First, Guangzhou is a pioneer city in China’s reform; therefore, narratives in this pioneer can reveal some dynamics which cannot be observed in other cities. This is because other Chinese cities as followers in China’s reform often learn experience from Guangzhou and Guangdong; these followers are not original place for policy experiments. These experiments can better reveal political nature of urban issues because they are usually the frontline of reform with fierce conflicts between different social groups. Guangdong Province is a traditional pioneer in China’s transition while it is far away from the political centre, Beijing, and near the most Westernised Chinese city, a global metropolis and ex-colony city, Hong Kong. Therefore it is safer to do some political-economic experiments in Guangdong Province than in Beijing and Shanghai which are more crucial for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to control the whole country.

What happens in Guangdong Province often acts as an experiment and provides good experiences to other region of China to imitate. Shenzhen, one of the most important cities in Guangdong, is the most pioneering city in China’s transition. However Shenzhen is a special case because it is a special experimental zone in China’s reform. It has just been developed after the beginning of transition in 1978. It has only thirty-eight years history as a city until now; which means it is less typical with traditional characteristics as Chinese cities, such as powerful local bureaucratic group, long-term urban culture and historical heritages. Therefore, Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province with more than 2000 years history, is a good case for researching patterns of governance in Chinese cities.

At the same time, because Guangzhou is closer to Hong Kong; it has been influenced to be a more democratically-governed city compared to Beijing. It brings about more meaning to Guangzhou as a pioneer in transition towards to more open, transparent and democratic system. It also may reduce the difficulty of investigation in Guangzhou than in other large Chinese cities because of the relative openness of government (Lu 2001; Zhu and Zhang 2004).

Second, Guangzhou has been selected as one of the first cities to experiment the ‘Three old redevelopment’ policy which has been launched in 2009. ‘Three old redevelopment’ includes the redevelopment of old villages, old cities, and old factories. This policy is coming from the Ministry of Land and Resources. Guangdong Province is the first place to experiment this policy. It brings about a series of special institutional arrangements to encourage urban redevelopment through releasing planning regulation, reducing taxation, providing financial resources and supporting to build partnership. Such institutional arrangements indicate some new tendencies in urban governance which are difficult to be found in other Chinese cities.

Foshan, Dongguan and Guangzhou are the experimental cities in this policy. Foshan is the first city among these three cities to apply this policy; however, it is a much less important city compared with Guangzhou in a national level. Besides, Foshan and Dongguan are not as important as Guangzhou in China. Therefore, Guangzhou has a unique position to be analysed in the experimental policy, ‘Three old redevelopment’ policy in my study.

My research will more focus on the years after 1990. This starting point is selected for three reasons.

After the Tiananmen Square Protest in 1989, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its regime has paid much more attention to economic growth to survive the legitimacy crisis. Urban development and redevelopment is an important part of economic growth (Gries and Rosen 2004). This period has displayed stronger incentives of authoritarian regime to pursue land-based economic growth. Such incentives can reveal the significance of authoritarian factors in governing urban redevelopment as one of the research objectives.

After China’s reform from 1978, urban lands were freely distributed to land users until 1987. From 1987 to 1992, a new institution of a market-oriented land using system has been established. After that, local authorities have more incentive to develop and redevelop urban land for fiscal income (Zhu 2005). This institutional arrangement formed the structure of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou and simulated the fast growth of redevelopment. In this way, it builds up a specific pattern of governance. It concerns another aspect of research objectives, the governance patterns.

After 1990, the growth of both Total Investment in Building and Residential Building Areas has been accelerated in Guangzhou. These two indexes displays increased investment in construction industry; and this industry is closely related to urban redevelopment. At the same period, the investment of the real estate in Guangzhou also boomed (see Table 1.1 and Fig. 1.1).

Table 1.1 Total investment and built areas in construction in Guangzhou

Fig. 1.1

Total investment of real estate in Guangzhou. Source Author’s drawing based on data from Statistics Bureau of Guangzhou Municipality and Guangzhou Survey Office of National Bureau of Statistics (2014), p. 110

1.3.3 Structure of This Study

This research will be displayed as three parts in following chapters. Based on introducing basic information about Guangzhou, Chap. 2 aims to put urban redevelopment of Guangzhou into the institutional matrix within Chinese authoritarian regime. Incentive and resources of the local state and other actors to push redevelopment forwards will be figured out. Chapter 3 concerns about governance modes of urban redevelopment in Guangzhou after 1990 in terms of its whole picture and individuals cases. Three distinct phases will be defined according to different relationship between state, market and communities in redevelopment. Chapter 4 is a connection between authoritarian institutions (Chap. 2) and governance of urban redevelopment (Chap. 3) to understand the reasons and mechanism behind these changes of governance modes. After such a connection, a resilient governance mode would emerge to reflect the characteristics of China’s political system.