Rethinking China’s model of urban governance. London. 23/05/2025.

Prof. Yeung gave a talk titled ‘The Political Economy of David Harvey’s Neoliberalism “with Chinese characteristics”: Mixing/Messing the State with the Process of Neoliberalization?’. He critically reviewed Harvey’s perspective on China’s urban governance in the early 2000s and challenged it by emphasising the role of the state.

Prof. Wu introduced his new paper titled ‘From entrepreneurial to managerial statecraft: New trends of urban governance transformation in post-pandemic China’. This paper revisits the transformations in post-pandemic China and finds that rising state capital, re-centralization of spatial governance, and party-state co-governance represent the shift from entrepreneurial to managerial statecraft. The new trends broadly echo changing capital-state-society relationships in the world today. Beyond market rationality, the state mobilizes capital and society to pursue strategic intentionality. The transformation has been exacerbated by pandemic urgency, post-pandemic economic downturn, and greater geopolitical tension.

Henry Wai-chung Yeung was Distinguished Professor (and Professor of Economic Geography since 2005) at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, until 31 December 2024. Since January 2025, he is the Choh-Ming Li Professorship at the Department of Geography and Resource Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the recipient of multiple research awards, including the 2022 Sir Peter Hall Award for Lifetime Contribution by the Regional Studies Association in the UK, the 2018 Distinguished Scholarship Honors by the American Association of Geographers, and the 2017 Murchison Award by the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), UK. He has published 7 monographs and 1 textbook (3 editions), 7 edited books, 115 journal articles, and 50 book chapters. His most recent books are Theory and Explanation in Geography (RGS-IBG Book Series, Wiley, September 2023), Interconnected Worlds: Global Electronics and Production Networks in East Asia (Innovation and Technology in the World Economy Series, Stanford University Press, June 2022), Strategic Coupling: East Asian Industrial Transformation in the New Global Economy (Cornell Studies in Political Economy Series, Cornell University Press, 2016), and Global Production Networks: Theorizing Economic Development in an Interconnected World (with Neil Coe, Oxford University Press, 2015). For over two decades since 2001, he has been a co-editor of two top journals in Geography – Economic Geography and Environment and Planning A. He is also past editor of Review of International Political Economy (2004-2013) and serves on the editorial boards of 17 other journals.

Photo by Zhenfa Li