Kean Fan Lim
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 387407 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Kean Fan Lim |
| NOMBRES | Kean Fan |
| APELLIDO | Lim |
| FIRMA | LIM K F |
| AFILIACIONES | Newcastle University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7979-2068 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 249 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2004 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
Geopolitical Rivalry and the New Global Economic Geography
The geography of the global economy is being remade before our eyes. Trade disputes, export controls, and vast subsidy programs proliferate. At the sharp end of the wedge, naked geopolitical violen...
Regional development through simultaneous strategic coupling
This article argues for a more incisive understanding of regional development through examining and explaining the effects of simultaneous strategic coupling. Circumventing firm-centric approaches that underplay dynamic intra-regional asset formation and matching with global production networks (GPNs), this article spotlights how simultaneous coupling with multiple GPNs within the same region is constituted by and generates new interactive effect…
Urban state venturism as state entrepreneurialism
This article examines the rationale and emergent effects of state-led venture capital (SVC) investments as an urban developmental tool to pursue industrial upgrading. Building on the concept of urban state venturism, the article introduces a new framework to examine how state institutions in Hefei, the capital city of Anhui province in central China, became SVC investors in private firms with high growth potential. Juxtaposing published interview…
Urban state venturism
Fragmented governance, informal migrant workers and post-pandemic economic resilience
This paper foregrounds two under-explored aspects that affect post-pandemic economic resilience—fragmented territorial governance and path-dependence on informal industries driven primarily by informally employed migrant workers—in the National Capital Region (NCR) of Delhi, India. Drawing from fieldwork conducted in Delhi NCR between 2021 and 2024, the paper highlights how post-pandemic recovery efforts are encumbered by the 'locked in’ effects …
The constitutive role of illicit activities in global production networks
In this commentary commemorating the Journal of Economic Geography’s 25th anniversary, we highlight the under-researched role of illicit activities in global production processes and present three distinct avenues for future economic-geographical research. The commentary begins with a call for research on global production networks (GPN) to embrace a broad understanding of illicit activities that entangle with firms, networks and places in varied…
The firm as a geoeconomic actor
Cutting-edge research on geoeconomics has under-explored one core constituent - the firm. Presenting two empirical 'snapshots' from different historical-geographical conjunctures, this essay spotlights the continuities that underpin firms' function as geoeconomic actors. The first conjuncture is the expansion of British geoeconomic influence through the East India Company. The US government's ongoing attempt to curtail attempts by China-based fir…
Urban state venturism
Research on the urban process of capital accumulation has typically examined the state and capital as separate actors. This distinction is problematized by a long-standing, increasingly prominent but largely overlooked attempt by state institutions to drive urban development through venture capital (VC) investments. Conceptualized as urban state venturism in this paper, state-driven VC investments reflect at once a riskier extension of urban entr…
On the rationale and implications of China’s RMB internationalization
This article addresses two interrelated questions pertaining to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) attempt to internationalize the Chinese currency – the renminbi (RMB). First, what is the historical rationale of RMB internationalization, and what are its implications? Second, how does the rationale for, and implications of, RMB internationalization distinguish this process from the emergence of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? The…
From the city of steel to Germany’s ‘China City’
This paper critically evaluates the prevailing World Bank recommendation for city-regions to drive infrastructure-led development through targeted spatial plans. Introducing a novel analytical framework to conceptualize Duisburg's evolution into the primary European gateway for the EU–China transcontinental railway, the paper demonstrates how key actors and institutions operating across multiple scales enabled this previously deindustrializing Ge…
Capital accumulation, territoriality, and the reproduction of state sovereignty in China
The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity-states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the "free market". This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a "rise" of state capit…
Peasant Mobilization, the 'Land Question' and Spatial Egalitarianism in an Urbanizing China
Urbanization has become a core strategy for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reinforce its authoritarian rule over China. Its roll-out is replete with tensions, however, because the extent to which urbanization can replicate spatial egalitarianism, the foundation of CPC sovereign rule following its victory in the Chinese civil war (1946-49), remains unclear. To advance research on these tensions, this article first presents a genealogy of th…
The geographical preconditions of radical price reforms in post-Mao China
This paper offers a critical engagement with Isabella Weber's fascinating new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It foregrounds the book's contributions to knowledge on a hitherto under-explored topic - why shock therapy advocates were unsuccessful in launching all-out price liberalisation across China during the 1980s - and introduces new questions through assessing Weber's analysis vis-à-vis three geographical aspects of Chinese political-e…
Making markets ‘decisive’
This article critically assesses state–market relations through a comparative firm-level study of state-led development in the China–Myanmar border region. It develops a framework that foregrounds how market building is a contingent and multi-scalar process that underpins the reproduction of stable state rule. The framework is utilized to examine state-led attempts in Ruili, a border city in Yunnan province, to attract Yinxiang, a privately owned…
The Constitutive Role of State Structures in Strategic Coupling
Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are actively (re)configured across multiple scales in ways that could redefine the prevailing mode of strategi…
Cross‐border market building for narcotics control
For decades, narcotics control has been unable to overhaul the durable and arguably self‐regulating socio‐economic networks driving heroin production and distribution in northern Myanmar, the second biggest drug production area in the world. To overcome this territorial barrier, the Chinese state introduced in 2000 an opium substitution programme that involved bringing Chinese agribusiness firms together with ex‐poppy farmers and local elites in …
Opium substitution, reciprocal control and the tensions of geoeconomic integration in the China-Myanmar Border
Over the past decade, the Chinese state has launched a strategic opium substitution program to support agricultural firms in Yunnan province to invest in northern Myanmar, which is second only to Afghanistan in drug production. These Yunnanese firms are encouraged to collaborate with or hire ex-poppy farmers to plant rubber, sugarcane, tea, corn, and other crops so that these farmers can leave the drug economy successfully. This paper examines th…
Strategic coupling, state capitalism, and the shifting dynamics of global production networks
This paper critically evaluates the relationship between state capitalism and "strategic coupling" within global production networks (GPN). It underscores specifically the lack of cases on "coupling" involving state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from developing countries and city-regions within developed countries. Most existing studies focus on the connection between regions in developing economies with lead firms originating from developed economies…
International Division of Labor
The international division of labor refers to a conception of economic production as intrinsically transnational and as intrinsically interdependent on labor power based in different places. Old and new versions of the concept abound: the old international division refers to the Ricardian view that labor power enjoys a comparative advantage based on finished products, while the new international division defines comparative advantage on the basis…
Regulation/Deregulation
Economic regulation is dynamically entwined with deregulation. Contrary to the logic of market fundamentalism, producers and/or consumers do not always benefit from deregulation. Rational choice theories of regulation have not impacted economic‐geographical research as much as regulation theory (RT). Developed in France to theorize the crisis of Fordism, RT underscores the importance of social regulation in the capital accumulation process. Rathe…
Labor Market
Labor markets are socially constructed entities that facilitate the buying and selling of labor power. They are effectively political‐geographic institutions, governed predominantly by state regulations that apply within specific territorial boundaries. For this reason, analyses of labor markets have tended to be state‐centric. Economic geographers have worked assiduously at transcending state‐centrism through showing how the buying and selling o…
The Great Leveler
Brett Christophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 360 pp., illustrations, graphs, tables, index, notes. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 9780674504912).What explains the recurring reproduction o
Researching state rescaling in China
This paper foregrounds and evaluates the research design associated with the study of Chinese state rescaling. It first synthesizes the existing gaps in the original, Western-based state rescaling framework. It then explores how different methodological channels are integrated to support a revised analytical framework. Specifically, it presents the value of multi-sited comparisons through (1) the ‘extended case method’ and (2) the ‘concurrent nes…
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China: a dynamic analytical framework. Regional Studies. This paper evaluates the applicability of the state rescaling framework for framing politico-economic evolution in China. It then presents an analytical framework that examines institutional change as driven by the dynamic entwinement of state rescaling, place-specific policy experimentation and institutional path depen…
On the shifting spatial logics of socioeconomic regulation in post-1949 China
On the Shifting Spatial Logics of Socioeconomic Regulation in post-1949 China. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper argues that new rounds of socioeconomic reforms in post-1949 China, each with their distinct geographical expressions, constitute a complex palimpsest rather than a straightforward process of historical succession. Drawing on a review of extensive empirical evidence, the paper complicates two dichotomous portrayals of socioec…
Socialism with Chinese characteristics’
While ‘neoliberalization’ is increasingly used to conceptualize concrete realities of China’s economic development, it is not employed in dialectical relation with China’s prevailing developmental ideology – ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This paper offers a fresh framework and research agenda from which to examine this relation. It argues that neoliberalization across China is a variegated process, formed and fractured by actually exi…
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China: a dynamic analytical framework. Regional Studies. This paper evaluates the applicability of the state rescaling framework for framing politico-economic evolution in China. It then presents an analytical framework that examines institutional change as driven by the dynamic entwinement of state rescaling, place-specific policy experimentation and institutional path depen…
On China’s growing geo-economic influence and the evolution of variegated capitalism
China
The political-economic evolution of post-Mao China has been portrayed as a historically inevitable embrace of neoliberalism; as an exemplification of the East Asian developmental state and as an extension of Soviet New Economic Policy-style state capitalism. This paper evaluates these portrayals through a broad historical and geographical framework. It examines the position of China as a new state after 1949. It then places the shifting logics of…
Spatial egalitarianism as a social 'counter-movement
Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million mÂ2 of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal acc…
Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name
Adopting Henri Lefebvre's spatial conceptual triad, this paper provides a critical investigation into the socio-spatial expression of homosexuality in Singapore. It explores how social space is not ontological, but constructed and reinforced as heterosexual. Specifically, an analysis is made of the roles of statistics, educational content and legal tools in fortifying heteronormativity. However, this paper contends that homosexuals in Singapore a…
Strategic coupling, state capitalism, and the shifting dynamics of global production networks
This paper critically evaluates the relationship between state capitalism and "strategic coupling" within global production networks (GPN). It underscores specifically the lack of cases on "coupling" involving state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from developing countries and city-regions within developed countries. Most existing studies focus on the connection between regions in developing economies with lead firms originating from developed economies…
Capital accumulation, territoriality, and the reproduction of state sovereignty in China
The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity-states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the "free market". This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a "rise" of state capit…
From the city of steel to Germany’s ‘China City’
This paper critically evaluates the prevailing World Bank recommendation for city-regions to drive infrastructure-led development through targeted spatial plans. Introducing a novel analytical framework to conceptualize Duisburg's evolution into the primary European gateway for the EU–China transcontinental railway, the paper demonstrates how key actors and institutions operating across multiple scales enabled this previously deindustrializing Ge…
The Constitutive Role of State Structures in Strategic Coupling
Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are actively (re)configured across multiple scales in ways that could redefine the prevailing mode of strategi…
Opium substitution, reciprocal control and the tensions of geoeconomic integration in the China-Myanmar Border
Over the past decade, the Chinese state has launched a strategic opium substitution program to support agricultural firms in Yunnan province to invest in northern Myanmar, which is second only to Afghanistan in drug production. These Yunnanese firms are encouraged to collaborate with or hire ex-poppy farmers to plant rubber, sugarcane, tea, corn, and other crops so that these farmers can leave the drug economy successfully. This paper examines th…
Emptying the cage, changing the birds’
This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicisation of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustra…
Urban state venturism
Research on the urban process of capital accumulation has typically examined the state and capital as separate actors. This distinction is problematized by a long-standing, increasingly prominent but largely overlooked attempt by state institutions to drive urban development through venture capital (VC) investments. Conceptualized as urban state venturism in this paper, state-driven VC investments reflect at once a riskier extension of urban entr…
On the shifting spatial logics of socioeconomic regulation in post-1949 China
On the Shifting Spatial Logics of Socioeconomic Regulation in post-1949 China. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper argues that new rounds of socioeconomic reforms in post-1949 China, each with their distinct geographical expressions, constitute a complex palimpsest rather than a straightforward process of historical succession. Drawing on a review of extensive empirical evidence, the paper complicates two dichotomous portrayals of socioec…
The Chongqing vs. Guangdong developmental ‘models’ in post-Mao China
The Chinese political economy is a dynamic entity constituted by multiple developmental trajectories. Recent debates on two seemingly divergent ‘models’ in the subnational regions of Chongqing and Guangdong have foregrounded the potential contradictions of this dynamism. While existing research has attempted to evaluate these trajectories as outcomes of elite politics or ideological incommensurability, an overlooked but no less important aspect i…
What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo‐economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary
Despite emergent trends of geo‐economic integration between nation‐states, the role of realist‐driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state‐centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo‐economic formation through an exploration of China–US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo‐legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how t…
On the rationale and implications of China’s RMB internationalization
This article addresses two interrelated questions pertaining to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) attempt to internationalize the Chinese currency – the renminbi (RMB). First, what is the historical rationale of RMB internationalization, and what are its implications? Second, how does the rationale for, and implications of, RMB internationalization distinguish this process from the emergence of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? The…
Cross‐border market building for narcotics control
For decades, narcotics control has been unable to overhaul the durable and arguably self‐regulating socio‐economic networks driving heroin production and distribution in northern Myanmar, the second biggest drug production area in the world. To overcome this territorial barrier, the Chinese state introduced in 2000 an opium substitution programme that involved bringing Chinese agribusiness firms together with ex‐poppy farmers and local elites in …
The firm as a geoeconomic actor
Cutting-edge research on geoeconomics has under-explored one core constituent - the firm. Presenting two empirical 'snapshots' from different historical-geographical conjunctures, this essay spotlights the continuities that underpin firms' function as geoeconomic actors. The first conjuncture is the expansion of British geoeconomic influence through the East India Company. The US government's ongoing attempt to curtail attempts by China-based fir…
Peasant Mobilization, the 'Land Question' and Spatial Egalitarianism in an Urbanizing China
Urbanization has become a core strategy for the Communist Party of China (CPC) to reinforce its authoritarian rule over China. Its roll-out is replete with tensions, however, because the extent to which urbanization can replicate spatial egalitarianism, the foundation of CPC sovereign rule following its victory in the Chinese civil war (1946-49), remains unclear. To advance research on these tensions, this article first presents a genealogy of th…
Making markets ‘decisive’
This article critically assesses state–market relations through a comparative firm-level study of state-led development in the China–Myanmar border region. It develops a framework that foregrounds how market building is a contingent and multi-scalar process that underpins the reproduction of stable state rule. The framework is utilized to examine state-led attempts in Ruili, a border city in Yunnan province, to attract Yinxiang, a privately owned…
Urban state venturism
Researching state rescaling in China
This paper foregrounds and evaluates the research design associated with the study of Chinese state rescaling. It first synthesizes the existing gaps in the original, Western-based state rescaling framework. It then explores how different methodological channels are integrated to support a revised analytical framework. Specifically, it presents the value of multi-sited comparisons through (1) the ‘extended case method’ and (2) the ‘concurrent nes…
The point is to keep going
Journal Article The point is to keep going: the global sub-prime mortgage crisis, local labour market repositioning, and the capital accumulation dynamic in Singapore Get access Kean Fan Lim Kean Fan Lim * *Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada, E-mail: Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 12, Issue 3, May 201…
Where Love Dares (Not) Speak Its Name
Adopting Henri Lefebvre's spatial conceptual triad, this paper provides a critical investigation into the socio-spatial expression of homosexuality in Singapore. It explores how social space is not ontological, but constructed and reinforced as heterosexual. Specifically, an analysis is made of the roles of statistics, educational content and legal tools in fortifying heteronormativity. However, this paper contends that homosexuals in Singapore a…
Transnational collaborations, local competitiveness
Through the Global Production Networks (GPN) analytical lens, this paper shows how politico‐economic developments in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia are instrumental in developing Hong Kong as a premier filmmaking centre, and how Hong Kong‐based filmmakers have to weave new cross‐scalar production networks and target new markets so as to remain competitive. The broader objective of the paper is to contribute to extant debates on urban‐based, clu…
On China’s growing geo-economic influence and the evolution of variegated capitalism
The point is to keep going
Journal Article The point is to keep going: the global sub-prime mortgage crisis, local labour market repositioning, and the capital accumulation dynamic in Singapore Get access Kean Fan Lim Kean Fan Lim * *Department of Geography, 1984 West Mall, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2, Canada, E-mail: Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Economic Geography, Volume 12, Issue 3, May 201…
What You See Is (Not) What You Get? The Taiwan Question, Geo‐economic Realities, and the “China Threat” Imaginary
Despite emergent trends of geo‐economic integration between nation‐states, the role of realist‐driven geopolitical calculation appears highly enduring. This paper explores the potential contradictions between state‐centric geopolitical concerns and transnational geo‐economic formation through an exploration of China–US tensions over Taiwan, a territory of indeterminate geo‐legal status and which China regards as its own province. I consider how t…
Socialism with Chinese characteristics’
While ‘neoliberalization’ is increasingly used to conceptualize concrete realities of China’s economic development, it is not employed in dialectical relation with China’s prevailing developmental ideology – ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This paper offers a fresh framework and research agenda from which to examine this relation. It argues that neoliberalization across China is a variegated process, formed and fractured by actually exi…
Spatial egalitarianism as a social 'counter-movement
Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million mÂ2 of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal acc…
On the shifting spatial logics of socioeconomic regulation in post-1949 China
On the Shifting Spatial Logics of Socioeconomic Regulation in post-1949 China. Territory, Politics, Governance. This paper argues that new rounds of socioeconomic reforms in post-1949 China, each with their distinct geographical expressions, constitute a complex palimpsest rather than a straightforward process of historical succession. Drawing on a review of extensive empirical evidence, the paper complicates two dichotomous portrayals of socioec…
Emptying the cage, changing the birds’
This paper evaluates how economic restructuring in Guangdong is entwined with the politicisation of state rescaling during and after the global financial crisis of 2008. It shows how a key industrial policy known as ‘double relocation’ generated tensions between the Guangdong government, then led by Party Secretary Wang Yang, and the senior echelon of the Communist Party of China in Beijing. The contestations and negotiations that ensued illustra…
The Chongqing vs. Guangdong developmental ‘models’ in post-Mao China
The Chinese political economy is a dynamic entity constituted by multiple developmental trajectories. Recent debates on two seemingly divergent ‘models’ in the subnational regions of Chongqing and Guangdong have foregrounded the potential contradictions of this dynamism. While existing research has attempted to evaluate these trajectories as outcomes of elite politics or ideological incommensurability, an overlooked but no less important aspect i…
China
The political-economic evolution of post-Mao China has been portrayed as a historically inevitable embrace of neoliberalism; as an exemplification of the East Asian developmental state and as an extension of Soviet New Economic Policy-style state capitalism. This paper evaluates these portrayals through a broad historical and geographical framework. It examines the position of China as a new state after 1949. It then places the shifting logics of…
International Division of Labor
The international division of labor refers to a conception of economic production as intrinsically transnational and as intrinsically interdependent on labor power based in different places. Old and new versions of the concept abound: the old international division refers to the Ricardian view that labor power enjoys a comparative advantage based on finished products, while the new international division defines comparative advantage on the basis…
Regulation/Deregulation
Economic regulation is dynamically entwined with deregulation. Contrary to the logic of market fundamentalism, producers and/or consumers do not always benefit from deregulation. Rational choice theories of regulation have not impacted economic‐geographical research as much as regulation theory (RT). Developed in France to theorize the crisis of Fordism, RT underscores the importance of social regulation in the capital accumulation process. Rathe…
Labor Market
Labor markets are socially constructed entities that facilitate the buying and selling of labor power. They are effectively political‐geographic institutions, governed predominantly by state regulations that apply within specific territorial boundaries. For this reason, analyses of labor markets have tended to be state‐centric. Economic geographers have worked assiduously at transcending state‐centrism through showing how the buying and selling o…
The Great Leveler
Brett Christophers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016. 360 pp., illustrations, graphs, tables, index, notes. $45.00 cloth (ISBN 9780674504912).What explains the recurring reproduction o
Researching state rescaling in China
This paper foregrounds and evaluates the research design associated with the study of Chinese state rescaling. It first synthesizes the existing gaps in the original, Western-based state rescaling framework. It then explores how different methodological channels are integrated to support a revised analytical framework. Specifically, it presents the value of multi-sited comparisons through (1) the ‘extended case method’ and (2) the ‘concurrent nes…
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China
State rescaling, policy experimentation and path dependency in post-Mao China: a dynamic analytical framework. Regional Studies. This paper evaluates the applicability of the state rescaling framework for framing politico-economic evolution in China. It then presents an analytical framework that examines institutional change as driven by the dynamic entwinement of state rescaling, place-specific policy experimentation and institutional path depen…
Strategic coupling, state capitalism, and the shifting dynamics of global production networks
This paper critically evaluates the relationship between state capitalism and "strategic coupling" within global production networks (GPN). It underscores specifically the lack of cases on "coupling" involving state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from developing countries and city-regions within developed countries. Most existing studies focus on the connection between regions in developing economies with lead firms originating from developed economies…
Opium substitution, reciprocal control and the tensions of geoeconomic integration in the China-Myanmar Border
Over the past decade, the Chinese state has launched a strategic opium substitution program to support agricultural firms in Yunnan province to invest in northern Myanmar, which is second only to Afghanistan in drug production. These Yunnanese firms are encouraged to collaborate with or hire ex-poppy farmers to plant rubber, sugarcane, tea, corn, and other crops so that these farmers can leave the drug economy successfully. This paper examines th…
Cross‐border market building for narcotics control
For decades, narcotics control has been unable to overhaul the durable and arguably self‐regulating socio‐economic networks driving heroin production and distribution in northern Myanmar, the second biggest drug production area in the world. To overcome this territorial barrier, the Chinese state introduced in 2000 an opium substitution programme that involved bringing Chinese agribusiness firms together with ex‐poppy farmers and local elites in …
Making markets ‘decisive’
This article critically assesses state–market relations through a comparative firm-level study of state-led development in the China–Myanmar border region. It develops a framework that foregrounds how market building is a contingent and multi-scalar process that underpins the reproduction of stable state rule. The framework is utilized to examine state-led attempts in Ruili, a border city in Yunnan province, to attract Yinxiang, a privately owned…
The Constitutive Role of State Structures in Strategic Coupling
Research on the strategic coupling between regions and global lead firms has largely assumed that the regional assets for coupling are ready made and are largely unchanging throughout the coupling process. This article takes this assumption as its critical point of departure and presents a new framework that considers how regional assets are actively (re)configured across multiple scales in ways that could redefine the prevailing mode of strategi…
On the rationale and implications of China’s RMB internationalization
This article addresses two interrelated questions pertaining to the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) attempt to internationalize the Chinese currency – the renminbi (RMB). First, what is the historical rationale of RMB internationalization, and what are its implications? Second, how does the rationale for, and implications of, RMB internationalization distinguish this process from the emergence of the US dollar as the global reserve currency? The…
From the city of steel to Germany’s ‘China City’
This paper critically evaluates the prevailing World Bank recommendation for city-regions to drive infrastructure-led development through targeted spatial plans. Introducing a novel analytical framework to conceptualize Duisburg's evolution into the primary European gateway for the EU–China transcontinental railway, the paper demonstrates how key actors and institutions operating across multiple scales enabled this previously deindustrializing Ge…
Capital accumulation, territoriality, and the reproduction of state sovereignty in China
The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity-states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the "free market". This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a "rise" of state capit…
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