Commodification in Disguise: Growth Dynamics and Emerging Geography of Culture-Led Urban Redevelopments in Contemporary China

The global proliferation of culture-led urban regeneration has been extensively documented as a popular practice to create a cultural and creative economy for place promotion or a spatiotemporal fix of the built-in crises of capital (over)accumulation. This study engages with competing interpretations in the extant literature through an investigation of the intriguing pattern and process identified from China. Culture-led urban redevelopment projects in many Chinese cities are found to be shaped not so much by the genuine interests in the creation of a cultural economy but instead by local political imperatives to circumvent central restriction over urban land expansion. The stronger the central restriction over local urban expansion, the greater the extent of culture-led urban redevelopment. Promotion of cultural and creative industries has been leveraged by municipal governments as a disguise for the hidden agenda of commodifying state-owned land without going through land conveyance and open-market transactions. Conceptually, the Chinese practices of manipulating state-owned industrial heritage and cultural resources cast doubt over the popular perception about city governments’ genuine interests in cultural preservation and demonstrate the distinctive pathways and trajectories of the global culture/creativity syndrome in the context of an East Asian socialist economy in transformation. Methodologically, the research foregrounds a conjunctural and situational approach particularly attentive to local articulation and manipulation of both the power relationships within the state apparatus vertically and the asymmetry for arbitrage in the land market horizontally.