Decoding the Myth of Provincial Development Zone Policy in Urban China

As a widespread socioeconomic phenomenon, development zones (DZs) have garnered global academic attention; however, small and midsized DZs, although constituting the majority of the DZ system, have been frequently neglected in current urban and regional studies. To fill this gap, this study focuses on provincial development zones (PDZs) in China and examines their development logic by using 1991 PDZs developed from 1984 to 2018. A multidimensional perspective—spatial platforms, industrial platforms, and game forms, proposed by central and local governments—is applied to understand the development process. The results show that (1) driven by the balanced regional development strategies shifting from the imbalanced ones at the national level, the rise of PDZs exhibited strong spatiotemporal regularity during the last 40 years: diffused from the south to the north and from the coastal to the inland and accompanied by a significant shift from a concentrated distribution to discrete distribution; (2) there existed industrial homogenization among some adjacent PDZs, which include PDZs whose leading industries were three traditional industries (i.e., food, chemical processing, and mining processing) and PDZs whose leading industries were three technology-intensive industries (i.e., equipment manufacturing, electronic information, and automobile); (3) local governments had strategic interactions in the establishment of PDZs, but their interaction modes differed across prefectures and counties. Finally, policy implications for Chinese PDZs’ development are provided. The findings of regularity, homogenization, and strategic interaction behind the PDZ policy implementation in urban China are of international significance for developing countries with state investment capitalism.