This book explores and evaluates the evolution of regional (uneven) development in Jiangsu province in China, during the economic reform that began in the late 1970s and continues to the present day. Using detailed case studies, it clarifies and deciphers a number of fundamental ideological and institutional logics that have decisively shaped or guided China’s 30-year economic reform.
The book provides an example of how the traditional struggles with the modern, how the domestic interacts with the global, and how the local/regional scale coordinates and conflicts with the central in the context of China’s economic reform. Taken together, it reveals how institutions, forces and actors interconnect and co-evolve in a dynamic and relational fashion within specific spatiotemporal horizons. Of particular interest in the research presented here is the way that the empirical material enables the four dimensions of territory, place, scale and network to be explored within the context of contemporary China. It is shown how the economic and social development of different territories and places within Jiangsu province is ‘relationally intertwined’ with sets of political and economic forces operating at different scales and within wider networks. As such, this book provides a detailed understanding of the spatiotemporal dynamics of uneven regional development in China, and sets out a number of salient policy implications drawn from the research findings.
