(Re)shaping Urban Governance through State–Business Interaction in Inland China's Emerging Industries

Abstract:Urban governance has been increasingly complicated by the rapid development of emerging industries in recent years. One example is the boom of China's intelligent connected vehicle (ICV) industry, in which governments and business interests are increasingly complicated in co-constructing a context-specific "framework of action" to tap the potential of new industries in managing radical urban development uncertainty. Against this background, this article examines the ICV industries in Hunan Xiangjiang New Area (HXNA), a national new area in Central China's inland province of Hunan. Despite keen competition from coastal cities, HXNA has managed to develop the ICV industry as its flagship sector to propel local economic development. Through tracing the ICV-induced development, this article demonstrates that HXNA's success owes much to a dynamic state–business interaction rarely seen in traditional industrial sectors. To explicate this interaction, this article seeks to move beyond the dichotomy between business-centric and state-centric interpretations of entrepreneurial urban governance to argue that state–business interactions are neither unidirectional nor fixed, but bidirectional, malleable and evolving constantly. Our findings underscore the importance of understanding the entrepreneurial economic landscape as co-shaped by both the state and firms in a temporally dynamic manner.