5 - Re-Scaling Territorial Authority within Regional Organizations

Summary

Abstract

This chapter analyses the spatial articulation of the Chinese border regime within regional development projects and the multiplication of border within the process. With regard to the case studies, I discuss the spatial selection of Yunnan and Jilin province as ‘bridgehead’ and link towards them to neighbouring countries and the wider region. Specifically, I analyse how Beijing attempts to economically integrate the borderlands into regional organisations such as the Greater Mekong Subregion and the Greater Tumen Initiative. I show how strategies of direct local cross-border interaction and ‘sites of exception’ in special border development zones constitute a ‘zoning activity’ that allows to integrate resources that lie beyond Chinese territory. This spatial re-articulation also shows how the centre-periphery relation is politically designed and assembled.

Keywords: multiplication of borders, Greater Mekong Subregion, Greater Tumen Initiative, spatiality, bridgeheads, politics of scale

Territorial authority is at the ontological and epistemological centre of border studies. How does a sovereign exert its power over a given territory and how does this power emanate? This chapter addresses the question of how the Chinese government varies the spatial reach of its power throughout its territory and beyond. Considering the relative political inattention paid to China's territorial periphery historically, its government has needed to assert coherent spatial planning in order to reintegrate these peripheries. Regional integration measures have ultimately allowed the government to reclaim peripheries as bridgeheads towards regional markets and establish them as hubs for regional trade. In this process, territorial authority has shifted. Historically underregulated political borders have become central to national economic restructuring. As border prefectures have become relatively empowered due to changing centre-periphery relations, the Chinese government's authority has grown to encompass the exploitation of labour and natural resources in neighbouring regions. Managing the various scales of political and economic activities has birthed a strategy of spatial fixes that aims to avoid ‘capitalist crises through temporal deferral and geographical expansion’ (Harvey 2003: 115). Different (sub-)national governmental entities comprise an ‘interscalar rule regime’ in which the nation state plays a crucial role as ‘scalar manager’ (Su 2012a: 504).