Rezoning at the threshold of two systems: regionalised party–statecraft in China’s Greater Bay Area
质疑改革时期中央集权向自由化转变的叙事，提出党国空间性是多形态、多尺度的过程，并以粤港澳大湾区为例，分析‘新时代’分区策略如何被用作党国驱动的探路改革工具。
During China’s reform era, dominant narratives described a transition away from centralised planning in favour of mutually reinforcing processes of liberalisation and decentralisation. Under Xi Jinping, the talk has increasingly been of the recentralisation of authoritarian-state powers and party discipline. Questioning both reform-era transition narratives and equally simplifying claims about their recent reversal, the paper argues for an enriched treatment of party–state spatiality, understood as a polymorphic and multi-scalar process, rather than simply a more complex one. In the emergent Greater Bay Area megaregion, ‘new era’ zoning strategies are being repurposed as drivers of pathfinding reforms animated by the party–state, in contrast to received readings of zones as single-purpose instruments of liberalisation.