Centralising state power, undermining local growth politics and escalating debt crisis: A new stage of state entrepreneurialism in China
研究中国大理小城市的发展轨迹，发现中央集权迫使地方用土地增值和公私合作等市场手段落实环保等中央优先事项，加剧了地方债务，揭示了国家干预在后增长城市治理中的局限。
Strengthened state interventions have reshaped China’s urban governance agendas to achieve both economic and extra-economic goals, challenging the conventional understanding of urban entrepreneurialism. However, little is known about local struggles when extra-economic agendas confront local fiscal insufficiency. We investigate the trajectory of urban development in Dali, a small city in the peripheral regions of China. We find an emerging form of urban governance in which the central state consolidates control over local development politics, compelling local governments to repurpose entrepreneurial tactics, such as land value capture and public–private partnerships, to implement central priorities, especially environmental protection. These practices have reconfigured the previous local growth politics, while exacerbating local government indebtedness. We conceptualise this phenomenon as a new stage of state entrepreneurialism, a hybrid governance approach that employs market tactics to achieve central strategic objectives, resulting in state power restructuring and urban governance transformation with substantial liabilities. Based on grounded practices, this article illuminates the limits of state interventions in post-growth urban governance experiments.