INNOVATING URBAN CHINA: The Rise of the Local Venture State and the Making of New Entrepreneurial Spaces

Lin Zhang and Tu Lan

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2025, vol. 49, issue 1, 142-162

Abstract: In this article we centralize the analytic of the local venture state (LVS) to offer a novel framework for investigating China's new urban entrepreneurialism, which emerged after the 2008 global financial crisis. As a spatiotemporally specific response to the crisis, the LVS goes beyond GDP‐driven developmentalism, seeking to simultaneously promote economic development, indigenous innovation and social equity using a variety of financialized policy instruments. Ethnographic case studies of new entrepreneurial spaces in Beijing's Zhongguancun area situate the LVS at the interface between Zhongguancun's urban space and China's innovation system. They reveal the rationalities behind the rise of the LVS and discrepancies among policy intentions, the implementation thereof and actual local results. Underlying the mixed results of the LVS, we argue, is the complicated power dynamics within the LVS and a fundamental contradiction between the dynamics of technological innovation and those of wealth redistribution. In our examination of China's LVS vis‐à‐vis global struggles to tackle the protracted economic crisis and achieve a more socially inclusive model of urban development, we stress the need to theorize urban entrepreneurialism from the global East with the aim of enriching the literature of urban China and of variegated urban entrepreneurialism.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.13279

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ijurrs:v:49:y:2025:i:1:p:142-162

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0309-1317

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban and Regional Research is currently edited by Alan Harding, Roger Keil and Jeremy Seekings

More articles in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().