Jenn-hwan Wang, Chair Professor
E-mail: [email protected]
Graduate Institute of Development Studies, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Tse-Kang Leng, Research Fellow,
E-mail: [email protected] Institute of Political Science, Academia Sinica,
Professor (Joint Appointment) Department of Political Science, National Chengchi University, Taiwan
Abstract
The development of high-tech industrial parks (HTIPs) has become a salient phenomenon in China’s economic and urban development. Current studies regarding the development of HTIPs tend to focus either on the active role of the local government or on the consequences of technological innovation that those parks may have brought about. Very few studies have paid attention to the intrinsic relationship between the process of space production in building HTIPs and the effect on urban development. To fill this theoretical gap, this paper considers developing HTIPs as a territorial project through which both central and local states seek to promote economic growth by reorganizing their territories so as to facilitate capital accumulation based on high-tech industries. We use Beijing’s Zhongguancun and Shanghai’s Yangpu areas as examples to show the active role played by district governments in promoting and using the HTIP symbol to develop the designated land. In the end, due to the quick tax-generating potentiality, the construction of HTIPs has given rise to property-led projects which district governments are much more enthusiastic in pursuing. The property-led development projects paradoxically, as we argue, may have generated some negative effects on the promotion of high-tech development, which especially shows in the case of Yangpu district.
1. Introduction
During the past two decades, high-tech industrial parks (HTIPs) have increasingly been promoted as growth engines in various cities in China to facilitate regional and urban development as well as generate technological innovation. Large areas of urban and rural lands have been developed and redeveloped to support the dream of becoming high tech nodes in the global technological production networks. Among them, Beijing’s Zhongguancun (ZGC) science park was the earliest (1988) and has been regarded as the most ambitious project that might not only have been able to attract a huge amount of foreign investment but also to generate indigenous innovation due to the abundant human resources in the city. Shanghai and other cities have followed suit.
Indeed, the Chinese state in the late 1980s had installed two very important reform programs to rejuvenate the aged R&D system in China, the first one being the 863 plan (1986) and the other the Torch Program (1988). The former aimed to pool resources and scientists together wherever possible to serve as a bridge and to keep up with international high-technology development in several high technologies. The latter, by contrast, was intended to learn the experiences and successes of Silicon Valley in order to build China’s technopoles so as to revitalize China’s traditional industries, and also promote the creation of new and high-technology enterprises (Wang et al., 1998; Zhou, 2005; Segal, 2003). It was in such circumstances that ZGC was designated as China’s first HTIP in 1988. By 1993, 52 nationally recognized zones existed throughout the country, covering 28 of the 31 provinces, autonomous regions and centrally-administered municipalities. These HTIPs soon became the growth poles in each region, especially in the cities, and thus high tech industrialization has become intertwined with high rise urbanization, especially in the two major world cities in China, namely, Beijing and Shanghai.
We regard the creation and re-creation of HTIPs in China in general, and in Beijing and Shanghai in particular, as a process of space production in which spatial transformation concurs with China’s pursuit of modernity through the strategy of territorialization. In this respect, as Harvey argues, modernity entails the conquest of space, the tearing down of all spatial barriers, and the ultimate ‘annihilation of space through time’ (Harvey, 1989:205). Thus, the central state wants to open its territory to global capital so as to attract foreign investments and to demand the most updated technologies. The municipal governments in turn want
to reorganize urban space through the strategy of building new HTIPs so as to pursue rapid capital accumulation and technological innovation. Finally, the district governments are able to use the high-tech banner to attract capital investment, especially in the real estate sector. The High Tech Park has become a representation of progress which is hoped to bring high value-added economic activities to the locality and ultimately contribute to the district governments’ revenue. Ultimately, the HTIP has become a territory that has become fused with various forces contesting for its formation and space production.
Existing studies on China’s development of HTIPs are mainly focused on two issues: the first approach emphasizes the role of the local state in building HTIPs and promoting local economic development (i.e., Segal, 2003; Hsing, 1998; Zweig, 2002; Wang and Lee, 2007), whereas the second stresses the importance of cluster effects in generating technological innovation and shaping the local innovation system (Zhou, 2005, 2008; Zhou and Tong, 2003 Wu, 2007). Very few studies, however, have paid attention to the intrinsic relationship between the process of space production in building HTIPs and the effect on urban development.
To fill this theoretical gap in the literature, this paper regards developing HTIPs as a territorial project through which both central and local states seek to promote economic growth by reorganizing the spatial structure in their territories so as to facilitate capital accumulation based on high-tech industries.
We use Beijing’s ZG and Shanghai’s Yangpu area as examples to show how district governments in both cities have actively promoted the construction of HTIPs and have used them as symbols to develop the designated land. In the end, due to the quick tax-generating potential, the construction of HTIPs has given rise to property-led projects, if not replacing high-tech development, which district governments are much more enthusiastic in pursuing. The property-led development projects, we argue, may have created unexpectedly negative effects that have affected the promotion of high-tech development, which especially shows in the case of Yangpu district.