Understanding city-regionalism in China: regional cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta

Understanding city-regionalism in China: regional cooperation in the Yangtze River Delta. Regional Studies. China has witnessed the orchestration of city-regionalism and two different regional-scale mechanisms have influenced this integration and cooperation: the top-down state-mandated process and the bottom-up process initiated by local governments. However, this has not been a smooth process and it is shaped by the internal politics generated by China's state configurations. Using the Yangtze River Delta as a case study, this paper argues that China's territorial administrative divisions are a historical configuration that is essential to understand the efforts to construct city-regions as well as to understand the failure to create a new sub-national state space.