China’s publicly listed infrastructure REITs (C-REITs), launched in 2021, represent an important innovation in infrastructure finance and capital market reform. Their emergence raises important questions about the changing relationship between the state, market creation, and infrastructure financialization in China. Existing studies have variously interpreted C-REITs as an extension of state capitalism, an expression of state entrepreneurialism, or evidence of growing financialization. However, these perspectives are often treated separately and provide only a partial explanation of the development of the C-REIT market. This paper examines how state capitalism, state entrepreneurialism, and infrastructure financialization are articulated together in the development of China’s REIT market. Drawing on Peck’s conjunctural approach and the case of the Ping An REIT, it analyses ownership structures and control, market creation, asset securitization, and actor relationships. The findings show that SOEs remain dominant while the state actively creates and shapes the REIT market through institutional innovation. The infrastructure assets are increasingly transformed into tradable financial products through capital markets. The paper argues that C-REITs do not represent a transition from state capitalism to state entrepreneurialism. They constitute a distinctive form of state-led infrastructure financialization in which state ownership, market creation, and financialization are articulated together within an evolving form of party-state capitalism.
Operational resilience of subway systems is critical for sustaining service under disruptions. The lack of a practical assessment approach that links station-level capabilities to network-level performance can result in system overload, service inefficiency and increased operational costs for subway systems. This study develops a Pressure–State–Response (PSR) assessment framework for subway station resilience. A 31-indicator system is constructed and quantified using a cloud-model-based method to derive station resilience ratings of five selected stations in the Xuzhou subway system. The network efficiency metric evaluates network-level resilience assuming three disruption scenarios. Scenario 1 represents a functional failure that disconnects stations from the network. Scenario 2 represents service failure in which trains bypass affected stations without stopping, and scenario 3 is the combination of both scenarios. High state and response resilience are observed across five stations, consistent with standardised company-level procedures and resource configurations for monitoring, preparedness, safety management, responses and recovery. In contrast, cross-station differences are driven primarily by pressure resilience, which is sensitive to station-specific exposure, particularly at high-demand interchange stations. Network resilience is highest under bypass operations and lowest under functional disconnection with segmented services, underscoring the importance of preserving through‑movement and connectivity during disruptions. Findings recommend focusing on exposure control at high-demand stations, integrating monitoring with rapid response activation, institutionalising organisational learning and strengthening resilience governance. The PSR assessment framework supports comparative diagnosis of subway stations and scenario-based planning for resilience enhancement in subway operations.
This paper examines the reconfiguration of state-capital relations, focusing on China’s model of governance. It brings the new state capitalism framework prevalent in Western scholarship into the conversation. The analysis reveals fundamental differences in the ways the state engages with the market. It emphasizes that new state capitalism embeds the state within the capitalist framework for capital accumulation. However, China demonstrates a model in which the state uses the market rather than being subordinated to the market. This paper argues that China should be understood neither as a variant of new state capitalism nor as an instance of varieties of capitalism (VoC), but rather as a state-constituted market economy, in which the market is reconfigured as an evolving instrument of governance. The state offers the market space for development to achieve its objectives. When the market’s own dynamics result in outcomes that diverge from these objectives, the state continuously reconstitutes the market to align with its strategic objectives, demonstrating a divergent trajectory in the global political economy.
Located within the world’s largest urban region, the Guangdong-Macao In-Depth Cooperation Zone in Hengqin (GMH) is a new experimental and innovative governance space connected to China’s ‘one country, two systems’ policy. Located within the geographical boundaries of Zhuhai, the GMH is governed under a shared administrative jurisdiction between Macao, Zhuhai and Guangdong Province. Originally developed from researching African urban contexts, we mobilise and extend a ‘transcalarity’ framework to overcome perceived weaknesses inherent in the ‘state rescaling’ approach often deployed to explain subnational governance arrangements in China. The paper reveals how polycentric urban regions such as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area are actively governed through transcalar state strategies. It shows how transcalarity, as a concept, can reveal important new empirical and theoretical insights into urban China. Conceptually, it reframes Hengqin as a ‘buffer zone’ that stabilises yet simultaneously destabilises the ‘one country, two systems’ configuration, producing experimental governance dynamics. Empirically, the paper draws on 39 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, to provide a granular and multi-perspectival analysis of experimental governance practices in the GMH. We demonstrate that central government actors orchestrate polycentric urban development through selective delegation, embedded jurisdictional controls and strategic recalibration of intergovernmental relations. This produces distinctly asymmetrical outcomes: Macao gains institutional leverage, while Zhuhai’s formal administrative authority is constrained. Overall, our paper demonstrates how polycentricity is strategically constructed, rather than emergent, in contemporary state spatial projects.
China’s urban food system is increasingly governed through standards of formalisation, visual order and supply-chain integration. Yet small-scale, vendor-led food circulation continues to sustain everyday access to fresh produce across rural and urban geographies. This article examines Jinsheng, a busy fresh produce market in Sihong County, northern Jiangsu, which is located in the urban centre yet widely described as ‘rural-like’. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I use this paradox to examine how vendors organise food flows through agricultural routines, embodied knowledge, rural social networks, multi-role labour and local spatial familiarity. I conceptualise these practices as ‘vernacular logistics’: locally embedded arrangements through which vendors sustain circulation between fragmented rural production and urban consumption. The article makes two arguments. First, vernacular logistics constitute a form of infrastructural agency, enabling vendors to work through partial regulation, uncertain recognition and uneven market governance. Second, these logistical practices produce the marketplace as a rural-urban interface, where rural temporalities, materialities and forms of exchange are continuously brought into the urban core. By foregrounding the everyday work of food circulation, the article challenges planning approaches that equate infrastructural improvement with standardisation alone, and points towards more differentiated licensing, spatial and temporal regulation, and market management practices that recognise vernacular forms of urban provisioning.
