Notes on academic research

“Bayspeak: Narrating China’s Greater Bay Area”

Chris Meulbroek, Jamie Peck & Jun Zhang

Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 53:1 (2023)

China’s Greater Bay Area (GBA) initiative is the latest and most ambitious attempt to “regionalise” the development process in the Pearl River Delta, promising to accelerate political-economic integration via an innovation-intensive model of growth. Drawing on the techniques of critical discourse analysis, this article presents a deconstruction of the GBA’s emergent spatial imaginary – “bayspeak” – and the rescaled mode of governance that it portends. By way of an interrogation of texts and contexts relating to the GBA initiative, it is suggested that the plan should be taken seriously, if not literally, in its projection of an encompassing and assimilative, if somewhat intransitive, mode of governance. An effort to constitute a mega-region “for itself,” rather than simply “in itself,” the GBA programme has opened a new space (and scale) for co-ordinated development and growth-coalition building under the auspices of the decentralised party-state. As an emergent discourse, bayspeak can be read as hyperbolic, aspirational and symbolic, but as the benign and developmentalist face of the Communist Party line in this economically important but politically stressed region, it may yet prove to be significant. From the Abstract

“Analyzing the impact of sustainable economic development from the policy text network: Based on the practice of China’s bay area policy”

Huijie Zhou, Shangjia Yu, Pengyue Wu

PLOS ONE (2023)

In order to break through the surface analysis of the content structure of policy texts, an in-depth discussion of the linkage between regional policy makers and objectives is helpful to analyze the formation mechanism of policy effects. Through social network analysis and multi-index analysis, this study takes the Qianwan New Area of Ningbo and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area as representatives to explore the policy framework for the sustainable development of manufacturing industry in the two bay areas respectively. Through the construction of government department cooperation network, policy keyword co-occurrence network, department keyword correlation network, and the analysis of network density, network centrality, structural holes, and cohesive subgroups, it is found that the impact results show great differences, which is related to the network structure of manufacturing policy text. From the Abstract