This book introduces readers to the current social and economic state of China since its restructuring in 1949.

• Provides insights into the targeted institutional change that is occurring simultaneously across the entire country
• Presents context-rich accounts of how and why these changes connect to (if not contradict) regulatory logics established during the Mao-era
• A new analytical framework that explicitly considers the relationship between state rescaling, policy experimentation, and path dependency
• Prompts readers to think about how experimental initiatives reflect and contribute to the ‘national strategy’ of Chinese development
• An excellent extension of ongoing theoretical work examining the entwinement of subnational regulatory reconfiguration, place-specific policy experimentation, and the reproduction of national economic advantage

Kean Fan Lim is Lecturer in Economic Geography and Urban and Regional Development at Newcastle University, UK. He is primarily interested in the impact of city-regional policy experimentation on national-level regulatory pathways in China. Kean’s research has been widely published in journals within and beyond geography.