Shutian Huang
Department: Geography
Discipline: Geography
Research Centre/Unit: Amory
Project Summary
The Evolution of Uneven Economic Development between the North and South of Jiangsu Province in China Under a Growth-Orientated State Ideology:
The North and South of Jiangsu province in China are divided by the Yangtze river. This, however is more than a geographical divide, and also represents an increasingly sharp division in terms of social and economic development. This is represented on the poster of the earth at night-time, where the lights of the built-up urban areas in the South stand out far more brightly than those of the more rural North. This unevenness is on the one hand the result of distinct histories, with a set of historically accumulated social and economic relations resulting in different levels of economic development, but it is also the result of contemporary China’s growth-orientated state ideology and its institutional expressions. This research project will examine how the traditional struggles with the modern, how the domestic interacts with the global, how local and regional scales of governance coordinate and conflict with central government, and how these institutions and actors interconnect and co-evolve in a dynamic, relational and reflexive fashion under the so-called ‘China Model’ of economic development.
Wider Research Interests
Regional and urban development; Neo-Institutionalism; Political Ideology and social justice
