Moving up the value chain: Intermediation in industrial upgrading in the Pearl River Delta

The project «Moving up the value chain: Intermediation in Industrial Upgrading in the Pearl River Delta» has employed the lens of intermediation to analyze economic change. Industrial upgrading implies shifting from low value-added, land- and labor-intensive, and polluting industries to more knowledge intensive, cleaner industries. The study takes place in Guangdong province, South China. A development plan for South China was launched during the project period under the heading of the « Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area». The rhetoric and substantial policies introduced with this plan were subject of data collection for the project Jan-Dec 2021. Industrial upgrading is a field of intense policy work nationally in China and particularly in Guangdong. Official policy discourse has recently adopted the term «China's Greater Bay Area» to refer to Guangdong Province, Hong Kong, and Macao. The new designation reflected an ambition to turn South China into an international leader in research and development with global influence like that of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Tokyo Bay Area. The project has studied economic developments «from above» and «from below», attending both to official policies and to how actors at various scales navigate changing political and economic opportunities and constraints. Data collection was focused in two sectors: Low-end manufacturing for export to Africa (that Guangdong aspires to move away from), and the biomedical industry (that is strategically important to economic upgrading in Guangdong). The primary methods for data collection have been participant observation and open-ended interviews. The principal investigator and a postdoctoral researcher followed a limited number of cases over a ten-month period of ethnographic fieldwork 2018-19. The focus of inquiry in these studies is on how actors, whether individuals or institutions, attain and maintain positions from which they can create connections across scales. The project mapped how policies at different geographic scale have evolved and interact. «Indigenous innovation» is a key strategic term nationally. President Xi has stressed that in the increasingly fierce competition between nations, the government should «support scientific and technological innovation to take a lead role in the national economy and vigorously implement an innovation-driven development strategy» (Xinhua, 2013). However, several local governments in Guangdong have instead opted to import technology through foreign investments. They encourage investments in technology-intensive industries with the aim of crowding out investments in polluting and labor-intensive manufacturing. These local-level policies are founded on the idea that the logics, practices, and ethos of attractive capital are distinct from those in low-value added industries. South China has moved from being a place where pharmaceutical standards are imported through Western-controlled multinational companies to harboring its own ambitions for setting standards for globally mobile pharmaceuticals. Tso and Haugen have also demonstrated how intra-regional personal exchanges and professional mobility in East Asia has been important to industrial upgrading in the pharmaceutical industry. A postdoctoral researcher did a rhetorical and policy analysis to investigate changes that took place in the relationship between central and local governance since Xi Jinping came to power, and how these influenced the current opportunities for bottom-up initiatives. The Greater Bay Area has been defined as a part of China’s national strategy for regional development, placing it in a larger picture of parallel developments in other parts of China and in a more centralized decision-making context. In the literature on political practice, Sebastian Heilmann’s widely used concept of ‘experimentation under hierarchy’ from 2008 has not been updated in a systematic way in the literature, even though it is no longer valid for cases such as the policy plans for Pearl River Delta as it turns into the Greater Bay Area policy initiative. In terms of policy descriptions of the general increase of centralization, we have also not yet seen any other published case study of the Greater Bay Area describing the ways in which it represents a centralized version of local politics.

Prosjektet er et grunnforskningsprosjekt og har som hovedmål å generere ny kunnskap. Det er vanskelig å måle prosjektets innflytelse på forskningsfronten, men tilbakemeldinger fra kollegaer på konferanser og foredrag og tilslag på publisering i velrennomerte tidsskrifter indikerer at innsiktene fra prosjektet har funnet et bredt og relevant publikum hos forskerkolleger. Siden prosjektstart har det vært større offentlig oppmerksomhet knyttet til Kinas økonomiske utvikling og betydningen av internasjonale forbindelser. Kunnskap om endringene vi har studert i prosjektet er etterspurt blant representanter for forvaltningen og bedrifter, og prosjektleder har fått en merkbar økning i antall invitasjoner til å presentere innsikt som bygger på prosjektet, både i åpne fora rettet mot et generelt publikum og i lukkede fora rettet mot forvaltning og politikere.

The proliferation of brokerage across sectors has placed the topic back on the agenda in the social sciences. Yet, approaches to brokerage have remained remarkably static. This project moves the field forward by addressing an oft-neglected phase of brokerage: How actors position themselves in interstitial spaces to make brokerage possible. Research on brokerage has tended to take the morphology of social networks as its point of departure, and the novelty of my approach lies in shifting theoretical and empirical attention towards relationship formation. Theoretical innovation will be pursued by confronting current theories of brokerage with analytical perspectives from research on guanxi (interpersonal relations). Guanxi studies elucidate how relationships are generated through a mixture of interest, affect, and moral obligations, and this emphasis can produce new insights into how actors become brokers. The project employs ethnographic methods to examine how prospective brokers position themselves between local and transnational actors. The close analysis of a limited number of relationships departs from mainstream network research on brokerage, which aims to map all nodes and ties in the networks under study. Theory development will be grounded in empirical studies of how transnational linkages are generated in Guangdong, South China. Specifically, the case studies examine brokerage in the promotion of foreign investments in high value-added sectors and industrial upgrading. Chinas extraversion is a privileged vantage point for studying brokerage because of its massive scale and the intensity with which new links are being forged.