Rescaling the Chinese state and regionalization in the Great Mekong Subregion

In the past five years, the Chinese state has made great effort to implement its 'going-out' strategy, i.e., the geographical expansion of Chinese capital and labor overseas. This paper explores how the Chinese state rescales to implement this going-out strategy and produce new spaces of development. Particularly, this paper examines how the Chinese state reconfigures its institutional ensemble to integrate landlocked Yunnan Province into the transnational economy embodied in the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS). The paper finds that the Chinese state deploys two spatial strategies - upward coordination with international organizations and GMS national governments, and downward implementation throughout Yunnan Province - to establish an interscalar regulatory regime. Through this regime the Chinese state aims to assemble capital, labor, and political clout to expand Chinese capital and labor in the GMS, and to develop Yunnan's economy to ease uneven domestic geographical development. This paper contributes to the booming literature on the political-economic restructuring of national states and to the limited scholarship on the institutional arrangement for cross-border regions in a non-Western context. It also sheds light on how the rescaling of the Chinese state potentially shapes the international political economy.