The power of representation: Re-theorizing China’s land development as a state-led strategic discursive–material nexus

China’s land development is commonly viewed as a state-led model, yet this paper seeks to deepen this understanding by examining it as a strategic discursive–material nexus, encompassing both material processes of land development and discursive processes of justification that reflect the diverse ways in which land can be utilized. To this end, two arguments are developed involving a cross-fertilization of the economic sociology of land and the cultural political economy. Firstly, the state strategically adjusts local land use and regimes to satisfy the changing geopolitical and political-economic imperative, and secondly, owing to the multiple affordances of land, various competing imaginations for, and interests in, land have emerged that potentially impede land (regime) change. Hence, the state strategically selects how it represents land from the variety of epistemological claims on it to justify institutional transformations and (re)development. We substantiate these arguments through analyzing a transit-oriented development-themed land development scheme in Shenzhen, and a big data economy-themed land reassignment in Guiyang.