Financialization of urban development in China: fantasy, fact or somewhere in between?

It has been widely and persuasively argued that financialization is an ongoing and all-encompassing phenomenon within large swathes of contemporary capitalism. In particular, there has been much penetrative analysis of the impact of financialization on the built environment, especially in the run-up to and wake of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis in the United States. The term ‘financialization’ itself, however, is open to a number of definitions both broad and more focused, and there is little agreement about how best to understand the concept. This paper inserts China into these debates through an examination of how urban and infrastructure projects are undertaken to ask whether financialization is a factor in the construction and operation of new urban and infrastructural landscapes in China. The paper takes as its interpretative lens the urban investment and development companies that fund, construct, and then often operate and manage new projects on behalf of local government. It argues that the funding of development projects places increasing pressures on local governments and their corporations, and that there are signs these pressures are leading to a resort to securitized loans. While this would correspond to one definition of financialization, it does not, we argue, amount to a systemic move into a financialized stage of capitalism in corporatist China.