On the frontier of party-state capitalism: Hong Kong, Guangdong & the making of the Greater Bay Area

On the frontier of party-state capitalism: Hong Kong, Guangdong & the making of the Greater Bay Area

When: Tuesday 16 May 6:00pm

Where: Lecture Theatre 270, Level 2, Wilkinson Building 

Speaker: Jamie Peck, University of British Columbia

China’s Greater Bay Area, comprising nine of Guangdong’s cities and the Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macau, is one of the world’s most powerful economies, with a GDP exceeding that of Canada, South Korea, and Russia. As a newly inaugurated region-building project, the GBA may be too big to fail, but it may also be too frail to succeed. Institutionally underpowered and internally divided, the GBA straddles (while being defined by) the potentially unstable fault line that separates China’s “two systems,” the socialist market economy of the mainland and the capitalist economies of the offshore SARs. The presentation will consider how to make sense of the GBA, both as a question for political economy and as an epistemological problem.

Speaker Bio

Jamie Peck, FRSC, FBA, FAcSS is Professor of Geography and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, Canada. With long-term research interests in economic geography, urban and regional studies, and institutional political economy, his publications include Variegated economies (Oxford), Urban studies inside/out: theory, method, practice (Sage, coedited with H Leitner & E Sheppard), Market/place: exploring spaces of exchange (Agenda, coedited with C Berndt & NM Rantisi), and Offshore: exploring the worlds of global outsourcing (Oxford).