Domesticating globalisation, new economic spaces and regional polarisation in Guangdong Province, China

Concerns over the effects of globalisation and liberalisation have intensified the debates over the trajectories and underlying sources of regional inequality. This paper attempts to link macro studies of regional inequality to micro studies of local development and to expand the research on intraprovincial inequality in China to Guangdong Province. First, substantial evidence has been provided to illustrate the extent of polarisation between the Pearl River Delta (PRD) and the periphery, especially since the early 1990s. Second, it has been found that new economic spaces centred on exoproduction centres, high-tech zones, university clusters, and entrepreneurial spaces driven by the domestication of globalisation and the growth of the knowledge economy have emerged as new engines of regional growth. The orthodox notion of the PRD development as externally driven has become obsolete, and a new conceptualisation centred on the knowledge economy and integrated development better explains regional development and polarisation in Guangdong. Finally, the theoretical and policy implications of the research are discussed. The emerging form of regional development in the PRD represents an effort to make the knowledge economy the new engine of regional development and indicates that developing countries such as China are attempting to move beyond being a manufacturing assembler. The emergence of the knowledge economy in the PRD also has important implications for the recent efforts to develop the Greater Pearl River Delta, which needs to pay more attention to global networks for innovation and creativity. Moreover, the emergence of the knowledge economy makes the development of the periphery even more challenging due to the effects of self-reinforcing agglomeration and the constraints of geographical barriers.