Shanghai and Chongqing: the “province-level cities” as territorial strategies of the state in the Chinese economy

The territorial configuration of power relations in China is crucial to understand the processes that underpin economic and social changes. The complex and unstable political geography of China includes an administrative unit called ‘province-level city’, which the bulk of the scholars have wrongly translated as ‘municipalities’. These territories are directly managed by the central government as spaces for testing economic strategies or for developing national infrastructural projects. This paper will discuss the financial and corporate institutional framework for infrastructure development of Shanghai and the establishment of Chongqing as administrative territory for developing the ‘Three Gorges Dam’, as spatial territorial strategies the Chinese central government has designed to govern economic processes