Spatializing urban infrastructure investment in China: Cadre tenure, political competition, and uneven geography of government-pays public-private partnerships

Existing theory of urban growth machine has been criticized for its inherent tendency to over-emphasize the external forces of capital and globalization. Recent attempts have been made to examine the endogenous nature of China’s pro-growth politics, with competing viewpoints stressing intensive central-local fiscal relations as macro-level factors and the micro-level political considerations of local cadres. This research enriches the literature on urban pro-growth politics through an investigation of the uneven development of China's government-pays public-private partnerships (PPPs). It focuses on the individual characteristics of local cadres and critically examines the effects of different sources of promotion pressure on the development of government-pays PPPs. Based on a prefectural-level panel dataset from 2014 to 2018, the empirical analysis shows that the development of government-pays PPPs is driven by the promotion pressure of local cadres for career advancement. However, the promotion pressure of local cadres is mainly derived from their frequent cadre turnover and their inner impulse of competing with others, rather than from the actual improvement of socioeconomic performance. Additionally, the political considerations of local cadres are found to be heterogeneous according to region-specific conditions including the level of economic development, the degree of marketization, and the legacy of state socialism. Findings of this research call for greater attention paid to the variety and effectiveness of local cadres' promotion pressure as the underlying factors influencing their investment behaviors.