Page 334 - Sustainable Cities and Communities Design Handbook

Chapter 16

Urban Sustainability and

Industrial Migration: The
Green Transition of Hefei,

China

Benjamin Leffel a
University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA, United States

Chapter Outline
Introduction 307 Discussion and Conclusion 320
Green Urban Planning 308 Acknowledgments 321
Dueling Investments 310 References 322
Hefei’s Green Transition 316 Further Reading 324

INTRODUCTION
Ang (2017) observes that from the early 2000s, local governments along
China’s coast began increasingly expelling less valuable, high-polluting in-
dustries to make room for more valuable, nonpolluting industries, prompting
those high-polluting industries to migrate to inland Chinese provinces, as re-
flected in recorded flows of “beyond-province investment” (shengwai zijin),
or domestic investment from one Chinese province to another. This study
corroborates the connection between beyond-province investment and high-
polluting industries by showing that when one ranks the central region pro-
vincial capital cities by their relative levels of high-polluting industrial

a. Benjamin Leffel is a Sociology Ph.D. student at the University of California Irvine, holds a
Masters of International Affairs in China Studies from the School of International Service at the
American University, Washington DC, and is Director of Research for the Tai Initiative, a
USeChina subnational cooperation organization. His research on Sino-foreign subnational
networking and cooperation has informed the work of the US Department of State, the British
Government Office for Science, and US local governments.

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