“City of districts” as state project: socioeconomic unevenness and contested power relations in establishing Wansheng in Chongqing

Wansheng is a small and historically wealthy industrial territory currently under the jurisdiction of Chongqing provincial-level city as an economic and technological development district. The overlapping territorial policies through which the central government reconfigured Wansheng constituted the conflictive setting of the reform approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs of the State Council that merged Wansheng district and Qijiang county to establish Qijiang district in December 2011. This decision immediately produced discontent and social chaos in the former Wansheng district. Four months later, the central government repealed the original merger, establishing Wansheng as an economic and technological development district. Changes in administrative borders of sub-national territories in China are complex state strategies that intrinsically involve local bureaucratic conflicts and socioeconomic contradictions. This paper analyzes, through the disciplinary lens of political geography, the Wansheng-Qijiang merger as a contested and contradictory territorial strategy whose main goal was the centralization of power relations in Chongqing city by integrating two territories with extremely different socioeconomic and administrative conditions.