Dalian, a city of a little more than six million people on the tip of the Liaodong peninsula in Liaoning province, is most frequently mentioned outside China for one of two reasons. First, as the host of the “Summer Davos,” Dalian has a reputation as one of China's cleanest and most beautiful cities. Dalian is also noted for its connection to one of China's most recognizable and notorious contemporary politicians: Bo Xilai. Before Bo attracted global attention for “smashing” corruption and singing Red songs as part of his populist reform campaign in Chongqing, and notoriety for the murder scandal that felled him in 2012, he served in the city of Dalian from 1984 through 2000 in various positions, and ultimately as mayor. However, Bo's populist turn in Chongqing was not at all predictable in terms of his tenure in Dalian, during which he presided over the city's opening to foreign direct investment (FDI) and its transformation from a socialist industrial base to an area for global corporate outsourcing.

Dalian's two reputations are, to be sure, deeply intertwined. Under Bo's leadership, the city initiated a massive transformation of the urban built environment and undertook a substantial public relations campaign to highlight its success in urban planning and economic reforms. Dalian's rise, both economically and publicly, coincided with Bo's political rise such that we cannot disentangle the effect of one from the other. The same is true of the mutual dependence of the city's economic trajectory and its pursuit of land and real estate development. As Dalian grew out of the rust belt into a global capital hub, the local government monopolized property rights and deployed land development as a tool for government financing, a model that almost all Chinese cities would replicate in the 2000s. This chapter narrates Dalian's economic growth and physical transformation, illustrating how its statist property-rights regime emerged as a result of the sequencing of global opening and economic reforms.

The Argument in Brief

The integral relationship between economic strategies and property-rights practices experienced throughout China is on particular display in Dalian. Dalian's reform era economic performance was made possible by a dramatic reorganization of its political economy from a state socialist heavy industry base to a global capital hub. This reorganization, itself possible because of Dalian's preferential status and therefore early access to global capital, generated a shift in local political alliances.