Capital accumulation, territoriality, and the reproduction of state sovereignty in China: Is this “new” state capitalism?

The portrayals of “new state capitalism” in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity—states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the “free market”. This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a “rise” of state capitalistic maneuvers from China as a dynamic sovereignty–accumulation nexus. Specifically, Chinese state capitalism—and arguably state capitalism in general—constitutes the reproduction of sovereign rule. Underpinning this tension-filled process is territoriality: the use of territory for political, economic, and social ends. This dynamic relationship will be illustrated through an examination of how and why Yunnan, a southwestern Chinese province that was economically marginalized for several decades, emerged as a geostrategic platform for facilitating new rounds of capital accumulation. Through large-scale infrastructural investments in Yunnan, the Chinese state generated new territorial configurations that (a) enabled the positioning of Yunnan as a “bridgehead” of Chinese economic statecraft and (b) encouraged investments aimed at capturing new growth opportunities. While this state-led developmental process partially resolves tensions generated by previous rounds of capital accumulation, it also generates new tensions. Building on this case study, the paper demonstrates how Chinese state capitalism more accurately exemplifies a state-building process that is embedded in and is constituted by a central contradiction between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power. It concludes by presenting two directions for future research on Chinese state capitalism.


Introduction
The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and academic research have become a potent geopolitical category. As Alami and Dixon (2020: 2) cogently demonstrate, these "problematic" discourses play "a powerful role in categorizing, disciplining, and hierarchizing the spaces of world politics". The role is perhaps most acutely accentuated through the U.S. trade war with China during the Donald Trump administration (2017-2021)-the entire Chinese political economy was first viewed with suspicion before it was subject to punitive measures because Chinese state intervention was deemed as a concrete economic threat (Boylan et al., 2021;Gertz and Evers, 2020;Steinbock, 2018). This imagination has not dissipated despite Trump's electoral loss. "One of the most pressing challenges the Biden administration will face", Blanchette (2021) argues "is how to compete with, and push back against, China's increasingly powerful and disruptive state capitalist system, which not only threatens U.S. economic and strategic interests, but also undermines the regulatory and legal architecture that underpins the global economy." This politically realist approach is understandably popular because of its simplicity-the story of capital accumulation, namely the capture of monetary surplus value following the sale of goods and services produced by wage laborers, becomes one in which a "good" state seeks to discipline and punish a "bad" state. Yet, this approach is simultaneously simplistic in two interrelated ways: it is (a) territorially fetishistic in the way state space (e.g. China, the United States) is presented as static and timeless and (b) conceptually reductionistic by equating the global system of capitalism as an aggregate of internally undifferentiated national capitalisms. In reality, however, the capital accumulation process encompasses the global scale and is underpinned by what Harvey (2005) terms an essential contradiction between the imperative of capital to break down geographical barriers and the interests of territorially based class alliances to embed free-flowing capital. This contradiction applies to all participants in the capital accumulation process.
And here is where the Chinese state's role becomes complicated: it is simultaneously a part of free-flowing capital (via state-owned enterprises and, more recently, through equity investments in transnational corporations (TNCs) as well as a part of territorial class alliances at the subnational, national and transnational levels. Examining how the Chinese state proactively resolves these contradictions across different geographical scales on a rolling basis would therefore sidestep the limitations of territorial fetishism and conceptual reductionism that portray state capitalism as a threat to neoliberal hegemony a priori: it advances knowledge on the concrete economic and non-economic reasons for the Chinese state's participation in the transnational capital accumulation process.
To this end, the paper frames the purported "rise" and "threat" of state capitalistic maneuvers from China as a dynamic sovereignty-accumulation nexus. It first examines how the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) consolidated its sovereign rule after the establishment of a new Chinese state-the People's Republic of China (PRC), the official name of contemporary China-in 1949 through extensive territorial reconfigurations that enabled state-driven capital accumulation. While consolidating sovereign rule for the CPC, these new territorial logics generated barriers for and hence pronounced tensions with the imperative of free-flowing capital. These tensions consequently provided the impetus for Deng Xiaoping to launch market-oriented reforms in 1978. Deng's geographically targeted approach produced new territorial class alliances that eased tensions with free-flowing capital, but generated acute domestic uneven development that undermined the political-ideological legitimacy of the CPC. New territorial alliances were formed in response to these challenges-alliances that now extend across the global scale.
These cumulative processes collectively underscore why the CPC has to respond to and resolve these tensions-it needs to sustain state sovereignty. This necessity is a universal requirement for all states, to be sure, but it is especially salient in the Chinese context where the perpetual survival of the ruling party is the precondition of state sovereignty. It contrasts the situation in many countries where the primary political question is which party implements state sovereignty rather than whether sovereign power will dissolve if a ruling party is replaced. To ensure its perpetual rule and in turn the existence of the PRC as a state, the CPC must generate conditions that enable the reproduction of sovereignty and preempt sociopolitical resistance. Capital accumulation and territorial reconfigurations are its primary methods. Occurring well before the current debates on "new state capitalism", this focus on existential longevity highlights how Chinese state capitalism is not an historically novel system that is constructed to "threaten" the current global neoliberal hegemony. State-driven capital accumulation may appear anomalous to and are hence uncomfortable for votaries of neoliberal universalism, but its instrumental objective since the founding of the PRC has always been to ease any existential threats to the party-state system.
The dynamic relationship between capital accumulation, territoriality, and the reproduction of state sovereignty will be presented through an analysis of how Yunnan, a province in southwestern China, evolved from territorial peripherality during the first three decades of post-1978 reforms to national developmental priority over the past decade. This case study spotlights a relatively underexplored aspect of Chinese state capitalism-it is a process that is driven both by domestic state spatial strategies, which constrained economic development in Yunnan for several decades, and the transnational imperative to reduce barriers for capital flows, which involved state interventions to enhance Yunnan's transport and logistical connectivity. In this instance, the Yunnan government leveraged its access to Myanmar and lobbied to enhance its long-standing peripheral status within the national political-economic hierarchy by becoming a crucial platform for actualizing nationallevel challenges, namely (a) the uneven development generated by the domestic industrialization agenda that explicitly favored coastal provinces in the 1980s and 1990s and (b) relatively weak access to new labor and consumer markets in Southeast Asia.
The Yunnan case study is embedded within a macro-level geographical-historical analysis that consolidates the core argument of this paper: the emerging "threat" of "Chinese state capitalism" as it is portrayed in the international media could be more accurately evaluated through the Chinese economy's changing connections within the global system of capitalism. The newly formed PRC first integrated with the Soviet-led "socialist world economy" in the 1950s before engaging with a gradual and spatially selective attempt at global economic integration since 1978. Enabling these connections is the recurring reconfiguration of Chinese state territory to embed transnational circulatory capital in targeted locations. The paper will consider the constitutive role and implications of three national-level spatial projects: the Great Western Development program (xibu dakaifa 西部大开发) to uplift socioeconomic development in the western interior, the positioning of selected border cities as "bridgeheads" (qiaotoubao 桥头堡), and the transnational Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
Research data informing the analysis in this paper is derived from two levels. The historical analysis of Mao era development is based on policy documents, published statistics, and memoirs of CPC leaders, while the case study on Yunnan draws on the fieldwork conducted in Kunming, Yunnan's capital city, and Ruili, Yunnan's largest overland trade port that connects to Myanmar, between July 2017 and August 2019. In Ruili, the authors visited cross-border trade sites and interviewed 10 local officials in charge of customs and trade promotion. Each interview lasted about 45-60 minutes, and three officials were interviewed twice to clarify some key points. Ruili's statistical yearbooks from 2000 to 2019 were analyzed to obtain a comprehensive picture of China's engagement with Myanmar via this border city. In Kunming, the authors interviewed two officials in the Yunnan Department of Commerce to understand how the provincial government-aligned Yunnan's development with national strategies. Interviews in Kunming lasted about 30 minutes because of time constraint. Policy archives related to Yunnan's development were accessed in the Yunnan Archives Bureau and more recent policies were sourced from the digital repository of Yunnan Daily (https://yndaily.yunnan.cn). The interview data is juxtaposed with policy documents and published statistics to delineate the trajectory of Yunnan's regional development and its geoeconomic engagement with Myanmar. This paper comprises five subsequent parts. The next section will critically evaluate cutting-edge research on state-capital relations before establishing the framework to conceptualize and assess the Chinese state's relationship with capital accumulation. Why dominant scales of capital accumulation changed after the founding of the PRC will be examined in the third section. This then sets up the empirical case study of Yunnan's territorial repositioning and reconfigurations in section 4. Section 5 synthesizes and abstracts from the empirical analysis to demonstrate the importance of conceptualizing Chinese state capitalism as a dynamic sovereignty-accumulation nexus. Two further research directions emerging from this study will be presented in the concluding section.
State capitalism: Sovereignty consolidation through capital accumulation and territorial reconfigurations State capitalism has received substantial research attention since Vladimir Lenin introduced the concept as a positive form of socioeconomic regulation a century ago. Even though the rise of the Fordist regime of accumulation in advanced capitalist economies after the Second World War was largely construed as a triumph of private enterprise over state-led development, Buick and Crump (1986: 15) contend that state capitalist countries "do not exist apart from the rest of world capitalism; they are an integral part of it, one where state ownership and state enterprise have become the predominant institutional form for the operation of the economic mechanism of capitalism." And empirical evidence has shown this predominance to be enduring under conditions of global neoliberal hegemony over the past three decades (Babic et al., 2020;Bremmer, 2009). These developments jointly raise a theoretical question: what, actually, is the relationship between "state capitalism" and the global system of capitalism?
To address this question, this paper adopts a relational definition of state capitalism that circumvents its widespread portrayal as a geopolitical marker of illiberalism. It refers to the (1) state ownership and investment of capital within and beyond national territories and (2) interventionist actions in the capital accumulation process to achieve geopolitical and geoeconomic objectives (Alami and Dixon, 2021;Sperber, 2019). These two characteristics are not diametrically opposed to "free market" capitalism; as research has demonstrated, they are generic functions that manifest in varying degrees across different state types-neoliberal, developmental, and authoritarian (Evans, 1995;Mazzucato, 2018). That the state is capable of partaking in the capital accumulation process regardless of its underlying ideology should not be surprising, as Engels (1976: 360) argues more than a century ago: The modern state, whatever its form, is an essentially capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal aggregate capitalist The more productive forces it takes over in its possession, the more it becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-workers, proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not abolished, rather it is pushed to the limit.
While Engels (1976) examines the state-capital entwinement at the individual state level, Holloway (1994: 32) broadens the analytical scale by defining the state's role within the capitalist global economy: If capitalist social relations are inherently global, then each national state is a moment of global society, a territorial fragmentation of a society which extends throughout the world. No national state, 'rich' or 'poor' can be understood in abstraction from its existence as a moment of the global capital relation… All national states are defined, historically and repeatedly, through their relation to the totality of capitalist social relations.
If all national states-regardless of governance ideologies-are defined in relation to "the totality of capitalist social relations", it would be more plausible to explore the extent to which the "capitalist relationship" of the state as conceived by Engels (1976) can be "pushed to the limit" through linkages within and beyond state territories. Harvey's (1982) dialectical conceptualization of capitalist expansion offers an important angle to ascertain and assess these linkages: capital may tend to flow freely, but it also requires spatial fixity to accumulate value. States have long been proactive in shaping spatial fixes for transnational circulatory capital through what Agnew (2005: 437) terms territoriality, "the use of territory for political, social and economic ends". As Brenner (1998: 462) observes, the territorial state exists both "as a form of territorialization for capital and as an institutional mediator of uneven geographical development on differential spatial scales". Unsurprisingly, then, states are fundamental to the reproduction of the global capitalist system. "If states had not existed", Harvey (2005: 105) avers, "capitalism would have had to invent them".
The territorial logics that underpin state-capital relations are extensively explored in Arrighi's (1994) influential historical analysis of the modern world system: states harness capital as a means for territorial expansion, while territorial acquisitions are also necessary to generate the resources for capital accumulation. For this reason, Arrighi (1994: 34) contends, the world system has been made and remade to "resolve the recurrent contradiction between an 'endless' accumulation of capital and a comparatively stable organization of political space." The situation becomes complicated when this "recurrent contradiction" incorporates the state's multidimensional relationship with capital. The state can be and often is a part of capital, yet it is also the primary regulator of capital across several geographical scales. In this sense, the state requires spatial fixes on the one hand (so that it can realize specific political objectives through place-specific capital accumulation) and is capable, on the other hand, of influencing and actualizing these spatial fixes through territoriality.
These interventions now commonly extend beyond state territory in ways that need not necessitate forceful military-driven occupations. As Glassman (1999: 673) demonstrates, the state apparatus becomes "increasingly oriented towards facilitating capital accumulation for the most internationalized investors, regardless of their nationality." Exemplifying this qualitatively distinct process in the Chinese context is the intensification of the "Go Abroad" program for Chinese firms after the 2008 global financial crisis and the launch of the BRI, an ambitious vision to drive global-scale connectivity through infrastructural investments, in 2013.
At one level, this paper's conceptual focus on territoriality aligns with Alami and Dixon's (2021: 4) call for a relational approach to state capitalism research, "one that aims at capturing the dialectical and cumulative unfolding of different modalities of state intervention across space, scale and time". Whether territorially targeted state interventions could embed and/or reproduce transnational circulatory capital through creating profit-generating spatial fixes are contingent on place-specific path dependency, infrastructural connectivity extending across different geographical scales, and ease of market access. And these aspects do interact dialectically with other modalities of state interventions. At the same time, however, this relational approach must explicitly consider every state's existential necessity to reproduce state sovereignty-the unlimited and indivisible rule by a state.
Research on state capitalism is largely premised on the shaky assumption that the "state" part of state capitalism is inherently stable. Yet, right from the very earliest state formations, the process of creating and sustaining a state structure has been highly unstable (Scott, 2017). And instability has indeed underpinned the Chinese trajectory of state formation over the past 150 years. The Qing Dynasty endured very unstable rule for much of the 19th century before its eventual collapse in 1911. This was followed by four decades of political and social chaos before the current sovereign, the CPC, asserted its power over a new state called the PRC in 1949. Carrai (2019: 1-2) therefore correctly observes that a "quest for sovereignty characterizes China's modern history…sovereignty has become the cornerstone of China's foreign policy." Yet this quest is not only circumscribed to compliance with international law, the resolution of international territorial disputes, and the establishment of cordial international relations; the development of extensive state power domestically is equally, if not more, important for consolidating this nascent state structure. This is because the existence of the PRC as a state is premised on the power and survival of the ruling party (the CPC). State power therefore becomes a function of party survival, but securing this power is always a contingency due to three rolling challenges: acute uneven development across the country (Lim, 2014), competing challenges for sovereign rule within CPC-held territories (Kinzley, 2018), and entrenched ideological differences at the highest policy-making levels (Saich, 2021). It is for this reason that territorially targeted capital accumulation across China also becomes a necessary means for the CPC to reproduce and reinforce sovereign rule.
To ensure that both the logics of capital accumulation and territoriality work for the Chinese state, tensions between the free-flowing imperative of capital and the place-based demands of territorial class alliances must be eased regularly. The dynamic connections between these tensions and state sovereignty comprise what this paper terms the sovereignty-accumulation nexus. Presented as a conceptual framework in Figure 1, the sovereignty-accumulation nexus goes beyond state-centric studies on the quantity and efficiency of state involvement in the economy by explaining why territorial reconfigurations-refer to the middle box of the diagram-are shaped by both transnational circulatory capital, of which the state is an integral part, and the state, which has to reproduce its sovereign rule (refer to the top and bottom boxes of the diagram). In so doing, this paper does not presume the existence of a definitive "state capitalist" prototype; the form of "state capitalism" requires careful (re)mapping and assessment at specific conjunctures. This is the focus of the next four sections.

Territorial reconfigurations and interior marginalization in post-1949 China
The PRC was never insulated from the global economy after its formation in 1949. It was, indeed, internationalized right from its inception by becoming a major component within the USSR-led "socialist world economy". As Kirby (2006) demonstrates, the newly formed Chinese state participated in this international economy through trade plans and technological sharing. A "one price rule"-i.e. all trading partners would buy and sell a particular produce at the same priceapplied to trade. Transactions were denominated in the Soviet ruble, with the State Bank of the USSR serving as the clearing house. This internationalization arguably impelled Mao Zedong to accelerate the national consolidation of productive resources that were then concentrated in disparate regional economies. There was, in other words, a strong territorial impetus to produce a coherent national scale of accumulation both because of China's participation in the socialist world economy and because of the highly uncoordinated nature of the subnational economies.
To accumulate capital for trade and retain trading partners' confidence, the CPC relied primarily on an accumulation approach imported from the Soviet system-the "price scissors" mode of accumulation ( jiage jiandao cha 价格剪刀差). Under this approach, capital-intensive heavy industries were mainly located in the coastal cities. To ensure steady supplies of funds and/or raw materials to these industries, surplus laborers and their families (totaling 80% of the population) were immobilized in the rural People's Communes (renmin gongshe 人民公社). Enabling this accumulation approach was a state monopsony-the "unified purchase and sale" (tonggou tongxiao 统购统销) system first instituted in 1953-that acquired all agricultural products at very low prices. The products were then used to sustain workers in the cities and/or used as raw materials in industrial production. Industrial labor and raw material costs were consequently suppressed. Peasants simultaneously subsidized national-scale industrialization in China by accepting state-suppressed prices for their agricultural products and paying higher prices for goods produced by urban-based industries. Effectively, then, rural labor power became the basis for the CPC to define and capture value, a strategy that persists in the present despite four decades of market reforms (Gong, 2019;Rozelle and Hell, 2020).
The China-Soviet ideological split in the late 1950s and the concurrent geopolitical threat from the U.S. triggered a territorial reconfiguration project to enhance national security. Between 1964 and 1971, the CPC implemented a massive campaign-the Third Front construction(sanxian jianshe, 三线建设)-to develop the western hinterland and facilitate industrial relocation from the coast. Aimed at creating a huge self-sufficient industrial base area, this interior-focused campaign engendered over 1100 big and medium projects that were approved and continued until 1980 (Naughton, 1988). Nearly 400 state-owned enterprises were relocated from coastal cities to the hinterland for war preparation (Meyskens, 2020). During this period, 220 million yuan (∼US $89.43 million) of the national budget was invested in 21 new key projects on power, coal, fertilizers, and traffic in Yunnan, while the Yunnan provincial government invested 330 million yuan (∼US$134.15 million) to build 59 key projects in heavy industries such as metallurgical plant, coal, fertilizer, and machinery (Chao, 2009). 1 These territorial reallocations of economic resources during the Third Front campaign collectively demonstrate the importance of conserving state sovereignty for the CPC.
The territorial logic of the Third Front was inverted after Deng Xiaoping came into power and launched liberalization reforms in 1978 to accelerate and intensify capital accumulation. This process started with the introduction of four special economic zones (SEZs) in 1979 in southeastern China before it was gradually expanded nationwide over the next decade. On the whole, the geographical bias is palpable: coastal provinces enjoyed preferential policies for attracting foreign investments, retaining foreign exchange, controlling prices, and accessing financing. These policies converted targeted city regions into globally competitive economic entities through foreign direct investments and enhanced trade (which consequently contributed to substantial economic growth over the next four decades).
Spatially selective global economic engagement engendered huge social and spatial inequalities simultaneously, however. According to research by the Swiss bank Credit Suisse (2021: 20), China was home to 5.27 million US dollar millionaires in China in 2020, ranking second in the world behind the United States. Yet, as the Prime Minister, Li Keqiang, revealed in 2020, more than 600 million citizens continue to earn monthly incomes of 1000 yuan (∼US$155) or under, barely sufficient to cover living expenses (The Economist, 2020). Uneven economic-geographical development has also become pronounced across the country. This is because many TNCs preferred to invest in coastal cities and therefore provided these cities with a first-mover advantage in industrialization. In turn, the interior provinces supplied raw materials and inexpensive labor to thriving manufacturing hubs along the coast (Fan, 1995). This development effectively meant interior provinces not only lagged coastal regions in income, but also became directly dependent on industrialization in these regions. Figure 2 shows the GDP per capita in Yunnan relative to national income. Yunnan has lagged behind national income growth since 1978 and remains poor: the provincial GDP per capita remains 30%-45% lower than the national figure. The highest ratio was 73.6% in 1990, which subsequently dropped to 54.71% in 2006, the largest gap since 1978. Then Yunnan gradually caught up, mainly due to substantial investments from the central government in heavy industry and infrastructure as a component of the national strategy of bridgehead construction (see next section). While this gap has been closed since 2006, with the ratio improving to 67.63% in 2019, it still lagged the national average in 2019, let alone the above-average income levels in the now-affluent coastal provinces (e.g. Guangdong and Zhejiang).
Sustaining attempts at bridging the coastal-interior economic gap has become necessary because uneven development previously threatened the sovereignty of the Chinese party-state. Specifically, the combination of territorially targeted economic liberalization, expansionist monetary policies, and fiscal decentralization triggered nationwide sociopolitical turmoil in the late 1980s. The ensuing economic instability lasted well into the mid-1990s and proved that territorial reconfigurations for capital accumulation generated destabilizing and deleterious effects that ironically undermined future accumulation. To mitigate these effects and resolve the budget crisis triggered by post-1978 fiscal decentralization, the Chinese central government introduced a tax-sharing system (fenshuizhi 分税制) in 1994 (Wu, 2002;Zhang, 1999). This system effectively transformed subnational governments, particularly those in major industrializing coastal cities, into "the tax collectors for the center" (Zhang, 1999: 141). As Zhu (2004: 424) shows, the reform empowered subnational governments to devise and implement localized developmental policies, "leading to autonomous local governments that are highly motivated to maximize revenues in order to support local growth." Yet, as the interviews with officials in the Yunnan Department of Commerce reveal, local governments in Yunnan still found developmental opportunities limited despite growing autonomy. The condition only changed after the-then Premier, Zhu Rongji, initiated the previously introduced Great Western Development Strategy in 1998 to boost economic development in Yunnan and other 11 provincial-level territories. Integral to the tenth national 5-year plan, this strategy encompassed infrastructural construction, regional economic restructuring, the promotion of science and technology, and the restoration of threatened ecological systems. Between 2000 and 2012, the Chinese central government invested 3.68 trillion yuan (∼US$585.1 billion) in 187 key projects and granted privileged policies to the western interior provinces. 2 Figure 2 shows the Great Western Development strategy did not immediately uplift Yunnan's underdeveloped condition vis-à-vis the whole country. The worsening ratio of Yunnan's GDP per capita to the national average after 1998 underscores the difficulties of ameliorating uneven development generated by interior marginalization. Local governments in Yunnan needed time to align with national-level policies in ways that establish a new competitive advantage. This alignment process intensified after the central government proposed stronger incentives to enhance capital flows into border provinces through a rolling series of ambitious projects on transnational regionalization with neighboring countries (interview with officials in Yunnan Department of Commerce, 2019).
Transnationalizing Yunnan: From "bridgehead" construction to the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) Regional development in Yunnan was further buttressed by the new geostrategic significance of border provinces in subsequent national-level plans. During his instruction tour in Yunnan in 2009, President Hu Jintao urged the provincial leaders to deepen transnational economic cooperation through leveraging its geographical proximity to neighboring countries and become a bridgehead to South and Southeast Asia (Su, 2013). This bridgehead strategy emphasizes cross-border economic integration and exemplifies the importance of territorial reconfigurations in national governance: overcoming the contradictions generated by its coastal-oriented spatial strategies entails identifying new strategic functions that could elevate economic development in peripheral provinces like Yunnan.
Because most firms in Yunnan were not enrolled in GPNs, a feasible first step to jumpstart economic growth was to direct surplus domestic capital to its city regions. This approach creates two national-level strategic benefits for the Chinese party-state-the expansion of Chinese capital and commodities to mainland Southeast Asia (which resolves nationwide issues of industrial overcapacity) and the transformation of border provinces like Yunnan from "left behind" regions to a new growth engine (which reduces the political pressure to address the limits of coastal-oriented developmental strategies) (Su, 2013).
Enhanced connectivity with transnational energy sources through border provinces subsequently became a primary national policy. Uninterrupted energy supplies-primarily crude oil and natural gas-has become a crucial precondition of sustained capital accumulation. In 1993, China became a net importer of crude oil for the first time, and, in 2016, the country replaced the United States as the world's largest importer. Over 70% of oil supplies in China originate from the Middle East and Africa, and the transport route extends from the Suez Canal to the Indian Ocean and then through the Malacca Straits and South China Sea. China's energy security, therefore, depends on a transportation belt beyond Chinese sovereign rule. A naval blockade along this belt would jeopardize oil supplies from the Middle East and Africa (Zhao, 2015).
As early as 2003, President Hu Jintao prioritized energy security as one of China's foremost security agendas for the first time and expressed serious concern about 80% of China's oil imports passing through the Strait of Malacca (Liu et al., 2017;Wong, 2018;Zhao, 2015). Establishing new routes for transporting oil and gas to China consequently became a primary objective of the bridgehead strategy. Energy corridors were proposed and then constructed to enhance China's energy security and, more crucially, to sustain seamless capital accumulation across Chinese state territory. Political actors in peripheral border provinces quickly aligned with this emerging focus on energy security by repositioning their territories as conduits of transnational energy imports. Much-needed capital injections from the central government and centrally owned SOEs ensued. The first-ever pipeline for crude oil imports from Kazakhstan to Xinjiang commenced operations in July 2006. The Myanmar-China oil and gas pipelines subsequently became China's fourth strategic energy route.
While the construction of these pipelines may appear as just another exemplification of national-level grand strategies, the idea actually emerged at the subnational level and entailed lobbying the central government. Officials in Kunming delineated the process during an interview with the authors: local scholars in Yunnan's universities proposed this idea in 2004 and had it recognized by the provincial government. In August 2004, the Yunnan provincial government submitted a report to the State Council and formally proposed building the China-Myanmar oil and gas pipelines to improve China's energy security (Su, 2016). When President Hu inspected Yunnan in May 2006, Xu Ronggai, then the provincial governor, nailed down a firm push for the project after presenting the pipeline proposal to Hu (Zhang, 2018). The State Council subsequently approved the project in August 2006 and designated the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), China's largest oil and natural gas producer, as the primary owner and builder of the pipelines.
After multiple rounds of negotiation, national representatives from China and Myanmar signed the formal pipeline construction agreement in March 2009. In September 2010, construction work on the Chinese sections of the pipelines began in Kunming. Figure 3 shows the pipelines start at Kyaukpyu port on Myanmar's west coast and enter China via Yunnan's border city of Ruili. The 2380-km long oil pipeline was expected to transport 12 million tons of crude oil annually from the Middle East and Africa to China. It was jointly financed and built by the CNPC and Myanmar's state-owned Oil and Gas Enterprise, with 50.9% and 49.1% shares, respectively. The 2806-km long gas pipeline, as shown in Figure 3, runs from Ruili to Kunming and reaches the southwestern provinces of Sichuan and Chongqing. The Myanmar section of the oil pipeline was jointly invested by four companies from Myanmar, China, South Korea, and India. The total investment of both pipelines amounted to US$ 2.5 billion.
Occurring in tandem with the pipeline construction were intensifying interactions between national-and provincial-level actors in Yunnan after President Xi Jinping launched the BRI in 2013. Underpinning this initiative is a vast infrastructural network of railways, energy pipelines, highways, and a series of SEZs. Specifically, this initiative exemplifies what Summers (2016Summers ( : 1637Summers ( -1638 terms "a state-led spatial fix to provide infrastructure to facilitate the development of networks of capital across the Eurasian continent." Myanmar features prominently following this shift in economic statecraft. Sensing an opportunity to boost economic development, the Myanmar government led by Aung San Suu Ki expressed strong interest in the BRI and established a high-profile committee to coordinate domestic economic policies with the BRI. In 2016, the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi, signed an agreement in Naypyidaw to establish the CMEC. This joint strategy became both a symbolic and a substantial aspect of BRI implementation in Myanmar. Building on the preexisting energy corridor between Yunnan and Myanmar, the CMEC extends from China's Kunming and Ruili to Myanmar's Muse and Mandalay, and eventually reaches Yangon and Kyaukpyu, respectively (see Figure 3). Its central purpose is to increase trade and production through improving infrastructural connectivity. The CMEC further reinforces the importance of territorial reconfigurations to enhance accumulation capacities. In a formal document released by the State Council (2015) on the BRI's visions and actions, Yunnan's strategic importance is explicitly delineated: We should make good use of the geographic advantage of Yunnan Province, advance the construction of an international transport corridor connecting China with neighboring countries, develop a new highlight of economic cooperation in the Greater Mekong Sub-region, and make the region a pivot of China's opening-up to South and Southeast Asia.
The CMEC has become a territorial focal point for forging new connections between China's economic centers such as Guangzhou and Shanghai and key cities in the CMEC, namely Kunming and Ruili in Yunnan, and Muse, Mandalay, Yangon, and Kyaukpyu in Myanmar. As infrastructure projects such as ports, dams, expressways, bridges, railways, and industrial zones gradually materialize along the corridor, these cities are becoming new manufacturing and trading platforms. According to the Observer Research Foundation (2021), Chinese firms continued to launch multi-billion dollar projects in Yangon, Kyaukpyu and the northern Shan and Kachin states close to the Chinese border after the 2021 military coup 3 in Myanmar. This clearly indicates the CMEC has engendered a strong territorial class alliance that is fully committed to capital accumulation even in the face of political instability. With the completion of the Kunming-Ruili Railway at the end of 2022, Yunnan's border cities would be further integrated within the national network of high-speed logistics and are therefore in a better position to attract and embed new investments in the CMEC.
At the same time, the completion of the oil and gas pipelines has transformed Yunnan into a regional energy powerhouse. In 2018, CNPC Yunnan launched a 10-million-ton oil refinery in Anning to benefit from a steady supply of crude oil via Myanmar. The refinery has produced over 100-million tons of refined oil for three consecutive years (2018, 2019, and 2020), and consequently generated skyrocketing growth in the processing of petroleum and related products, as shown by a 634.3% jump in 2017, 245.7% in 2018, and 108.3% in 2019 on a yearly basis (Statistical Bureau of Yunnan, 2020). In October 2018, CNPC International (Yunnan), a subsidiary of CNPC, exported over 64 tons of diesel to Laos, marking the first-ever export of refined oil from Yunnan to the Laos market. Energy shortages in Yunnan, Chongqing, and Sichuan were also ameliorated through increased natural gas supplies.
These empirical findings collectively underscore the importance of exploring the territorial logic of state-driven capital accumulation (see connections to the middle box in Figure 1). Emerging research has already gone beyond the statist and spatially deterministic vantage points first introduced in the introductory section. To Summers (2016), the BRI exemplifies China's role in reproducing a global capitalist economy. Mayer and Zhang (2021) explain how the BRI enables the Chinese state and firms (state-owned and non-state) to craft new spatial fixes both domestically and transnationally. Along the same vein, Schindler and Kanai (2021: 47) argue that the BRI has engendered the formation of global growth coalitions-comprising banks, investors, and international development organizations-that "led to a bewildering array of spatial planning schemes that integrate development corridors, SEZs and an extensive network of ports". This paper builds on these contributions from a subnational perspective: outward investments under the BRI banner are also direct attempts to mitigate uneven development between strategically targeted and previously marginalized provinces such as Yunnan and Xinjiang and the substantially more affluent coastal provinces. If it represents a spatial fix, the BRI is not simply about allocating capital overseas, but also about creating new conditions for transnational capital accumulation in marginalized domestic provinces. Yet, as this section has shown, the BRI rollout in and through Yunnan has not occurred exclusively through top-down instructions from Beijing. Involving multiple domestic and foreign actors, the BRI implementation process is necessarily capricious, with no guaranteed success in capital accumulation. This development is starkly absent in the "new state capitalism" discourse that portrays Chinese outward foreign direct investments (OFDIs) as embedded within a unidirectional, internally coherent, and centrally driven agenda to achieve global dominance. This problematic portrayal will be addressed explicitly in the next section through examining the evolution of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus in post-1949 China.

Discussion: An evolutionary overview of Chinese state capitalism
Capital accumulation in China has continued unabated in spite of the creation of a new state in 1949 (i.e. the PRC). Drawing from the conceptual framing of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus in section 2 (see Figure 1), this paper delineates the tensions between the free-flowing imperatives of capital and the place-specific demands of territorial class alliances across China since 1949. These tensions expressed different degrees of intensity over four phases of political-economic evolution. During the first phase , territoriality enabled state control of the means of production. This control explains why China was able to become what Engels (1976: 370) terms a "real aggregate capitalist". In so doing, Mao was able to consolidate political power and eradicate much of the subnational political strife that followed the Qing Dynasty's dissolution in 1911. The strong emphasis on securing national-territorial control could be identified in the prominent role designated to Yunnan during the "Third Front" movement that was discussed previously in section 3. Yet this heavy focus on national-level political control generated pronounced tensions due to increased barriers for capital flows.
Deng Xiaoping and his successors reformed this strategy by relaxing these barriers in spatially selective ways during the next phase . Population movement and residency proscriptions were also eased to expand labor markets in coastal city regions. Two different types of territorial class alliances consequently emerged, one within the coastal city regions seeking to sustain their first-mover advantage through reinforcing their respective regional assets, and another within peripheralized city regions in interior provinces (like Ruili in Yunnan) working at "catching up" with the coastal city regions. This uneven geography of territorial class alliances generated new political challenges while easing capital flow barriers to China as a whole: transnational circulatory capital could enter China more freely, but its primary territorialization within the coastal city regions engendered an increasingly polarizing situation (liangji fenhua 两极分化) that Deng was keen to avoid because of its negative implications for state sovereignty. In response, the CPC recalibrated the capital accumulation approach to involve previously peripheralized provinces in the interior. Yunnan is one such province.
Three targeted strategies to redirect capital flows-one of which was the previously discussed Great Western Development-were launched during the third phase of CPC rule (1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008). Local governments in Yunnan became more proactive in driving economic development during this phase, although investment flows (both volume and rate) still trailed flows into coastal provinces. Clearly, the strategies of territorial class alliances in the coastal provinces have developed substantial path-dependent effects. The intensification of "GDPism" after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 further reinforced these effects: fierce competition for foreign capital from coastal city regions with well-developed infrastructural capacities and deep labor market pools made it difficult for peripheral city regions in interior provinces like Yunnan to attract investments. There was therefore sustained pressure on the Chinese central government to ease the persistent tensions between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power by enhancing the regional assets of these interior city regions.
The 2008 global financial crisis catalyzed more proactive global engagement strategies. During this fourth phase of political-economic evolution (2008-present), the Chinese state first sought to reduce its over-accumulated dollar reserves by intensifying the "Go Abroad" program. As discussed in sections 4 and 5, geographically contiguous markets in Southeast Asia became the prime targets of these approaches and consequently augmented Yunnan's geostrategic importance. The BRI then offered more opportunities by way of subsidies and national-level investments that further accentuated Yunnan's national importance. Following this shift in economic statecraft were new territorial alliances involving a wide range of stakeholders-local governments, state-linked banks, firms from all over China, Myanmese traders, ruling militias in the China-Myanmar border regions, and the Myanmar national government-that contributed to substantially higher flows of capital into city regions in Yunnan. Crucially, as the establishment of the CMEC demonstrates, these new alliances are now becoming transnational.
Herein lies the crux of this paper's analysis: what is "new" in Chinese state capitalism is not the high degree of involvement by state-linked actors, but the extent to which territoriality is necessary to sustain capital accumulation and, by extension, the sovereign rule of the Chinese party-state. With reference to the sovereignty-accumulation nexus conceptual framework that is presented in Figure 1, state-driven capital accumulation is crucial insofar as it consolidates sovereign rule, yet this consolidation is always temporary and could be undermined by new tensions in the capital accumulation process. Resolving these tensions therefore entails recurring territorial reconfigurations. When China sought integration within the "socialist world economy" during the Mao era, it had to produce a consolidated national scale of accumulation. Subnational territorial class alliances subsequently pulled transnational circulatory capital into China and established globally oriented manufacturing capacities during the post-Mao era. This process generated a huge amount of over-accumulated capital that is now both pump-priming large-scale infrastructural development in its peripheralized provinces as well as seeking new investment opportunities worldwide.
What this geographical-historical analysis provides, therefore, is a critical re-evaluation of the "new state capitalism" discourse that portrays state capitalism as a "threat"-the drivers and outcome of expanding Chinese geoeconomic influence overseas exemplify a rolling attempt to sustain stable party-state rule through negotiating the dialectical interactions between the territorial and capitalistic logics of accumulation since the Mao era. Specifically, this statecraft is more accurately the latest expression of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus that underpins state-led development since the formation of a new Chinese state in 1949.
The global-scale manifestation of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus in China underscores, in turn, the importance of a relational approach to state capitalism analysis that considers how the contradictions between territorial and capitalistic logics of power in other spatiotemporal contexts combined dynamically and cumulatively with processes in China to generate global-scale systemic impacts. For instance, as Brenner (2004: 114-115) demonstrates, the postwar project of spatial Keynesianism in Western Europe-the use of policies to generate equalizing effects between subnational regions-aimed to address "a deeply rooted socioeconomic crisis" caused by mounting class tensions. Since the late 1970s, spatial Keynesianism was superseded by the trans-Atlantic emergence of neoliberal regulation that encouraged states to concentrate productive resources in cities and firms to expand forays into foreign consumer and labor markets. This process corresponded with the transformation from nationally oriented central planning in Mao era China to gradual global economic integration after Deng's reforms in 1978. The convergence of these developments effectively established the foundation for China to become the "world's factory" today. Against this backdrop, it is ironic that Donald Trump introduced punitive tariffs on manufactured goods from China as part of his presidential promise to "Make America Great Again": if America was no longer "great" because it lost manufacturing capacities to China, this was because American state policies and firms have played an instrumental role in making this happen.
From a historical and cumulative standpoint, the Chinese party-state's attempt at geoeconomic expansion is arguably an extension of what Arrighi (2007) terms a "long twentieth century" of territorial pursuits to drive capital accumulation. Arrighi (2007) describes how the deployment and expansion of coercive apparatuses increasingly added non-Western subjects to the British territorial empire. This approach in turn enabled the reproduction of British state power through surplus capital extraction from the colonies. Within this empire, Hong Kong, a former part of the Qing Dynasty, was twice designated a "Crown Colony" (i.e. ruled directly by the British Crown in London) and played a major role in the advancement of British economic interests in East Asia until sovereign rule was handed over to the PRC in 1997. After the Second World War, both the USSR and the United States sought to expand their state power through geoeconomic expansion, the former through the previously mentioned "socialist world economy" and the latter through the Marshall Plan and then the "Washington Consensus" (which continues to underpin global neoliberal hegemony). Yet these approaches all encountered contradictions between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power, contradictions that were sufficiently serious to dissolve both the British empire and the USSR and which engendered immense instability in the American economy. An unlikely but highly symbiotic economic relationship between the United States and China emerged from this context-a relationship that has now come under immense strain. Whether the BRI and other aspects of Chinese statecraft could provide new global interconnections to sustain the sovereignty-accumulation nexus in China or generate new challenges for the Chinese party-state (e.g. the strong pushback against Chinese state-backed projects within Myanmar, leading to the suspension of the Myitsone Dam) has become a question of major geographicalhistorical significance.

Conclusion
Research has now identified why state capitalism has been characterized-and, in many instances, caricatured-in both orientalist and zero-sum ways. It is also palpable that the so-called "free market" is underpinned by a plethora of state interventions, the most prominent of which is unilateral military invasion. The state has, therefore, always been integral to the process of capital accumulation. Less obvious are the reasons why specific states participate directly in this process at particular conjunctures. This paper has offered a distinct angle to address this gap by focusing on the dynamic role of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus-namely, the interconnections between capital accumulation, territoriality, and state sovereignty in the context of China.
Through an explicit focus on the constitutive role of instituted uneven development in capital accumulation and the reproduction of state sovereignty in the PRC, this paper reinforces and refines Alami and Dixon's (2021) focus on "uneven and combined state capitalism" in this special issue: it is precisely this uneven territoriality within China that drives and now underpins the combined development of the global economy. Put another way, the restructuring of the global economy into one with China as the "world's factory" was only possible because of state spatial strategies (and their associated state investments) that generated uneven development across Chinese state territory. With the extension of these strategies across the world through the "Go Abroad" program and the BRI, new interconnections between China and the global economy are being established. And these lead to two distinct directions for further research.
First, conceptualizations of Chinese state capitalism could be enriched by understanding the constitutive and collaborative roles of non-state economic actors (both domestic and foreign). Of particular interest is the involvement of a large number of prominent TNCs in this evolutionary process -Apple, Sony, Samsung, Volkswagen, Toyota, Pfizer, the list does not appear to be shortening vis-à-vis proclamations of international "de-coupling" and "new cold war" with China. Many of these TNCs previously invested in China to establish manufacturing capacities, but they are now also engaging China as a fast-expanding consumer market (see, e.g. McKinsey, 2020). And even within the strictly regulated Chinese financial sector, global exposures to Chinese stocks and bonds rose to US$1.1 trillion in September 2021, more than five times the value of 2014 (Financial Times, 2021). Crucially, domestic private firms have also been strategically co-opted by Chinese state institutions to fulfill a diverse range of socioeconomic regulatory objectives domestically and overseas (Lim and Su, 2021;Fu and Lim, 2022). This development spotlights an often-overlooked aspect of Chinese state capitalism: it is driven by a substantial and still growing domestic private sector that accounts for more than 70% of technological innovation, more than 80% of employment in towns and cities, and more than 90% of total enterprises (State Taxation Administration, 2020). Collectively, the key roles played by a transnational group of non-state economic actors within the Chinese economy call for critical re-evaluations of zero-sum claims that Chinese state capitalism could threaten foreign "interests", is ideologically "deviant", and hence needs to be "disciplined".
Second, the Yunnan case presented in this paper provides a crucial entry point to further explore the relationship between globally oriented economic statecraft and the enduring domestic impetus to sustain stable state rule. Strategic national-level changes have elevated Yunnan's economicgeographical status both within and beyond China. Economic integration between Yunnan and the coastal provinces increased through enhanced infrastructural linkages, industrial relocation, and commodity flows, while place-specific policies and the construction of economic corridors increased links to Southeast and South Asia (refer to Figure 3). This elevated status is especially apparent after the BRI was launched. At the same time, the preceding section has demonstrated how territorially targeted strategies in China have always co-evolved through tensions with capitalistic logics. This is where a careful (re)mapping of state-driven capital accumulation at specific conjunctures, first discussed in section 2, remains important. Specifically, ascertaining how different subnational regions such as Xinjiang, Heilongjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Tibet are (not) benefiting from plugging into the BRI agenda could offer fresh insights into the uneven causes, expressions, and effects of these tensions. This research direction builds on and complements the fast-emerging literature on the variegated global impacts of the BRI by highlighting how this seemingly uniform and internally coherent economic statecraft could also generate potentially differentiated domestic outcomes because each subnational region has its own developmental trajectory and agenda that may not be fully congruent with the BRI vision. The logics and outcomes of the sovereignty-accumulation nexus would be directly affected by these variegated agendas.
These two new research directions would jointly advance knowledge on Chinese state capitalism as a contextualized and interconnected process. It is contextualized within the political necessity for the CPC to reproduce sovereign rule over an economically uneven state territory, but this contextualization is not reducible to "Chinese exceptionalism" (i.e. China is different because it is China) because the capital accumulation process in China is interconnected with GPNs and OFDIs. The overarching theoretical question on Chinese "state capitalism" is therefore not about the extent to which it is "new" vis-à-vis the "new state capitalism" discourse; it is also not about the extent to which it is different from other national varieties of capitalism. The Chinese political economy has always been an integral part of a broader system of capitalism; the open question is whether the CPC can sustain the sovereignty-accumulation nexus through negotiating, if not transcending, the enduring tensions between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power across this system.