Financialization and development regime building in waterfront redevelopment in Chinese port cities under neoliberalism: A case study of Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre

Post-industrial waterfront redevelopment refers to the transformation from the Keynesian-Fordist industrial landscape to the post-industrial service-based waterfront (Vormann, 2014). Neoliberal financial devolution has empowered local development coalitions to tap into local financial resources by leveraging private investment. Coalitions made up of city hall and private sector actors may be considered as urban development regimes that can utilize their institutional resources to make potent governing decisions (Stone, 1989).This research focuses on the financing of waterfront redevelopment projects in Chinese port cities under neoliberalism. The study examines Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre as an example of how such urban development coalitions function to promote waterfront redevelopment projects, and by extension, to understand how post-industrial waterfront redevelopment is pursued in Chinese port cities. In addition to the Sailing Centre, the relocation of Beihai Shipyard exemplifies how post-industrial waterfront redevelopment, in conjunction with the effect of gentrification, shapes the neoliberal urban landscape. The financing story of the Qingdao Olympic Sailing Centre is explored as a case study of entrepreneurial urban redevelopment strategy, and this study uncovers the process to present how an urban development coalition extracts land value from entrepreneurial strategies amid the trend of neoliberalism. How the Chinese urban growth coalitions, made up of the local city halls and private developers, conduct city redevelopment projects in an entrepreneurial way via mobilizing market elements and land resources to avoid the conventional budget public financing has been missing in past literature. Hence, the discussion about the financing of the waterfront redevelopment projects in the second-tier Chinese port cities contributes to filling the literature gap of how the second-tier Chinese cities conduct great-mega projects through off-budget financial instruments.