Introduction

The ‘reform and opening-up’ policies (gaige kaifang) initiated by the Chinese central government in the late 1970s have, on the one hand, enabled the country to achieve remarkable economic development and, on the other hand, fundamentally transformed its economic, political and institutional systems in three ways: (a) from a closed or partially closed economy to an open one that becomes increasingly integrated into the global economy and oriented towards export markets (globalization), (b) from a centrally planned to a decentralized political and fiscal system (decentralization) and (c) from a state- and collectively owned economy to one with a growing level of market orientation and private ownership (marketization) (He, Wei and Xie, 2008; McMillan and Naughton, 1992; Naughton, 1996; Wei, 2000, 2001). These changes have taken place alongside a new wave of economic globalization in which millions of Chinese consumers and workers have become more direct participants in the global economy, a process that has increasingly come to drive China's rapidly changing economic geography (Gereffi, 2009; Henderson and Nadvi, 2011). China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 further accelerated these transformations (Zhu and He, 2013). Driven by this export-oriented industrialization model, China's average annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate was around 9.8 per cent; exports increased by 12.4 per cent annually in the 1990s, and by more than 20 per cent a year in the early 2000s (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2011).

There was a boom in some manufacturing sectors in response to internal reforms and international demand for Chinese exports goods (Gereffi, 1999; Lemoine and Ünal-Kesenci, 2004), particularly those dependent on unskilled or semi-skilled low-wage labour and the leveraging of China's domestic advantages, including its large domestic market and the low cost of other input factors, such as land and electricity (Gereffi, 2009). Production and employment in such manufacturing sectors have become heavily concentrated in the coastal regions of east and southeast China, especially in export-processing zones (Fujita and Hu, 2001; He et al., 2008; Wen, 2004). In addition to cheap labour and land, the impressive growth of China's export-oriented production has also been predicated on a flexible business environment, the half-hearted enforcement of labour and environmental regulations and loose inspection of imports and exports (Hsing, 1998; Hsueh, 2011).