Conclusion

Last, although the aforementioned city-region plan aimed to foster more cooperative relations in the greater Beijing area, the implementation of the plan has been constrained by the complicated administrative framework at the regional level. Politically, the greater Beijing area is composed of one capital city (Beijing), a centrally administered city (Tianjin) and a province (Hebei), as well as a number of prefecture-level and countylevel cities or urban districts under their administrations. The implementation of cityregion planning has been criticized for overemphasizing the interests of Beijing. For example, many reservoirs in Hebei Province are designated as water sources only for Beijing, even though water shortage is also a key issue in Hebei. In addition, in this relatively affluent region there are 2.7 million people, mainly in Hebei Province, whose incomes are still under the national poverty threshold (Xinhua News, 2006). The development of a competitive global city-region centered on Beijing is therefore undoubtedly overshadowed by the uneven socioeconomic landscape in the region (Yu & Wei, 2008). In these local and regional complications, which impinge upon the “pure” form of urban planning and the global concepts that are being applied, we can see a “hybridicity” similar to that we identified above for the early twentieth century. As indigenous Chinese concepts interweave and interact with global concepts from outside China, then they may become concepts that are no longer purely Chinese, on the one hand, nor purely nonChinese, on the other hand. This gives rise to hybridicity, which is a fusion of Chinese and global concepts (planning in this case) such that they become transcendent, a synthesis of the Chinese-non-Chinese dialectic. Beijing, in particular, is still a specifically Chinese city, notwithstanding the influence of Western planning concepts, while it also has important general global features.