ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the major policy changes in China's regional development in the past few decades. To Chinese policy makers, the development of the West region is meant to reduce interregional disparities and to meet both environmental protection and national security goals. In China's Party-State political structure, the Central Government in Beijing has to manage the tensions between its national policy agenda and the interests of local governments at various levels. The communist urban policy was heavily influenced by the Marxist ideology of social equity, including the ideal of abolition of the separation of town and country. The evolution of regional policies in the 1980s was closely related to reform of central-and-local-government relations featured by administrative and fiscal decentralization. The Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan development region was launched in 1984 to form another growth axis centred around the three mega cities.
