Urban Fault Lines: The Politics of Territorial Restructuring in Nanjing and Ningbo

Recent decades have seen a flurry of administrative division adjustments (ADAs) in major Chinese cities, including ADAs that reconfigure multiple local government units at once. Despite the growing visibility of such reforms, it remains unclear how they come about and how profoundly they change cities’ governance and development prospects. To address these questions, this paper examines cases of ADA in Nanjing and Ningbo that had varying practical and political significance. Nanjing's 2013 ADA, though broad in scope, primarily served the purpose of administrative streamlining. By contrast, Ningbo's 2016 ADA marked a political and economic turning point, furthering the city's agenda of territorial consolidation. This detailed case comparison traces how varying ADA outcomes emerged from different intergovernmental relationships between cities, urban subunits, and provincial authorities, highlighting the territorial interest conflicts that play out within Chinese cities and the broader political challenges surrounding efforts to improve metropolitan governance.