中国行政区划调整的尺度政治

行政区划调整是人文地理学研究中的重要议题,但目前相关理论研究仍显不足。本文借助“尺度政治”理论,尝试对行政区划调整的诸多类型进行理论化梳理。具体而言,行政区划调整主要涉及行政等级变更、领域幅员调整、区划类型更替3种类型;从尺度政治视角出发,行政区划调整可以理解为行政区划的尺度生产和权力的尺度修复两大过程,其中涉及各种形式的尺度上推、尺度下推和尺度更替。基于这些尺度特征,本文探讨了行政区划调整的尺度重构和尺度政治的综合性、动态性和辩证性。本研究对于深化行政区划及尺度政治的理论研究具有积极的推动作用。

"Politics of scale" in Chinese administrative division adjustment

Administrative adjustment is a hot topic in many sub-disciplines of Chinese human geography, such as administrative regional geography, historical geography and economic geography. However, with most of the research focusing on the summarization of types, processes, impacts and practices based on inductive methods and case studies, few have proposed a general theoretical framework to explain the co-evolution of administrative adjustment and power relations. This paper tries to narrow this gap by developing a heuristic theoretical model of administrative adjustment based on the perspective of "politics of scale" and proposing a typology of rescaling and the dialectics of politics of scale in administrative adjustment. Specifically, we argue that there are mainly three types of "rescaling" in administrative adjustment, i.e. the change of order in administrative hierarchy, the transformation of territorial border or size, and the emergence of new institutional arrangement based on various administrative divisions. The "politics of scale" in administrative adjustment mainly includes two supplementary processes, i.e. the political production of scale (administrative division) and the scalar fix of administrative power relations. In both processes, the strategies of up-scaling, down-scaling and rescaling are adopted by various agencies at different levels of administrative regions. We also point out that the rescaling and politics of scale in administrative adjustment are synthetical, dynamic and dialectical. First, a specific process of administrative adjustment is associated with transformations in different forms of scale. For example, establishing a municipal city usually includes both scaling-up process in terms of county becoming city and scaling-down process since the new city only incorporates part of the original region. Second, administrative division is dynamic both as the outcome of power struggling and as the foundation of future power relations. Some forms of administrative adjustment recurred in the history. Third, similar to the uncertainty principle in physics, there is a contradiction between the size of administrative region and the degree of control of that region. As a result, the political agents tend to adopt scalar strategies to run contrary to their relative position within the scalar hierarchy, i.e. the powerful agents at higher level of administration tend to adopt down-scaling strategies and the powerful agents at lower level of administration tend to adopt up-scaling strategies; however, the tendency of scalar strategies would be to the opposite for the weak agents. This paper may not only advance the research on administrative division, but also enrich the theories of "politics of scale" which are mainly proposed based on Western practices and cases.