Lesser known are cases involve an increasingly common scheme of private sector-driven urbanization in China. In this case, private sector actors take charge of the coordination and development process of urbanization.
Companies such as China Fortune Land Development (CFLD) are developing industrial towns as private-public partnerships (PPP) with local governments. CFLD has developed around 100 industrial towns mostly in China with a few in South East Asia.
CFLD recently came into the public spotlight due to its critical financial situation which mirrors one of many of the large conventional real estate developments in China. CFLD and its PPP model have also become the object of academic research (see e.g., ‘Towards Urban economic vibrancy – patterns and practices in Asia’s new cities’ by Siqi Zheng and Zhengzhen Tan and ‘Rising private city operators in contemporary China: A study of the CFLD model’ by Yongli Jiao and Yang Yu).
Besides the PPP model, there is also a fully privatized model in which the local government signs a concession agreement with a private firm responsible for developing and operating the city including the provision of public services and receipt of taxes.
This fully privatized model is still little studied and known outside of China, but the Journal for Special Jurisdictions is about to publish a special volume on the topic of these Chinese private cities later this year.
One of the main success cases of this model is Jiaolong.