State entrepreneurialism under economic transition: Bounded rationality in China’s high-speed rail new town governance

Drawing on 16 high-speed rail (HSR) new towns along the Beijing–Shanghai corridor, this paper develops a middle-range explanation of how state entrepreneurialism is practiced and differentiated under conditions of economic transition in China. While the notion of state entrepreneurialism has been widely used to interpret postreform urban development, its application to HSR new town governance often under specifies how cognitive limits, uneven information and institutional heterogeneity shape local political choices. The empirical analysis suggests that, in these cases, local authorities operated under pronounced cognitive and informational constraints, and that bounded rationality shaped entrepreneurial practices through policy imitation, satisficing judgments and path-dependent commitments across cities at different positions in the urban hierarchy. Along the corridor, spatial heterogeneity is evident both in bargaining capacity and in developmental strategies: metropolitan governments were better able to push for institutional innovations despite high coordination costs; medium-sized cities tended to follow metropolitan templates while retaining some room for strategic adjustment; and smaller cities were more disadvantaged in central-local negotiations and more exposed to the risks of speculative development. By bringing bounded rationality and political choice into the analysis of HSR new town governance, the article shows how local entrepreneurial behaviour is shaped by limited cognitive capacity, uneven access to information and specific institutional settings. In doing so, it qualifies the state entrepreneurialism perspective by specifying scope conditions within the context of Chinese HSR new town development, rather than offering a general reconstruction of state entrepreneurialism across contexts.