关键词: 行政区划, 调整, 尺度政治, 尺度重构, 尺度生产, 尺度修复

Abstract:

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.

Key words: administrative division, adjustment, politics of scale, rescaling, production of scale, scalar fix