Industrial Policy in China: The Planned Growth of Specialised Towns in Guangdong Province

We analyse one of the most important policy experiences for industrial clustering in Southern China—the Specialised Towns programme—that has transformed some Chinese clusters into the backbone of global production chains. We offer a long-term, detailed overview of the policy programme and of Guangdong’s specialised towns, classifying them as endogenous or exogenous according to their features, and investigate their contribution to local growth and rebalancing. This analysis of the Specialised Towns programme contributes to the international debate on revisiting industrial policy, and suggests that the discussion should conceive them as articulated processes to reach long-term societal objectives.