Re-examining ‘culture-led’ regeneration: The interpretations, logics and implications of culture as a driver in Chinese urban redevelopment

‘Culture-led’ regeneration is a widely practised yet long-contested approach in China’s urban redevelopment. Much of the existing work interprets these projects through Western frameworks of neoliberalism and growth machine politics, often portraying them as economically driven and culturally inauthentic, resulting in social displacement. While such critiques highlight important problems with culture-led cases, they risk oversimplifying the complexity of Chinese governance and overlooking how culture is redefined and mobilised within local contexts. This paper argues that Chinese culture-led regeneration must be understood through the state’s evolving definition of culture and its intentional deployment across economic, political and social domains. Earlier approaches largely framed culture as a material asset, embedded in heritage sites and industrial reuse, used to attract investment and stimulate growth. More recent discourses and policies expand this definition by treating culture as a social and political resource, central to fostering cohesion, legitimacy and sustainability. This shift reflects the evolving urban governance logics driven by the limits of demolition-heavy redevelopment, growing land restrictions and national mandates on heritage preservation and social stability. Drawing on key examples of creative industry clusters, heritage-led tourism and micro-regeneration, the paper demonstrates how culture-led regeneration in China reveals a conjunctural logic in which culture operates simultaneously as an economic, political and social instrument. Rather than assessing Chinese culture-led regeneration through universalist frameworks, this paper advocates for theorising with China by employing localised frameworks such as state entrepreneurialism. Further reshaping the debates on commodification, authenticity and the future of regeneration. It calls out to future research to further investigate the evolving role of culture in regeneration based on emerging evidence of the state’s gravitation towards extra-economic objectives.