This article examines local entrepreneurialism and the governance logic of local states under China’s cadre assessment mechanism. By highlighting the ubiquitous performance competition and promotion pressure faced by local officials, it argues that building performance and seeking promotion during the tenure are the internal impulses for Chinese local states and their leaders to pursue entrepreneurialism. In China’s politico-institutional soil, therefore, entrepreneurial actions are not necessarily designed to enhance local attractiveness and competitiveness in the global market, but serve as a means for local officials to accumulate political capital and pursue career advancement. Lanzhou’s urban renewal is used as a case to illustrate how city leaders advance individual careers through entrepreneurialism. By interpreting the impact of cadre assessment mechanism on local governance, the study sheds light on the ubiquitous inter-scalar politics in China. It also enriches our understanding of China’s urban entrepreneurialism by revealing the political intent behind local governance actions.

This article examines the urban development strategies and pro-growth politics in China from a local state leadership perspective, focusing on the power dynamics within the local state leadership under China’s fragmented authoritarian system. The state-leading group is an innovative governance technique intentionally designed to overcome the institutional flaws of ‘ tiao-kuai segmentation’. It plays a critical role in fostering a common vision of ‘growth promotion’, aligning goals and unifying actions in the administrative system, broadening social consensus and promoting public–private partnerships. This study improves upon the understanding of the micro-mechanisms of state-led urban development within China’s fragmented authoritarian regime by exploring the heterogeneity of state actors as well as the agency of key local political actors (groups) in aligning goals and interests within and beyond the state and their political rationalities. By highlighting the conflicts and negotiations that exist within the state, the debate on state-led urban development and pro-growth politics is extended using China as an example.

This paper proposes an analytical framework to deconstruct the complexity of policy governance in globalization. Challenging traditional models’ static assumptions and linear diffusion narratives, it advances a dynamic perspective rooted in Deleuze’s rhizomatic theory and topological principles, conceptualizing policy formation as contingent intersections and topological emergence among cross-local knowledge nodes. Three analytical innovations transcend “global-local” binaries: (1) Rhizomatic evolution replaces linear transfer, emphasizing nonlinear knowledge connectivity and epistemic mutations across nodes; (2) Spatiotemporal folding reveals policy innovation emerge in the overlap of “near and far” policy references and historical sedimentation and future projections; (3) Topological power analysis uncovers entangled explicit/implicit power structures in global policy governance networks. By tracing policies’ processual emergence and the spatiotemporal dynamics behind it, the study clarifies the “geography of power relations” behind global knowledge production while offering a tool for navigating “global flows”—“local practices” dialectics. This broadens the analytical scope of policy mobility research and offers a alternative perspective for tackling policy governance challenges.