The East Asian developmental state model and the Anglo-American entrepreneurial state model profile varied ways in which the state continues to intervene in economic development. These models are developed by different disciplines and against diverse contexts to capture extrasocietal state responses to neoliberalism and globalization but leave the intrasocietal preconditions for state evolution little explored. We elaborate the concept of state intrapreneurialism as one way of understanding the interrelationship between economic and state transformation – one ingredient of the intrasocietal preconditions underpinning the responses to extrasocietal changes emphasized in the post-developmental state literature. Drawing on the case of Singapore's emergence in the field of smart/sustainable urban solutions, the subsidiary contributions of this paper are to suggest intrapreneurship as a specific and enduring advantage within the developmental state model, especially when set against its limitations signalled in the post-developmental state literature.

Taking a spatially sensitive approach to evaluating China’s quest of soft power, this paper conducted a media discourse analysis of European countries’ perceptions of China’s growing international influence in general, and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in particular. Preliminary analysis reveals regional diversity in media coverage of the BRI that was partially caused by a country’s position as a ‘discourse leader’, ‘discourse responder’ or ‘discourse follower’. In terms of the contents, this paper noticed a huge discrepancy among the European countries towards the potential impacts of the BRI and China’s rise in international affairs, and recorded a shift from a rather positive to a cautious attitude among the European Union’s leaders. It is suggested that China’s spatially blind approach to using soft power to promote BRI in Europe may be partly to blame for its limited success so far.

This paper examines the policy transfer process and outcomes outside the occidental context. It extends the voluntary transnational policy transfer framework with an evolutionary perspective and a scalar understanding of space and power at the subnational level. When the Sino-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), a government-to-government collaboration in promoting industrial development, was studied, it was revealed that two parallel policy transfer networks were developed in the early days of the SIP, which were embedded in different scales of governance and pursuing divergent targets. Their relationship affected the policy transfer outcomes for the SIP, and reveals the important governance and temporal dimensions in transnational policy transfers.

Interest in enclave urbanization has surfaced recently in urban and political geography scholarship. However, little of this work seeks to distinguish either the nature of enclaves from urban agglomerations or their economic ramifications. This study sketches out some of the distinctive features of enclaves and how these are reflected in morphological and functional polycentricity at the urban and inter-urban scales. We note how enclaves may produce important but qualitatively different morphological and functional parallels to ideas found in the extant economic geography literature on industry agglomerations. These parallels – in the guise of ‘cities as enclaves’, ‘clusters of enclaves’ and ‘enclave to enclave’ linkages – suggest some important gaps in our present understandings of, and open new agendas for, the study of urban and regional development as we illustrate with reference to the Yangtze River Delta Region (YRDR) in China.