Positioning the China’s spatial governance and planning system within existing classifications

This thesis focuses on China's spatial governance and planning system, reflecting on its potential and effectiveness in the aim to position it within the main international comparisons and classifications. The research background stems from China's efforts to reconstruct its national spatial governance system starting in 2019, attempting to optimize spatial planning through top-down institutional reforms and bottom-up "integrated multi-planning" pilot projects to address the challenges of globalization, regional integration, and rapid urbanization. The study adopts a comprehensive comparative research method, combining theoretical analysis and practices examinations, intending to uncover the strengths and shortcomings of China's present spatial governance and planning system, and on the basis of the latter, to position it within the most relevant classifications developed in Europe in the last decades. This research methodologically borrows extensively from the Ideal types by EU Compendium and the typologies build on the materials of ESPON COMPASS developed by Berisha et al., emphasizing the analytical framework of Multi-Level Governance (MLG) to better understand the spatial governance characteristics of China in the context of globalization and regional integration. The study points out that despite China's initial success, it still faces inconsistencies between policy implementation and local flexibility. The result shows that global comparative study is vital for refining and innovating spatial governance systems, notably in maintaining local flexibility while relying on transnational experiences. Additionally, the research advises that comparative studies should future refine methodology and construct more rigorous and operable analytical models, especially for expanded global comparative studies, to tackle the analytical and comparative challenges brought by the inclusion of more non-Western context SGPS, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of transnational policy transfer and practice.