**1. Introduction**

China has undergone high levels of urbanization and economic growth for several decades since major economic reform in 1978, during which its urban population grew from 172 million to 831 million by the end of 2018 [1]. In the early part of the 21st century, the Chinese government announced its plan to build 20 new towns every year before 2020 [2,3] and new town development has gradually become a key form of urban growth [4]. Various types of new towns have been planned and developed in recent decades including university towns, administrative new towns, high-speed new towns, financial city, smart city, eco-city, and low-carbon city [5]. New town development with progressive and sustainable urban concepts not only creates new economic development poles in the city, but is also used by city authorities to symbolise local urban and economic achievement, better quality of life, and innovative urban transitions.

The increasing popularity of sustainable urban concepts in China is due to intensive competition among cities [6]. Capitalist cities tend to compete with each other to increase their attractiveness to

capital, talent, and visitors [7,8]. Local governments have adopted pro-growth approaches through 'place making or promotion' [9] 'civic boosterism' [10], prestige projects [11] to stimulate local economic growth and increase their competitiveness. Similar entrepreneurial strategies have also been adopted in Chinese cities [12–14]. Recently, various theories used to explain pro-growth urban governance in capitalist cities, such as entrepreneurialism [7], growth machine [15], and urban regime [16], have been applied to the Chinese context [4,17,18].

In general, entrepreneurial governance in China is often led by local government and strongly influenced by the legacy of state socialism [12]. There are several defining characteristics of China's 'entrepreneurial local state', such as the 1994 tax-sharing system reform [19], land property and market reform [4], and cadre appointment system [20]. Each of these characteristics encourage local governments to adopt pro-growth urban development strategies to increase extra budgetary revenue, and enhance local economic and political performance. Furthermore, local governments are also protected by 'soft budget constraints' [21], which means that they are cushioned from financial losses if urban investments do not provide a return. This has generated a tendency for local governments to overspend and overdevelop [22]. For instance, Long (2019) identifies 180 cities in China with shrinking populations, which are nevertheless making pro-growth urban master plans based on ambitions for population and urban growth in the near future [23]. In extreme cases, some new town projects have resulted in 'ghost towns' where urban expansion has far outpaced population growth [24].

New town or 'new city' [4] development is China's main strategy of 'city making' [25], as new towns not only house residents and businesses, but also provide new centres of regional spatial reconfiguration [26], contributing to 'a globalizing central area that formed a unified global city region' [27]. The increasing popularity of sustainable and innovative urban concepts like eco-city, low-carbon city, sponge city, smart city, and knowledge city in Chinese new town development illustrate the attempts of local governments to create global cities and boost their attractiveness through city branding and marketing [6,28]. Using sustainability as a 'city branding' tactic highlights that local government is not only a market regulator or a unique player, but it can use market instruments to achieve its hidden political agendas. De Jong (2019) argues that this 'eco-civilisation' and 'new-type urbanisation' agenda is not likely to be genuinely implemented under its structural institutional mechanism encouraging the accumulation of land and power of local elites [5,29]. Through the transition from rural industrialism to new urbanism, new town development generally embraces a regime of accumulation and legitimation from land value [4], turning suburbs into spaces of capital accumulation [30]. These observations suggest that new town developments are often a feature of local governments' pro-growth strategies, which can lead to overspending and unnecessary investments, and potentially hamper the implementation of its sustainable and innovative urban objectives in the long run.

There is a large amount of literature on China's new town development and its urban entrepreneurial mechanism. At the same time, there is a lack of empirical evidence on how local pro-growth strategies affect the planning and development of city-level new towns and the implementation of sustainable and innovative objectives. This article aims to fill the gap by examining local government rationales and strategies of new town planning, development, and the potential urban outcomes, and to contribute to a deeper understanding of China's local politics and urban growth of new town development in both theoretical and empirical terms. The article is organized in six parts. Section 2 reviews urban theories that help to explain the cause and effects of land-driven economy and pro-growth mechanism in China's urbanisation and new town development. A conceptual framework is proposed to explore the linkages between urban growth mechanisms and urban outcomes. Section 3 outlines the methods used to select cases and gather data. Sections 4 and 5 examine and analyse the selected cases with the conceptual framework. Section 6 discusses the results and analysis from the examination of the case studies and Section 7 concludes on the main findings from the study.
