政府能动性对外部冲击型战略耦合断裂的暂时性调节研究——以江苏省昆山市为例

突如其来的新冠肺炎疫情在全球蔓延肆虐,国家间和区域间的人员、货物流动阻滞,对全球生产网络带来了巨大冲击。受此影响,涉外企业纷纷出现了与国际市场、供应链、劳动力、金融资本之间的短暂割裂。在此外部冲击面前,基于全球经济深度链接的战略耦合理论,无法有效解释全球生产网络出现的被动性、暂时性、突发性的耦合断裂。以江苏省昆山市为例,通过深入访谈和调研,重点研究地方政府能动性在维系战略耦合联系中的作用机制。研究发现,昆山政府以本地产业链供应链信息的系统掌握为基础,综合运用协调整合、政策支撑、资源调配等能力,修复导致耦合断裂的环节或重建新耦合。本文提出外部冲击型耦合断裂这一概念,丰富拓展了对战略耦合动态性的认识。其次,本文深化了对政府-全球生产网络互动联结的理解,讨论了地方政府在维系战略耦合联系中的能动性作用和局限性。

The role of government departments in mediating shock-driven coupling ruptures:A case study of Kunshan,China

Since 2020, the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused huge impacts on people's health and daily life, as well as economic development and employment worldwide. People were quarantined, transportation was blocked, and borders were closed. As a result of the pandemic, global production networks (GPNs), which organize production in a highly decentralized form and in a global scale, have been negatively affected to the greatest extent. This phenomenon demonstrates the temporary, shock-driven discontinuities and ruptures of strategic couplings in GPNs, which tend to be relatively overlooked in the existing GPN literature. In China, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out earliest, a large number of firms and factories were shut down and its economy once came to a standstill. However, China's economy soon recovered. This article argues that the rapid recovery has largely been driven by the strong, active and effective interventions of Chinese government actors at various levels, including the Chinese central as well as local and regional governments. This article uses the case of Kunshan in Jiangsu province as a case study to illustrate how the local government in particular played key roles in enabling and facilitating the restoration of coupling ruptures. Kunshan is highly plugged into GPNs, with a high level of foreign direct investments and exports. As such, it was heavily affected by the global pandemic initially. Specifically, this article illustrates four inter-connected problems that globally-plugged firms tended to face under the economic shock caused by the pandemic, that is, in terms of their access to the market, suppliers, labour, and finance. This article then shows how the local government of Kunshan utilized and mobilized the unique power and resources, namely, local industrial information, coordinating capacity, policy tools, and resource allocation capacity, to help firms overcome such challenges and in turn enabled and facilitated Kunshan's recovery from coupling ruptures. However, this article demonstrates the limitations of the local government alone in mediating crisis-driven coupling ruptures.