sustainability Article City Branding in China’s Northeastern Region: How Do Cities Reposition Themselves When Facing Industrial Decline and Ecological Modernization? Meiling Han 1,4, Martin de Jong 2,3,4, Zhuqing Cui 1, Limin Xu 1, Haiyan Lu 2 ID and Baiqing Sun 1,* 1 School of Management, Management Science and Engineering, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China;
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[email protected] (H.L.) 3 School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, Shanghai 200433, China 4 Erasmus School of Law, Erasmus University Rotterdam, 3062 PA Rotterdam, The Netherlands * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 14 December 2017; Accepted: 30 December 2017; Published: 4 January 2018 Abstract: The past decade has seen a surge in the use of city branding, which is used to attract specific target groups of investors, high-tech green firms and talented workforce and reflects a desired shift from old, polluting manufacturing industries to new, clean service industries. Previous studies in the Chinese mega-city regions Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta and Jing-Jin-Ji (region around Beijing and Tianjin) have shown that branding practices of primarily service and innovation oriented cities are largely in line with existing industrial profiles while those which are predominantly manufacturing oriented wish to present themselves as more service and innovation driven. In this contribution, city branding practices are studied in China’s three Northeastern provinces Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning which face structural decline because of the presence of many outdated resource-based and heavy industries.