Economic city branding and stakeholder involvement in China Attempt of a medium-sized city to trigger industrial transformation

Among known studies of city branding by Chinese megacities to realise urban transformation, there is no ex- plorative study of how smaller Chinese cities engage in city branding and attempt to trigger industrial transformation. In response, this article presents an in-depth case study of city branding processes in a medium-sized Chinese city. Roles, resources and interactions among the city's stakeholders are analysed during the brand creation and implementation stages in two different economic city branding projects. The stakeholder in- volvement mechanisms we identify confirm that city branding creation in China primarily follows political rather than business channels. Chinese local public authorities and more specifically key politicians, depart- ments, and public enterprises are core stakeholders in branding creation. However, this leads to challenges in the branding implementation, since key public sector players tend to withdraw themselves when implementation begins, leaving previously uninvolved private (and public) players to implement the brands. The unsuccessful transformation contrasts with those observed in Chinese megacities, where involvement of powerful corpora- tions and support from higher levels of government are both much higher. It appears that the imperative of broad stakeholder involvement to make city branding successful as we know it for Western cities may also apply in medium-sized Chinese cities.


Introduction
Chinese cities have experienced unprecedented economic growth rates in the last forty years (Deng, Huang, Rozelle, & Uchida, 2010;Fleisher, Li, & Zhao, 2010;Zhang, Wang, & Wang, 2012). This has brought many positive changes, especially in terms of quality of life and material prosperity for a great many people who live in these cities . On the other hand, a variety of social and ecological problems is associated with urbanisation and industrialisation. Examples of social problems include growing (regional) disparity between cities (Fan, Kanbur, & Zhang, 2011;Wang & Fan, 2004) and a growing gap between the wealthiest and the underprivileged living inside these cities (Cai, Wang, & Du, 2002;Fan et al., 2011;Wang & Fan, 2004;Zhang, 2001). Environmental problems which are increasingly plaguing industrialised Chinese cities are traffic congestion, air pollution, and a growing waste-pile (Chien & Wu, 2011;Logan & Molotch, 2007;Shao, Tang, Zhang, & Li, 2006;Yeh, Yang, & Wang, 2015). The aforementioned problems are especially poignant in cities in the nation's densely populated western and central heartlands, which are less prosperous than those in the coastal provinces. Furthermore, there is intense competition between cities due to their limited access to resources (e.g. a highly qualified workforce, financial and cultural facilities) and a growing mobility among inhabitants. For these reasons, many local policymakers are exploring new pathways to stimulate economic development and generate a sustainable urban transformation. Many decision-makers have embraced city branding as a key strategy to guide their municipalities' industrial transformation process. City branding is viewed as an essential strategy to remain 'competitive' (Kavaratzis, Warnaby, & Ashworth, 2014). Supporters argue that city branding is crucial to realise a metropolitan vision which feeds into sustainable urban transformation (Belloso, 2011;Goess, de Jong, & Meijers, 2016;Rius Ulldemolins, 2014), whereas critics have claimed that city branding is a vague policy term and merely a tool that is employed by local governments to greenwash a city's image (Braun, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102754 Received 24 July 2019; Received in revised form 16 March 2020; Accepted 24 April 2020 T 2012; de Jong, 2019;Kavaratzis & Ashworth, 2005;Schuetze & Chelleri, 2016;Zenker & Martin, 2011).
City branding in the more advanced coastal regions in China have gained some attention in academic studies. For example, Berg and Bjorner (2014) studied city branding in Chinese megacities, including Beijing and Shanghai. City branding in the Pearl River Delta and the Bohai River basin (around Beijing and Tianjin) are similarly discussed . Other scholars have studied different aspects of city branding in Chinese settings. For example, Wu (2000) has focused on urban development and place promotion in Shanghai, while Zhu, Qian, and Gao (2011) investigated the globalisation and city image in Guangzhou. Especially, the relationship between large international events and city branding has been extensively studied by hosts of scholars, for example, the Beijing Olympics (Chen, 2015;Zhang & Zhao, 2009), the Shanghai World Expo (Dynon, 2011;Yu, Wang, & Seo, 2012), and the Guangzhou Asian games (Chen, 2012). Obviously, city branding has been widely adopted by Chinese cities as a strategy to achieve a variety of urban development goals. However, little is known of what the smaller and lesser known cities located in China's central heartland provinces do in this regard, even though they represent the large majority of Chinese cities and its urban population. This is remarkable since we would argue that these regions and cities are of more importance from a policy perspective than the 'outliers' which have been studied so far; megacities in China harbour less than 13% of the overall population in China (NBSPRC, 2017).
This contribution focuses on city branding activities of a mediumsized Chinese city, Jingmen. Jingmen represents a typical average Chinese city. This type of city faces an increasingly complex mix of economic and environmental problems. On the one hand, governmental officials and departments face a relentless competition for resources, economic activity and residents with other cities (Jessop & Sum, 2000;Xu & Yeh, 2005). On the other hand, policymakers have the unenviable task to 'reinvent' and 'transform' these cities to become more sustainable (Joss & Molella, 2013;Ye, 2011;Zhan & de Jong, 2018). Some cities experience this challenge as deeply conflictual, others perceive this as a challenge and consequently embrace city branding as an opportunity to engage in industrial transformation (Ma, Schraven, Bruijne, Jong, & Lu, 2019). Jingmen belongs to the second category employs city branding strategies to generate industrial transformation (and the promise of economic growth resulting from that). Jingmen thus avoids using the outdated branding label 'Industrial City' and explores new brands and underlying economic 'business models' in an attempt to generate economic growth. These include brands which focus on general aviation, more specifically navigation equipment (the General Aviation New Town brand) and the local food industry and tourism (small private farmers and local food producers as destinations for food tourism) (China's Agricultural Valley brand).
The design of a city brand and the subsequent implementation of the brand via city branding is influenced by stakeholder involvement (Dinnie, 2010). Effective stakeholder engagement is crucial for the acceptance of city branding and can help fix and convey the image of a place (Kavaratzis, 2012). Stakeholders' attitudes and roles are essential factors in the process of city branding (Stubbs & Warnaby, 2015). However, public sector players are still the most influential stakeholders in China, and other ones tend to be followers rather than participants (Lu, de Jong, & Chen, 2017). More needs to be known about what roles these stakeholders take on, and to what extent and how they are involved in the city branding process.
Therefore, this article seeks to explore how a medium-sized Chinese city engages in city branding strategies that help trigger industrial transformation. More specifically, we examine how different stakeholders get involved in the city branding creation and implementation phases of developing a city brand.
Section 2 explores the relationship between city branding and local economic development and industrial transformation. The practice of stakeholder involvement in Chinese political systems is explained. It identifies the types of stakeholders in Chinese cities, their roles and resources and provides an analytical framework to analyse our empirical data. In Section 3, we explain our research process, methodology and the representativeness of Jingmen in the broader population of small and medium-sized cities in China and present detailed information regarding our fieldwork. Section 4 offers a brief description of Jingmen city, its industrial structure, and a concise history of brand development. In Section 5, a comparative analysis is made of two processes of brand creation and implementation we encountered in Jingmen, which allows us to analyse the roles, resources, and interactions between city departments and stakeholders in each project. Furthermore, we analyse the barriers encountered during brand implementation. We demonstrate that specific stakeholder roles are underrepresented, what resources are missing and subsequently assess the consequences for Jingmen's city branding strategy. Section 6 provides an in-depth discussion about city brand creation and implementation. Section 7 concludes by summarizing how mechanisms for stakeholder involvement work in medium-sized Chinese cities, where their weaknesses lie and we offer some suggestions for further study.

An economic policy-oriented view of city branding and China's application
City branding has been intensely studied in both the academic and professional domains in the last ten years, particularly in urban planning and governance (Lucarelli & Berg, 2011;Ma et al., 2019). In this contribution, we consider city branding as "a whole set of actions to build a positive image of the city and communicate it among various target groups via visuals, narratives, and events locally and internationally to gain a competitive advantage over other cities" (Vanolo, 2008, p.371). On the one hand, city branding has a strong connection with local economic development (Anttiroiko, 2014;Blakely & Leigh, 2013;Cleave, Arku, Sadler, & Gilliland, 2016;Rowe, 2009) and responds to global intercity competition (Anttiroiko, 2015). It aims to direct towards business relocation, expansion and investment (Baker, 2012;Harvey, 2013). Many Chinese cities apply city branding to obtain a competitive advantage and improve their economic position (Lu et al., 2017). For example, economic city brands are adopted in Greater Pearl River Delta as a policy instrument to trigger economic development (Lu et al., 2017). On the other hand, city branding as a process stimulates and enables cities to experience in-depth urban and industrial transformation, economic restructuring and policy change (Boisen, Terlouw, Groote, & Couwenberg, 2018;Joo & Seo, 2018;Ye & Björner, 2018). Thus, in this article, city branding can be understood as an economic policy instrument, covering the industrial dimension of city branding. Ye and Björner (2018) claim that city branding has become a growth-driven urban policy and governance strategy in Chinese megacities. In the Chinese context, city brands are widely adopted as brand identities in various plans, such as the Urban Master Plans and Five Year Social-Economic Plans, which provide a local vision on social, economic and industrial development (Lu et al., 2017). National, provincial, and local plans provide the direction for urban development and guide industrial change. Ideally, all the campaigns, promotions and policy actions should be fleshed out in line with these plans. Baker (2012) identified the key factors for branding small cities in some countries, such as making a consistent effort to achieve a vision with reality matching the positive expectations. However, research on city branding in Chinese small cities is non-existent.
Compared with urban development in Western countries, public authorities play a much bigger role in China (Xu & Yeh, 2005). Governments are the core stakeholders in China as most resources and policy instruments are regulated and controlled by the state (Chen, Sun, Tang, & Wu, 2011). A rich variety of public stakeholders can be identified, ranging from regional and local organisations to sections of stateowned enterprises who operate at the national level. Furthermore, politicians occupy key positions in the aforementioned government organisations, non-profit organisations, and state-owned companies (Li & Zhou, 2005). China's one-party system is organised more or less in parallel to the various government levels, so that party leaders occupy high positions both within the party and in (local) governments and state-owned enterprises. The party is thus involved at multiple-levels and in many aspects of China's societal governance down to cultural and sports organisations (Oi, 1995). However, we have insufficient knowledge of stakeholder involvement in the city branding activities of Chinese medium and small cities.

Stakeholder identification via an adopted involvement framework
The identification of stakeholders is a crucial step in any stakeholder analysis. A mixture of several techniques will be adopted, including a positional approach to map power or resources of stakeholders (Enserink et al., 2010) and a social participation approach to identify to what extent the stakeholders relate to activities (Bryson, 2004).
Here, we combine previous studies on stakeholder involvement in place branding (Kavaratzis, 2012;Klijn et al., 2012;Stubbs & Warnaby, 2015), stakeholder involvement in China (Zhan et al., 2017;Zhuang et al., 2019) and Chinese institutional characteristics (Li & Zhou, 2005;Ye, 2013Ye, , 2014 to identify the stakeholder structure in city branding processes in Chinese cities. We apply Stubbs & Warnaby's model (2015) to the Chinese context as shown in Table 1 (left side) but make some crucial adjustments to achieve a better fit with Chinese institutional characteristics. Most importantly, the role of politicians should be merged into various governmental organisations and state-owned enterprises. In China, there are also professional government organisations in charge of organising cultural and sports activities. So we also merge the cultural and sports organisations into government organisations. Since religious organisations are rarely involved in the design of city-level policies and city branding, we exclude them from our analysis. We will use our adjusted stakeholder framework to identify and analyse the various (potential) stakeholders in city branding creation and implementation processes in Jingmen in Section 5.

Table 1
Stakeholder involvement framework in city branding in China.

Research methodology
A case study can be used to investigate a contemporary phenomenon more deeply and to explore the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon (Yin, 2009). It is a deliberate research strategy to describe and explain the creation and implementation processes of city branding in a specific medium-sized city in China. Jingmen is a highly industrialised city and in its planning documents displays a strong willingness to experience economic, industrial and urban transformation. Roughly 600,000 of Jingmen's inhabitants live in the main urban district, which makes Jingmen a typical medium-sized municipality in China in terms of population numbers (SC, 2014). In terms of social and economic development, Jingmen closely represents the 'average' among Chinese cities. In 2017, its GDP per capita (57,357 RMB) (HBOS, 2018), closely resembles the Chinese national average GDP per capita (59,201 RMB) (NBSPRC, 2018). In 2018, Jingmen's urbanisation rate reached 59.21% (JMBOS, 2019), quite close to the national level (59.58%) (NBSPRC, 2019). Jingmen is one of the 128 "fifth-tier" cities and localities inlands in China, from a grand total of 337 listed cities in 2019, according to a Chinese media investigation (YICAI, 2019). Based on these data, we argue that the city of Jingmen can serve as a representative case to study city branding practices of a large group of cities. Fig. 1 shows the specific research process in this article, which focuses on the involvement of stakeholders in the creation of city brands and their subsequent implementation in city branding activities. In step 1, we identify the various stakeholders that were involved in two recent city branding projects which are indicative of recent attempts at city branding in the city of Jingmen. The stakeholder framework that was developed in Section 2.3 was used to identify relevant stakeholders via interviews and document analysis during our fieldwork in Jingmen. In step 2, we examined additional information about the city branding projects via interviews and official documents to trace brand creation and implementation processes and map the interactions among the different stakeholders. Expert panel discussions were used to complete the in-depth analysis of the city branding projects to subsequently analyse the barriers and challenges experienced in both projects. Finally, in step 3, we summarise the patterns of underlying stakeholder involvement in the city brand creation and implementation phases in a medium-sized Chinese city.
Specifically, we summarise the generic economic and social information from the websites about Jingmen City and the project information of two economic brands: China's Agricultural Valley (CAV), and General Aviation New Town (GANT).
We conducted our fieldwork in Jingmen from November 2018 to January 2019 and conducted semi-structured interviews with representatives of involved stakeholders. In total, 18 respondents were interviewed, among them the CAV and GANT project leaders. Four respondents were interviewed more than once (See Appendix A). Most interviewees were employed in local government departments, such as the Jingmen Planning Bureau, Jingmen Planning and Design Institute, Jingmen Daily Media Group and Jingmen Development and Reform Commission (DRC). We also consulted experts at local universities and research institutions; and the leaders of local enterprises about their knowledge about the city branding policies.
Furthermore, we participated as observers and participants in two meetings of the Jingmen Urban Planning Bureau, and organised a workshop with the local officials and external experts to analyse and discuss Jingmen's approach to city branding projects and industrial transformation (see Appendix A). Five foreign experts from Delft University of Technology, four experts from Chinese top universities, and eight PhD students participated in the workshop discussions.
In addition, we conducted telephone interviews and email inquiries with officials and experts to obtain updates and additional information. To complement these interviews, we used information from official websites and project documents and publications to understand the urban context (e.g. Jingmen Urban Master Plan). Combined with the interview results in Jingmen, official documents, and the suggestions from expert panels, we present our analysis and results in Section 5, especially focusing on the interactions among different stakeholders (see Figs. 5 and 6).

A brief description of Jingmen in China
The location of Jingmen in Hubei province is shown in Fig. 2. The land area of Jingmen is 12,404 sq.km. The number of inhabitants in the administrative area is reported as 2,896,500 (JMBOS, 2019). The Gross Domestic Product of Jingmen in 2018 was RMB 184.8 billion. Historically, Jingmen belonged to Jingzhou, another city next to Jingmen (see in Fig. 2). On August 19, 1983, the State Council approved the promotion of Jingmen to prefecture-level municipality 1 (PGOJM, 2019). Currently, Jingmen promotes the development of equipment manufacturing, new energy and new materials, renewable resource utilisation and environmental protection, electronic information, health, fine chemicals and processing of agricultural products (PGOJM, 2019).
To obtain insight in Jingmen's economic structure, we distinguish the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors in the economy. Fig. 3 Step 1 Stakeholder Identification

Method 1 Literature review;
Interviews; Documents Goal 1 Identify the various involved stakeholders, their roles and resources in Jingmen's two industrial brands.

Stakeholder Analysis
Goal 2 Analyse and map the interactions in city brand development and implementation among different stakeholders; Analyse the barriers and challenges in city brand(ing) implementation.

Discussion and findings
Goal 3 Compare patterns of stakeholder involvement in city brand creation and implementation across two cases

Method 3
Tabular analysis of roles, resources and barriers across two cases W. Ma, et al. Cities 105 (2020) 102754 shows the distribution of GDP across the three economic sectors in Jingmen from 1949 to 2018 (HBOS, 2018). The relative proportion of the primary sector decreases significantly over time, whereas the contribution of the secondary sector increases rapidly from the 1970s and onwards. Since then the secondary industry has maintained its economic importance in Jingmen's economy until the time of writing (2020). In 2017, the percentages of GDP in Jingmen's three economic sectors were 13.4%, 51.1%, and 35.5% respectively (JMBOS, 2019), which shows that the secondary sector still dominates the city's economic structure. In contrast, the workforce distribution of the three industrial sectors is 36.7%, 25.1%, and 38.2% respectively (HBOS, 2018). Roughly half of Jingmen's GDP is produced by a quarter of its working population. A substantial proportion of the working population is still employed in the primary sector even though its contribution to the city's GDP is relatively low. Although the tertiary industry experienced stable growth over time, its proportional contribution to Jingmen's GDP is still substantially lower than that of the secondary sector.

Jingmen's city brands: evolution and development
City brand development in Jingmen has seen some shifts over the previous decades. The evolution of city brand development from the beginning of the 1970s to the current day can be broadly divided into three stages. Jingmen's first city brand (Industrial City) was created during the period of the so-called Third Front Movement 2 as part of a large-scale national plan to industrialise China's interior. A substantial number of large national companies were (re)located to stimulate economic development (Qian, 2000). As a result of this deliberate   1949 1952 1955 1958 1961 1964 1967 1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 2018 Primary industry Secondary industry Tertiary industry national industrial policy, Jingmen evolved into an important petrochemical industrial hub and became well-known as a typical 'Industrial City' (interviewee 1). Jingmen's Industrial City brand was maintained until 2012 when a new city brand -China's Agricultural Valley (CAV), was developed and launched as part of Jingmen's new urban development model. Being mostly located on plain land, Jingmen is an important production base for commodity grain and high-quality rapeseed oil in the country (PGOJM, 2019). The output of cotton, oilseeds, fruits, pigs and aquatic products ranks among the highest in the province (PGOJM, 2019).
As part of a deliberate local government policy to stimulate Jingmen's primary sector and economic development in the region of Qujialing 3 (see in Fig. 4), China's Agricultural Valley (CAV) brand quickly caught on. The CAV brand was gradually extended from Qujialing to encompass Jingmen proper, and was later even used to brand the entire Hubei Province. Spurred on by high levels of attention from leaders of municipal and provincial governments the CAV brand quickly gained popularity as an economic concept, which in turn further stimulated the developed of CAV into a city brand of Jingmen itself.
More recently, in order to realise an industrial upgrade and transform the economy, Jingmen has been exploring new options for development. Jingmen is considered one of five general aviation industrial clusters in China. Being designated as a 'general aviation industry comprehensive demonstration zone' enables Jingmen to plan and build a General Aviation New Town (GANT) as part of its ambitious growth plans. The core area in GANT is Zhanghe New District. The core areas of CAV and GANT are shown in Fig. 4.
Actually, in addition to the aforementioned brands, the city of Jingmen also boasts being 'China's Outstanding Tourist City', 'Gateway of Hubei', 'National Garden City', 'National Forest City', 'Cultural Jingmen' and 'Ecological Jingmen' as city brands (PGOJM, 2019). However, since this article aims to analyse how Jingmen uses economic brands to achieve industrial transformation. China's Agricultural Valley, Industrial City, and the General Aviation New Town brands represent three typical industrial city brands in Jingmen. Since the building of Industrial City as a brand began in the 1970s further back in time, we were unable to obtain sufficient information about stakeholder engagement during the creation and implementation of this brand. Consequently, this article considers the Industrial City as background for the study of the other two brands in Jingmen. CAV and GANT are thus selected as cases for our analysis of economic city branding strategies in Jingmen which aim to trigger sustainable industrial transformation.

Stakeholder involvement analysis: CAV and GANT
From 1964, a large number of military-industrial and national defense enterprises were assigned to Jingmen because of the national Third Front Movement policy. These included Sinopec, Hongtu Aircraft Manufacturing Plant, 605 Research Institute, the 330 Cement Plant, various Thermal Power Plants, the Xiangsha Chemical Plant, but also the Dongguang Optoelectronics Factory, and the Jiangbei Foundry. Many petrochemical and phosphate industries companies joined these companies and most are still present in Jingmen today and are part of Jingmen's industrial basis (PGOJM, 2019). However, the governance of these state-owned enterprises is primarily concentrated at the national and provincial levels. From 1986 to 1995, China experienced a major reform of its economic system and a transition from a planned economy to a market-based economy (Qian, 2000). The Industrial City brand was developed in response to the abovementioned urban economic reforms in the national policy environment (interviewee 1; 4). This brand also stimulated the development of the secondary industry.
Currently, the Industrial City brand faces serious challenges. Severe environmental pollution presents an increasingly problematic living environment for local residents and challenges Jingmen's attractiveness to prospective city inhabitants (interviewee 1). When it comes to competition with neighbouring cities, the Industrial City brand has become unattractive and lacks power as it represents an image of environmental pollution and bad air quality. However, at the same time, the economic data shows that Jingmen still relies heavily on the secondary industry (interviewee 6). Nonetheless, Jingmen increasingly avoids branding itself as 'Industrial City'.
These reasons push the city of Jingmen to explore new ways of generating deep sustainable industrial transformation. The solution that the Jingmen government has chosen so far is to let the heavy industry survive but downplay the importance of the industrial sector in its external communication while promoting new aviation technology and sustainable agriculture as key economic activities. In the next sections, we will analyse the creation and implementation of these two city brands.

General project introduction
China's Agricultural Valley (CAV) brand was officially kicked off in 2012 with the Jingmen municipal government as the key driver. It aims to stimulate the development towards a modern agricultural industry in the Jingmen area. China's Agricultural Valley project initially focused on the Quiialing and Pengdun areas (see Fig. 4). The brand concept initially focused on the Qujialing farming culture, the rich and diverse agricultural resources in Jingmen. Table 2 shows more detailed information about project progress.

Stakeholder identification in CAV
The principal stakeholders, their roles and resources are shown in Table 3. The general media organisation and tourism agencies in Jingmen are the main promotion agencies of the CAV brand. The Daily Media Group publishes the information on CAV via media channels, such as WeChat and newspapers (interviewee 11; 12). Tourism agencies publish farming tourism information to attract outside visitors (interviewee 10).

Stakeholder analysis in CAV brand creation and implementation
In 2012, the Hubei Agricultural Valley Industrial Group Co., Ltd.  W. Ma, et al. Cities 105 (2020) 102754 Ltd. (CIHG), Transport Construction & Investment Co., Ltd. (TCI), and the Transport Bureau (TB2) are the main road infrastructure and transport providers in Jingmen. They are also in charge of the infrastructure and transport construction projects and policies that have been started under the CAV brand, such as rural transportation, and farmland water conservancy projects. Even though some residents participate in activities under the CAV brand, their participation is limited and communication about CAV is predominantly one-way; the government claims the brand, the residents receive brand information and participate in brand related activities (interviewee 16). The local farmers in the CAV area are important stakeholders, however, they only indirectly participate in CAV branding related projects. For example, the farmers sell their agricultural products to the large trading enterprises. Migrant workers participate in industrial farming work (interviewee 14). However, the farmers' participation has not been particularly massive, nor very passionate (interviewee 6).

General project introduction
In 2014, the Aviation Industry Corporation of China, Ltd. (AVIC) and the Jingmen Municipal Government reached an agreement on the construction of the Jingmen General Aviation New Town (GANT). The Jingmen Municipal Government initiated this project to stimulate local economic activity and create a new city strategy for urban transformation. General Aviation New Town is aimed at four industries: the development of navigation research and manufacturing, navigation operation and maintenance, emerging navigation services, and navigation training. More detailed information about GANT project progress can be found in Table 4.

Stakeholder identification in General Aviation New Town
The principal stakeholders, their roles and resources in GANT are shown in Table 5.   Local travel agencies publish travel information about GANT on their websites to attract outside visitors. The Daily Media Group also publishes news reports to promote GANT.

Stakeholder analysis in GANT brand creation and implementation
China Aviation Industry General Aircraft Co., Ltd. is a state-owned enterprise with experience in developing the general aviation industry. It was charged with providing technology and expertise to support the GANT projects in Jingmen. In 2017, the Hubei AVIC General Airport Management Company was launched as a flight service operation and management business at Zhanghe Airport. These public enterprises are the key stakeholders in the projects which aim to develop the GANT city brand. Some private tourism companies provide a platform and work with the government to promote the tourism industry.
During the 13th five year plan, Jingchu University of Technology     Ma, et al. Cities 105 (2020) 102754 established the School of Aviation and created graduation majors for its students including aircraft manufacturing engineering, avionics, electrical technology, and precision molding technology for aviation materials (JUT, 2016). In addition, the Jingmen Municipal Government cooperates with the Chinese Aviation Society in support of talent and technology development in the general aviation industry. Many infrastructure and transport providers participate in the infrastructure and real estate projects which are all conducted under the GANT brand, especially in key projects, such as the reconstruction and expansion of Zhanghe airport and the roads connecting the new town with the city of Jingmen. The Hubei Jingmen Urban Construction Group is a state-owned company responsible for the construction of infrastructure in the Zhanghe New district. Zhanghe New District Zhangfu Investment Development Co., Ltd., was established in 2012, and is a state-owned enterprise. It is the main financial department for urban infrastructure construction and investment in the Zhanghe New District (ZNDZID, 2019). The China Special Aircraft Research Institute contributes to the Jingmen Zhanghe general airport reconstruction and expansion project. Hubei Zhonghang General Airport Management Co., Ltd. leads the construction of the Jingmen general airport, water terminal, temporary take-off and landing point construction project.
Residents only participate in certain projects and activities, such as AVIC Flight Conference, via their role as visitors. In other words, the role of residents in GANT brand implementation is minimal.

Implementation barriers in Jingmen's city branding
We use Table 6 to list the main barriers in Jingmen's city branding implementation process. Weakly represented roles among stakeholders and missing resources in industry, markets, and policy supply are shown which result in a rather unsuccessful implementation of the two brands. Both have so far failed to attract noticeable attention from the targeted groups (i.e. investors, private companies, local farmers, and prospective residents).
Even though Jingmen still uses CAV as a city brand, political and policy attention for this brand fell dramatically after 2013 because of a change in the secretariat of the Jingmen municipal government (interviewees 6; 17). Current politicians and departments are more interested in the GANT city brand and its associated projects. A fleeting political attention to branding policies in general and the lack of political attention to brand implementation can be identified in Jingmen's city branding activities.
In these two cases, the responsibility for city branding and promotion of the city was placed primarily in the hands of the local media and promotion departments, which dutifully organised some public events.
However, after some initial success visitor numbers could not be maintained and declined dramatically once the activities were organised (interviewees 2; 3; 18). Obviously, politicians and other departments withdrew their attention and participation during the implementation phase. Other types of city branding policy instruments were not developed and implemented. At the same time, based on our observations, we conclude that the level of cooperation and coordination between the various public departments and locally engaged actors seems insufficient. Residential participation and interest in the brands has been low and passive. The participation of private enterprises in the implementation of city branding is weak. Thus, two important stakeholder groups remain uncommitted to the city branding efforts. According to the interviews, many projects were not realised, oftentimes even failing to kick off for lack of interest among companies and insufficient policy provided by the local government was insufficient (interviewees 8; 7). The two cases show no functioning industrial system or market-oriented operation which would benefit from the brands and so far, none have been established. In terms of infrastructure, there are still many difficulties in rural transportation, farmland water conservancy, and communication. For example, in terms of transportation, Jingmen City is the only prefecture-level city in the Hubei province that does not (yet) have a high-speed railway station. For these two cases, local government departments still need the technology input and expert advice. However, only a few suggestions from experts were adopted (interviewee 15). Little expertise and technology has been developed which could be translated into brand products.

Discussion and findings
The two economic city brands in Jingmen we investigated represent different choices with regard to the strategy towards industrial transformation. The CAV brand, leaning primary on the agricultural sector (potentially) focused on the involvement of a large share of the workforce, but of low added economic value to the Jingmen economy. The other GANT brand aims to trigger the development of an advanced, more sustainable part of the services side of the secondary sector (aviation navigation industry). However in doing so and focusing on aviation technology, the brand focuses on a very tiny percentage of the total Jingmen workforce, however one which could generate a potential high economic value. Still, we found the actual branding creation and implementation processes in both cases to show a very similar pattern.
Jingmen's local politicians and senior civil servants seem quite focused and successful in the identification and launching of potential brands which could be used to transform Jingmen. In both cases, they  W. Ma, et al. Cities 105 (2020) 102754 Table 6 The weak roles, missing resources and identified barriers in two branding projects.

Barriers
Roles Approver or Pusher (governments; politicians) Lack of guidance in attracting investment.
Unable to build a vigorous market system for local produce. Limited encouragement of public participation from the government.
Insufficient planning and coordination of policy implementation.
Focus more on more management than implementation.

Lack of political support and interest in implementation
Coordinator Dissolution of efforts as CAV office was merged into Jingmen's Agricultural Bureau. No specific departmental responsibility and authority for CAV project implementation.
Imperfect communication and coordination.

Lack of policy interest; Problematic organisation and coordination
Executor Local government departments simply follow higher level government guidelines.
Local government departments simply follow higher level government guidelines.

Passive participation
Information deliverers Ineffective brand communication via traditional media channels, like newspapers and TV stations.
Only media departments are involved in publication and communication.

Limited brand publication and promotion
Advisor Policy suggestions are not adopted.
Few suggestions for GANT creation and implementation.
Weak influence of expert advice Participants Insufficient participation from small private enterprises.
Few large and strong enterprises support the brand. Farmers' passion are not mobilized. Farmers' participation is relatively small.
Leading (state-owned) companies insufficiently involved. Insufficient participation from private enterprises.
Low general public participation.

Low private participation
Resources Policy Lack of policy support from higher level governments. Insufficient policy supply results in failure during the negotiations.
Lack of policy support from national government level. China lacks independent navigation regulations and standards. Insufficient policy supply results in failure during the negotiations.
Lack of political interest and support for implementation

Market
The CAV brand hasn't resulted in a viable economic market in support of providers of local produce.
Immature market for general aviation. Overall weak industry.
High operation costs of navigation and limited low-altitude airspace inhibit the realisation of a vital market.

Lack of viable market (perspective)
Media channels Only use of simple and traditional brand promotion channels.
Only use of simple and traditional brand promotion channels.
Simple and traditional promotion channels Insufficient infrastructure; lack of a general airport in the Hubei Province.

Lack of involvement in policy implementation
Technology, knowledge, and talent Technology development was not transferred into agricultural products.
Insufficient technology support for the agricultural sector.
Lack of in-depth cooperation with non-public actors.

Lack of professional aviation talents
Lack of professional input W. Ma, et al. Cities 105 (2020) 102754 show remarkable skill in lining up especially provincial and national governments during the brand construction phase. However, the cases at the same time reveal that after these brands are created, politicians 'leave' the implementation to other players such as local government agencies which neither have the powers and authority, nor perhaps the right skills to actually realise the original, ambitious policy goals underlying the city brands. Fig. 7 shows the key findings in Jingmen's city branding processes.

City branding selection and creation
A successful city brand should be aligned with national and provincial plans and policies, and based on historical and cultural traditions (Han et al., 2018). The brand ideally would take into account the current demographic and economic context, reflect future ambitions of the municipal government, set challenging yet realistic goals, be attractive and distinct from its neighbours, adopt and apply the brand for the long term through implementation across the various departments within the municipal government and connect it with other policy measures. If these conditions are fulfilled, a brand is (far more) likely to generate deep sustainable transformation. In Jingmen's cases, local government promotes new aviation technology development and sustainable agriculture, which comes across as more attractive and more sustainable. However, the economic city brands that were studied in this research did not add much economic value and employment. Jingmen allows its heavy industry, with all of the environmental problems that come associated with it, to survive and simply downplays the importance of the industrial city in its external communication. Economically speaking the aviation industry and sustainable agriculture play a far smaller role in Jingmen's local economy than the secondary sector. The manufacturing and petrochemical industries remain unaffected by the new city branding efforts. Although this is understandable, however, brand selection and creation do not go very far in achieving industrial transformation. We would have to conclude that the current state of affairs in Jingmen is not the most productive one in the long run. Actually, city labels, such as 'eco city' and 'low carbon city', are widely chosen by China's local governments in their planning contexts since these attractive labels are related to national urban development programs and influenced by national policies Lu & de Jong, 2019). These reflect cities' development visions and economic restructuring ambitions. However, in many occasions, the selected new economic brands do not meet the actual requirements of urban industrial transformation. Moreover, the new city brands barely distinguish one city from the other in terms of brands. This situation also represents a common phenomenon in many Chinese cities.
According to Baker (2012), a brand that has been developed with broad stakeholder support is more easily accepted and more quickly recognised by those at the receiving end. The brand should be widely embraced by a critical mass of stakeholders (Henninger, Foster, Alevizou, & Frohlich, 2016) within and outside the local government, and enjoy strong support from the political and administrative leaders and city officials. The city branding organisation should integrate the city's stakeholders, such as local government departments, public and private enterprises and residents into participation in city branding management (Zavattaro & Daspit, 2016). However, in contrast to this, we found that the realisation of city branding policies in Jingmen was primarily the result of opaque and deeply political processes in which many, especially private stakeholders are not or only quite passively involved. The cases show how political leaders skillfully identify and select seemingly attractive brands such as ecological agriculture or aviation new town to realise the industrial transformation goals for Jingmen. The branding creation can be successfully built with strong support from political leaders.

City branding implementation
In Jingmen's cases, only the attention of influential local politicians pushes the implementation of a brand. Effectiveness of a brand seriously is tightly related to the span of political attention. According to Kavaratzis' advice (2012), city brands should be recognised and accepted by many different stakeholders and this requires their involvement throughout the entire city branding process (Baker, 2012;Kavaratzis, 2012). However, Jingmen's governmental organisations at different levels, state-owned enterprises, public media organisations are the key stakeholders in both instances of city branding that we studied. Small private companies, promotion agencies, academic associations, and residents participate in city branding to a much lesser extent, and predominantly play a role as 'participant' or 'recipient' in the implementation phase. Their absence in the creation stage results in serious consequences during the implementation phase, while the absence of many essential public sector players (especially high level politicians and civil servants) similarly affects implementation negatively. The cases seem to provide evidence that branding processes in Chinese cities lack a coherent and integrated city branding approach.
Social media activities (Cleave, Arku, Sadler, & Kyeremeh, 2017;Zhou & Wang, 2014) and mega events (Chen, 2015;Marin-Aguilar & Vila-López, 2014) are broadly adopted by policy makers to brand cities for inside as well as in outside communication. For the implementation of Jingmen's city brands, the local government has placed the responsibility primarily in the hands of its media and promotion departments. These agencies utilise general media and the organisation of specific events as key instruments to establish a positive city image. In Jingmen, however, the limited number of activities and their small scale result in limited long-term effects of city promotion activities. In China, only the mega cities are in a position to organise mega events, such as Olympic Games or the G20 summits. And even then, it could be questioned whether these events are followed up by sufficient other activities and projects to really identify long-lasting effects in terms of branding. In contrast, the activities which are organised by small and medium-sized cities tend to be small in scale and weak in effect since they do not have sufficient resources at their disposal to organise mega events. Small cities can only focus on less glamourous activities generating far less Chosen brands are attractive, but have limited impact on adding economic value Extensive political, but limited stakeholder involvement The loss of interest of political elites; private sector stakeholders were not involved in brand selection; and lack of economic clout Lack of professional city branding/ marketing/ promotion departments and experienced staffs

Brand creation and selection
Brand implementation City branding processes Fig. 7. Key findings in Jingmen's city branding processes.
publicity. Furthermore, we find that public information campaigns and advertising are quite passive policy instruments and therefore in themselves insufficiently powerful to singlehandedly implement brands without broader participation. The specific actions which were undertaken to implement the two brands in Jingmen are less impressive than the slogans. Potential branding policy instruments are simply not developed or applied. The creation and implementation of city branding activities are processes which are meant to unite and align the various city departments and stakeholders in brand management, to have all the noses point in the same direction (Zavattaro & Daspit, 2016). Consistent and clear city brand recognition is the basis for successful city branding (Kavaratzis, 2004), which can only be achieved through the establishment of an appropriate city marketing organisational structure. Many international cities set up professional city branding organisations to focus on the creation and implementation of city branding projects; they focus on a specific tourist market and seek to attract growing numbers of visitors (Boisen et al., 2018;Pike, 2012). In Jingmen, the work of city branding is managed by the Municipal Party Committee Propaganda Departments (MPCPD). City branding efforts are primarily implemented by the daily newspaper media and other propaganda departments. Other departments are barely involved in the field of city image enhancement and city brand building. There is a lack of professional staff specialised in city branding and promotion (Fan, 2014). Lack of professional institutions and experienced staff obviously influences the effectiveness of implementation.

Conclusion
This article has presented a case study research to analyse economic city brands' creation and implementation processes of a medium-sized city in China. We mapped a stakeholder oriented typology of city branding practices in Chinese medium-sized cities.
City branding in China clearly is embedded within a multi-level governance context. Politicians and provincial, municipal and district governments and departments are all involved in branding activities in different stages. The politicians are heavily involved in the brand creation phase and its final approval. They subsequently mobilise public resources and authorities at the local level to push for brand implementation. They engage in specific city branding activities and rely on specific public enterprises to finance and manage projects which are developed as part of a city brand. Different levels of administrative governments and different departments are the implementers of brand projects. They are the specific executive institutions. The special work office or leading group for each brand project coordinates the various interests and ensures cooperation from different departments. The media organisations such as promotion agencies and propaganda organisations are the information deliverers of city branding implementation projects. Academic associations and organisations are the advisors for brand selection and implementation. In most occasions, state-owned enterprises, private companies, residents and infrastructure and transport providers are mainly receivers of city branding projects.
The mechanisms underlying branding creation and implementation in Jingmen that we encountered could serve as a basis to increase our understanding of city branding processes in medium-sized Chinese cities. The creation phase of city branding in medium-sized cities in China is characterised by politically sophisticated processes during which local politicians compete for the acknowledgement and alignment of potential brands for their local city within the various layers of the Chinese government. However, the implementation of the brands is an altogether different story. City brands are more easily created than implemented. Implementation is generally weak because key private sector stakeholders are not involved during the brand creation phase. However, citizens and private sector stakeholders are required for successful city branding implementation. Conversely, powerful politicians and public organisations dominate city brand creation phase, but are hardly involved and seem hardly interested in the actual implementation phase. In other words, there remains a wide gulf between ambitious, politically inspired intentions during brand creation and a continuous and viable commitment of the majority of stakeholders during the implementation phase, which is needed to achieve industrial transformation. Long-term political and bureaucratic commitment to city branding implementation efforts after the brands are created also seem important for sustained and lasting success in city branding.
Chinese city branding practices present a different style than European or American or other Asian ones because of its unique governance culture, Chinese cities are exceptional in the sense that they do not use the universally acclaimed mechanism of broad stakeholder involvement in city branding, which is described in international literature. However, the research findings suggest that private stakeholders such as residents, farmers and private corporations should be encouraged to participate more fully in city branding creation and implementation to convey their opinions and interpretations and turn the city brand into something more than just a craftily politically engineered, temporary slogan. The case study findings provide evidence that seems to support the necessity of organising broad stakeholder involvement in place branding process (Baker, 2012;Kavaratzis, 2012).
The broad stakeholder involvement also should be applied in China's city branding, which is a finding of great theoretical significance.
We are well aware that our conclusions are based on the analysis of two city branding policies within one city. However, Jingmen is representative of a large group of Chinese cities. China counts a great many medium-sized Chinese cities like Jingmen which boast high-level ambitions to use economic city brands to transform their urban economies and industrial structure into more sustainable directions. However, as becomes clear from our study, industrial transformation becomes very difficult for these cities. City officials face the daunting task of making this transition happen, with a dominant secondary sector that cannot easily be phased without incurring major economic damage, with major infrastructure issues and a lowly qualified labour force. Current institutional patterns favour politicisation of the branding creation phase, which lacks of engagement from private sector and citizen engagement. The image of city branding in medium-sized cities in China in terms of branding implementation in comparison with more visible and advanced city branding processes of larger megacities on the Eastern shore does not bode well. The outcome of our study is of importance since what actually takes place in Jingmen may reflect the result of industrial transformation patterns in many Chinese mediumsized cities. At the same time, we emphasise the need to investigate a greater number of medium-sized cities in future research to verify our findings. City branding is a potentially crucial tool for positive self-reinvention which could be enormously helpful to the majority of Chinese cities. Making this happen requires a major reconsideration of the prevalent institutional and organisational practices through which this is done.

Author contributions
Wenting Ma is the main author of this contribution. Martin de Jong is Wenting's promotor and in charge of Jingmen's project; he helped structure the manuscript, edited the texted and strengthened the narrative. Mark de Bruijne is Wenting's daily supervisor and in collaboration with Daan Schraven, he contributed to the text-editing and added his insights to the article. Martin de Jong holds the academic responsibility for the research program in which this paper is embedded.

Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare no conflict of interest. They conducted an advisory study to Jingmen City about its sustainable urban transition. This article is built on the experience gained from and uses some of the data collected during the project.
China Scholarship Council for supporting Wenting Ma's PhD project. They are also indebted to the Erasmus Initiative for the Dynamics of Inclusive Prosperity and Delft University of Technology for the in kind contributions made by the other three authors. The authors express their gratitude to Jingmen's Planning Bureau and Jingmen's Planning and Design Institute for the support and cooperation provided during our fieldwork. The authors thank Yun Song for his help in drawing the figures. Table 7 Interviewees in Jingmen in 2018 and 2019.