Governing incompletion and incompleteness: Agri-food market infrastructure in urban China

Abstract

This article examines how incomplete infrastructures are governed as politically expedient conditions in urban China. While scholarship on infrastructure in the Global South has foregrounded open-endedness as an ontological feature of infrastructure, less attention has been paid to how infrastructural non-closure is held in place and mobilised within high-capacity, centralised state contexts. Drawing on two cases – Pudong-Rd Market in Nanjing and the Jinsheng Relocation Site in Sihong County – we develop a conceptual distinction between incompletion , understood as an iterative, selectively governed process of infrastructural deferral, and incompleteness , as a provisional yet administratively sustained arrangement. We show how state actors mobilise ambiguity and temporality through performance regimes, regulatory discretion, and symbolic formalisation to manage visibility, accommodate informality, and defer resolution while sustaining the appearance of infrastructural progress. In doing so, the paper contributes to critical studies on infrastructural temporality, urban governance scholarship on China, and conjunctural approaches to state power by theorising infrastructural non-closure not as absence but as a modality of governance.