英文摘要：
The recent emergence of village CEOs as entrepreneurial cadres provides a valuable vantage point for examining how local innovations in spatial governance drive and condition rural gentrification in China. Using a case study to investigate the transformation of rural villages into tourism villages, in which exclusive spatial rights and protected insularity used to be rendered quid pro quo for villagers’ support and obedience, this article examines how quasi-state agents open access to rural land and property use, particularly through the implementation of new clientelist institutions that reconfigure spatial development rights. Beyond simplistic post-productivist frameworks, the analysis explains how village CEOs serve as pragmatic patronage brokers for the local state, reshaping spatial organisational, planning, and value systems to create favourable conditions for rural tourism and recreational development. Characterised by distinct dynamics of exclusion and marginalisation, an uneven geography of the tourist consumptionscape is orchestrated according to emerging broker–client relationships. Although rural gentrification is often examined as a spontaneous and amenity-drive process, this article sheds light on how the intricacies of entrenched institutional frameworks of spatial governance in a post-socialist context give rise to a stateembedded, coordinated form of gentrification with repercussions for local development.
