The aim of this article is to contribute to the debate on global prosperity in the post-GDP world, with specific attention given to the political discourse and intellectual debate on ecological civilization in China. I will first assess the national and international implications of assuming that China as a whole is a 'locality'. I will then focus specifically on one of the most significant political and intellectual debates in Chinese studies today, namely the social and environmental challenges linked to China's political and socioeconomic development. In this light, I will engage with the debate on the Anthropocene-the era during which humans have become an earth-altering forceand its interrelationship with the discourse on ecological civilization. In China, the term 'ecological civilization' appeared in the 1980s in the academic domain and was then appropriated by political discourse. This article proves that the concept of eco-civilization, in a similar way to the Anthropocene, has a significant discursive power: it allows for a shift from the binary political economy discourses of 'growth' versus 'development', and 'socialism' versus 'capitalism', to the inquiry of eco-socially sustainable prosperity. The final aim of this article is both to offer a more nuanced analysis of the relationship between the political discourse and academic debate, and to substantiate the rhetoric trope of 'Advancing Ecological Civilization and Building a Beautiful China'.

Between 1860 and 1945, the Chinese port city of Tianjin became the site of up to nine foreign-controlled concessions, functioning side by side. Ruth Rogaski has argued that Tianjin's distinctiveness deserves the appellation 'hypercolony', a term which reflects Tianjin's socio-political intricacies and the multiple colonial discourses of power and space. This article focuses on the representations of the ex-Italian concession in Tianjin, a site which is currently renegotiating its identity between reinvention of the past (1901-45) and property-led regeneration. The article employs the concept of heterotopia to explore 'semi-colonial', 'hypercolonial' and 'globalizing' representations of Tianjin's built form. * The research for this article was made possible thanks to a grant from the Universities' China Committee in London and a small research grant awarded by the British Academy. My grateful thanks to the editor Prof. Simon Gunn for his thought-provoking comments and suggestions. The paper has also benefited from advice and insightful comments received from two anonymous peer reviewers.

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This paper focuses on the artwork of Chinese artist Zhang Dali entitled ‘The Slogan Series.’ Zhang uses a particular technique of text and image juxtaposition to engage with the civic political slogans that were plastered on the streets of Beijing on the eve of the 2008 Olympic Games. His ‘Slogan Series’ consists of large paintings: each of them reproduces the human face of a common person, either in red and white or in black and white, which is literally covered by repeated civic political slogans. The paper investigates the origin of Zhang’s artwork, shedding light on the aesthetics and socio–political implications of a double juxtaposition: in the government’s ‘new citizenship’ campaign, the slogans are juxtaposed with the cityscape, while in Zhang Dali’s work the slogans are imposed on the common people’s faces.

Urban transformation in China has been hailed as a revolution. The pace and scale of change as well as the grand narrative of transformation have been characterized in terms of superlatives – the tallest skyscrapers, the largest shopping malls, the longest bridges and highways, the fastest trains – testifying to the teleology and progress of China’s dream of prosperity. However, behind the sleek and glittering façade lies a story of exclusion, violence, dispossession, and destruction – the ruins of a civilization. This article engages with this side of the story by exploring the dialectic between urban transformation and the parallel development of the visual arts, which has created new regimes of visibility and new hierarchies of representation. In new and large cities alike, the visual arts have been manifesting affections that permeate the contemporary world, creating new possibilities for ‘distributing the sensible’. This article focuses on the artworks produced by Zhang Dali, Dai Guangyu and Jin Feng, whose subject matter involves common people, and it engages with three crucial discursive formations: violence, socio-economic inequality, and utopian dreams. These artists are producing a ‘history from below’ (to borrow E. P. Thompson’s expression): rescuing the common people from ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’. They are making ordinary people assume the importance of the extraordinary. From the point of view of aesthetics, they are enacting a total revolution of the senses and, in Rancière’s words, making ‘heard as speakers those who had been perceived as mere noisy animals’.