Global China as Method

Abstract

Is China part of the world? Based on much of the political, media, and popular discourse in the West the answer is seemingly no. Even after four decades of integration into the global socioeconomic system, discussions of China continue to be underpinned by a core assumption: that the country represents a fundamentally different 'other' that somehow exists outside the 'real' world. Either implicitly or explicitly, China is generally depicted as an external force with the potential to impact on the 'normal' functioning of things. This core assumption, of China as an orientalised, externalised, and separate 'other', ultimately produces a distorted image of both China and the world. This Element seeks to illuminate the ways in which the country and people form an integral part of the global capitalist system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

The urbanising dynamics of global China: speculation, articulation, and translation in global capitalism

“…This is a question of how and how far China can be turned into a method for critical enquiries into urban processes at multiple scales. Such an enquiry is a crucial concern for us because China, as both the subject and object of the cases we observe, is often treated in an essentialist way, reduced into such elements as "state capitalism" or the "Belt and Road Initiative," and with "Global China" branded as the coming of an other (see also Franceschini & Loubere, 2022). However, investigating Global China in such a way misses the opportunity to problematise the existing vocabularies associated with studying China, often derived from a Western gaze.…”

Asia as method: Where does China fit?

“…In a book entitled Global China as Method, which is written from an international politics perspective, Franseschini and Loubere (2022) list three ways that people in general, and scholars in particular, regard China as separate from the rest of the world, that is, as a fundamentally different 'Other'. The first is a kind of essentialism, whereby observers see China and its socio-political system as incompatible with the west.…”

Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

“…Yet, there is a continuing need for both theoretically committed and empirically grounded geographies that cohere into a systematic and explicitly interdisciplinary framework, in order to examine how China's domestic and overseas BRI‐based processes imbricate, and with what complex and contradictory implications for agency, relationality and power. In light of recent calls to see ‘the BRI as method’ (Franceschini & Loubere, 2022; Lin et al., 2021; Shin et al., 2022), namely to approach the BRI as a source of reflexive theorizing, and by drawing on our previous work on the global urban geographies of the BRI (Apostolopoulou et al, under review), here we propose a spatial heuristic focused on BRI's trilectics as one way to think through the initiative's imagined, material and lived spaces across multiple differentiated terrains, geographies, and scales.…”