Geographies of infrastructure III: Infrastructure with Chinese characteristics

Abstract

For 25 years, China has staked its development on domestic and global infrastructure expansion. This third progress report on geographies of infrastructure explores what China’s far-reaching infrastructure venture means for critical infrastructure studies. Reviewing China’s infrastructure-driven urban growth, the Belt and Road Initiative and their links, three recommendations are advanced: (1) a reengagement with the state that takes its geographical and temporal diversity seriously, (2) an approach to infrastructure as part of a complex network of state projects with long-term ends, and (3) a concern with infrastructures of repression and confinement in wider processes of making things ‘flow’.

Theorising with urban China: Methodological and tactical experiments for a more global urban studies

“…This is opposed to such research seeking to connect with and contribute to broader debates about the type of cases themselves and their associated literatures, even though these are certainly shared features of the urban in general. Indeed, many China-focused papers feature in leading geography and urban studies journals which are supposed to push the boundaries of the discipline in more global terms (see Jiang and Waley, 2020;Wu et al, 2020;Furlong, 2022 for recent examples). There has also been a plethora of journal special issues focusing on China (see He and Qian, 2017;Logan, 2018;Wu, 2020b).…”

Geographies of big water infrastructure: Contemporary insights and future research opportunities

“…Third, particularly salient is examining big water infrastructural development as a debt‐driven process of financialization (Loftus et al., 2019) or as a socioecological fix to overaccumulated capital (Castree & Christophers, 2015; Ekers & Prudham, 2017, 2018; McCarthy, 2015), as well as the geographically differentiated debt‐financing character of China's belt and road initiative (Furlong, 2021). These projects sometimes meet the goals of financiers for return on investment but do not actually deliver their intended object (Goldman, 2011), leading to dispossession by financialization (Goldman, 2020).…”

“…Han and Webber have shown (2020) how China is exporting its 'Chinese water machine' model to Ghana in a process that is infused with cold war politics and represents China exerting geopolitical influence in Africa. Furlong has referred to the growth of Chinese-led infrastructure development, particularly in Africa and Latin America, as "infrastructure with Chinese characteristics" (Furlong, 2021). In this case, China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a means through which China provides financing and engineering expertise to build big water infrastructure as a way to exert future control over the flow of transnational ideological, monetary, water and other material resources (see also, Murton & Lord, 2020).…”

Who builds Shanghai's fiber-optic network? Thinking urban infrastructure through migrant construction labor

“…It is widely recognized that migrant labor is crucial to the construction of Chinese cities. However, researchers asking “who builds Chinese cities” often focus on top-level developers rather than the sub-contracted migrant laborers who eventually do the building work (Jiang and Waley, 2020), and research on infrastructure in particular, such as Furlong's (2022) exploration of “infrastructure with Chinese characteristics” does not touch on migrants’ roles in building urban infrastructure. At the same time, while infrastructure scholars have pointed to the roles that low-waged rural-urban migrant workers hold as the embodiment of certain forms of urban infrastructure (e.g.…”