Geography, area studies and Chinese world-writing

Abstract

This paper argues for a ‘provincialised’ critical geography of area studies by tracing the spatial genealogy of three waves of Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies. The shifting terrains have been shaped strongly by the continually reconfigured power-geometries and Chinese thinking of ‘the international’. The two coeval fields and knowledge production therein are situated in place-specific institutional contexts, which engender contingent disciplinary geographies and their enduring lack of dialogue. The contemporary regeneration of Chinese ‘world-writing’ brings its own identities and discourses, power relations and complex impacts to local-global epistemic (in)equality, which requires and rewards further critical mapping.

Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review

“…Any discussion of worlding Chinese everyday environmental geography needs to grapple with the strong policy orientation of Chinese academic research. Chinese geography is oriented towards providing conceptual tools and empirical findings to serve major development agendas advanced by the Chinese state at different levels (see Cheng and Liu 2022;Fan 2022;Liu, Browne and Iossifova 2022;Qian and Zhang 2022). Chinese literatures that investigate social responses to environmental policies (e.g., plastic bag use, Chang et al 2011;ecological resettlement, Qi et al 2013) demonstrate the applied nature of much Chinese environmental geography knowledge production.…”

“…The extent to which these concepts conceal everyday environmental dynamics in China also needs to be examined. As Cheng and Liu (2022: 2) ask in relation to Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies, 'what geographical knowledges are being produced in/through this process, [and] might they become sites of other forms of hegemony and marginalisation?' The process of worlding Chinese environmental geography should not underwrite or reinforce 'elitist uneven representations' (ibid: 14-15).…”

“…The Chinese state's dominant environmental policies and rhetoric of infrastructural, economic, and technological imaginaries/interventions have been widely criticised for obscuring the diverse, place-based, everyday realities of resource use and disposal (Dombroski 2015;Iossifova 2015aIossifova , 2015bCaprotti and Gong 2017). These realities are largely muted by prevailing quantitative, spatial or modelling approaches in environmental geography in China (Cheng and Liu 2022;Fan 2022). Asking questions about how Chinese citizens actively achieve environmental security for themselves, their families, and the community in everyday life can offer more profound insights into environmental governance in China.…”

Locating the Belt and Road Initiative's spatial trilectics

“…Scholars have also examined the tactics and strategies of power that link up the BRI as discourse with China's intensifying geopolitical preoccupations with continental and maritime territories and polities (Blanchard & Flint, 2017; Callahan, 2016). Chinese political and intellectual elites have been increasingly using geographical reasoning and representational practices to describe foreign affairs and reassess the tenor of global relations (Cheng & Liu, 2022b). This has often led to the (re)definition of the various and diverse BRI‐related places and spaces as allies, threats, or strategic hotspots (Ge et al., 2021).…”

“…Maps as a form of depicting the world and producing geographical knowledge thereby gain acceptance and power because they provide the backcloth onto which Chinese geobody is projected and ascribed (Grant, 2018). The panopticism of the empowered Chinese subject underwrites the division and classification of BRI's space into a symbolic inventory of cores and peripheries, which arguably has less to do with the social realities of the places where BRI projects materialize than they do with Chinese worldviews and agendas (Cheng & Liu, 2022b). Such cartographic statecraft techniques and novel spatial metaphors support geostrategic imaginaries which have been translated into policies that promote a grand transregional 'spatial fix' to postpone China's over-accumulation crises while consolidating a China-oriented infrastructural mode of growth in production, finance, and security (Sum, 2019), to which we now turn.…”