Papers by Carolyn Cartier
This article develops the concept of territorial urbanization in China through the historical con... more This article develops the concept of territorial urbanization in China through the historical conditions and research design problems of the Chinese administrative divisions in relation to comparative territorial thought. Subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed in China and the state maintains powers to establish new cities and enlarge and merge existing ones, and even eliminate others, with significant implications for geographically targeted economic development and governing powers. These territorial strategies, which administer urban expansion, rationalize government administration, and organize capital investment through continuing economic growth, are negotiated within the political system of the Chinese party-state and decided through non-transparent processes by the Chinese central government. Yet literature on urbanization in China often subsumes party-state territorialization practices under internationally recognizable epistemologies such as urban and regional planning and simplifies and contains their urban-economic transformations to fixed spaces in zone development. This analysis examines cities within the system of administrative divisions and pursues the question of the reproduction of state power through territorial urbanization in the Shanghai Pudong New Area, where a territorial merger doubled its size and central government policy imagines the future of China’s international financial center.
The level or rank of an administrative division (行区等级 or 政区级别) in China – a structural condition ... more The level or rank of an administrative division (行区等级 or 政区级别) in China – a structural condition of the subnational territorial administrative system – is a correlate of administrative rank (政政级别). State reterritorialization of the administrative divisions (行政区划), through establishment and expansion of hundreds of cities, introduces a political economy of differentiation and change by which city governments take the measure of their administrative reach and economic capacity. How do changes to the administrative divisions involve administrative rank, economic status and territorial governing power? In Suzhou, a prefecture-level city, incommensurability between the economic status of the city and its administrative rank reveals how ‘unfair’ rank in the administrative hierarchy becomes implicated in negotiations over territorial adjustments and cadre appointments, leading to creative forms of rank adjustment and compensation for ranking officials. Dynamics of the administrative divisions reflect rank consciousness, influence official positions and structure urban transformation in contemporary China.
ABSTRACT
Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in th... more ABSTRACT
Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial trans- formation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital- centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.
State promotion of export-oriented development in China through a system of special development z... more State promotion of export-oriented development in China through a system of special development zones contributed to both rapid economic growth and indiscriminate reproduction of special zones. Land use transformations have resulted in significant losses of arable land, and new state policies to conserve land and control land use through the revised Land Administration Law. Critical comparison of industrial development in the special zone phenomenon and the evolving land use disposition system demonstrates contradictory domestic political and economic policies of land development, land management, and land conservation. This analysis assesses land development trends in the south China coastal zone and adopts a geographical approach to examine the spatialities of the land use regime, across the administrative hierarchy, in the nature of the distinct rural and urban land use markets, and in land monitoring problems. Problems revealed in the land disposition system demonstrate how the state's land use regime has promoted land development. New controls over land use coincided with the need to restrict service sector development in real estate and related industries at the onset of the regional economic downturn in 1997.
The subject of economic zones has proliferated in scholarship on Asia and beyond as a relational ... more The subject of economic zones has proliferated in scholarship on Asia and beyond as a relational approach to social and economic geographies linked to the world economy. Signifying co-locations and mobile capacities of labor and capital, 'zone' has circulated as a concept whose 'exceptional' conditions deterritorialize from national landscapes. This paper contends that 'zone' and the territorial processes it represents have receded from critical analysis, and develops a state–market problematic to examine how analog circulation of 'zone' and 'zoning technologies' reproduces notional space of neoliberal marketization even where state capitalism defines territorial economies. The fundamental aporia emerges in the People's Republic of China where a 'zone' is one and every type of subnational territory: the party–state guides economic development by changing the system of administrative territory to produce multiple types of jurisdictional units with varied state-defined rationales including the emblematic Shenzhen 'zone'. Zone analog, drawing on models from spatial science, paradoxically reveals 'zoning technologies' to be not a general argument for neoliberalism as incremental marketization but rather state territorialization of the economy in general.
Questions about the evolution of paradigms in the academy are intriguing because their developmen... more Questions about the evolution of paradigms in the academy are intriguing because their development may reflect prevailing social formations as much or more than new discoveries or truths, particularly in the humanities and in branches of the social sciences in which epistemologies reflect how scholars choose to assemble and construct knowledge. In the field of China studies, the situation is more complex; even while acknowledging debates over the social construction of knowledge, historians of China have arguably treated paradigm shifts as if scientific methods from the "natural sciences provide a model of knowledge, research, and explanation" (Dirlik, 1996: 245). But translating scientific theory into humanistic research creates particular epistemological problems for paradigm development. In area studies research, epistemological divides between the disciplines and area studies, as well as between empirical work and theoretical applications, can obscure a paradigm's origins and complicate its
A human geographer and China specialist introduces perspectives on territory in China from the va... more A human geographer and China specialist introduces perspectives on territory in China from the vantage of guowai (outside the country) and guonei (inside the country). This relational comparison extends analysis of Chinese geopolitical narratives to current questions about state power in China, and opens up the geopolitical perspective to recalibrate analysis of territory and territorial boundary formation inside the nation-state. Territorial change is particularly significant in China because subnational territories are not constitutionally guaranteed and state development strategies regularly depend on strategic boundary changes to form new governing spaces. The article introduces the concept of the "administrative area economy" from the Chinese literature to explain how the Chinese political economy crucially depends on reterritorialization to establish and promote contemporary urbanization and achieve political and economic goals. This analytical approach, based on the international scholarship and the Chinese-language literature, also reflects Agnew's incorporation of methodological advances from new area studies in political geographical analysis.
While the conventions of area studies scholarship have historically limited landscape analysis ... more While the conventions of area studies scholarship have historically limited landscape analysis in China, the globalisation of scholarship and the new built environments of the reform-era Chinese city invite contemporary assessment. In Shenzhen, China’s leading Special Economic Zone, the planning and construction of a new city centre complex are designed to symbolise the city’s transformation from a manufacturing zone to a ‘world city’ and to function as its service-sector core. This landscape analysis applies the perspective of transnational urbanism to assess how the effort to instantiate ‘world city’ status in the built environment works
through plans, ideologies and representations of domestic and transnational e ́lites to establish legitimacy. The continuing strong role of the state in China makes the production of a new city centre a state-dominated enterprise; contesting meanings of these new landscapes takes place indirectly and symbolically in the arena of the state’s spiritual civilisation campaign.
Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China are formin... more Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China are forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair's formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture-ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong-style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed-use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair's prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.
Urban Geography, 2009
The ‘consumer revolution’ in the People’s Republic of China emerged after 1992 when the state dee... more The ‘consumer revolution’ in the People’s Republic of China emerged after 1992 when the state deepened growth-oriented reform and justified individual consumption as a pillar of economic development. This examination of cultural-economic practices in urban China makes an argument for conceptualizing consumption in relation to production through a modified cultural political economy, and locates a regional regime between Shanghai and Hong Kong, the latter as China’s main center of trade in precious metals and gemstones, and citizen-consumer subject formation with ‘Chinese characteristics’. The argument builds on Chinese feminist theory to explain contrasts between PRC state ideology on women’s roles in the household and contemporary alternatives in the marketplace. Empirical analysis focuses on the large market for fine jewelry, its disassociation from hetero-normative gifting and its association with leisure/tourism sites. Conclusions affirm the importance of a cultural political economy for theorizing production/consumption relations in the city, and query evolving consumerism in the PRC
China Story Yearbook 2013
This chapter introduces the urban issue of the year — the air quality problem in China’s cities —... more This chapter introduces the urban issue of the year — the air quality problem in China’s cities — in relation to the ‘Civilised City’ system. The system combines Maoist-style campaigns with ideals of urban modernisation, bestowing
the honour of the title ‘Civilised City’ on chosen places of reform. A hybrid form of social control and urban governance, the National Civilised City program sets out goals that encompass government accountability, air quality monitoring and improved public infrastructure including cultural facilities, in addition to programs promoting volunteerism and ‘healthy’ ideals for urban youth. It is a broad-based approach for all cities that recalibrates the party-state’s political and social agendas in relation to standard urban development benchmarks.
Urban Geography, 2011
Emerging research on comparative neoliberalism at the urban scale seeks to trace its diffusions a... more Emerging research on comparative neoliberalism at the urban scale seeks to trace its diffusions and document its contours and trajectories in regions beyond the trans-Atlantic corridor. Discovering geographical variation in neoliberal policy should produce more incisive understandings of neoliberalism's creative transformations, yet the emergent research on comparative urban policy may route uncomfortably close to the world of world and global cites. This brief discussion considers expanding places of inquiry to non-growth economic contexts and complex urban conditions in the world of cities. It introduces contemporary conditions of urban political economy in the People's Republic of China, where neoliberalization works in the interests of the party-state and resists critical analysis in association with debates over strains of neoconservatism (neoauthoritarism, neosocialism, and statism) in the Chinese academy and their mutual imbrication in an array of complex issues.
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2011
In his review of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1860: Expansion and Crisis, Victor L... more In his review of Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1860: Expansion and Crisis, Victor Lieberman plied the margins of Anthony Reid's (1995) portrayal of early modern Southeast Asia and objected with purpose: “critical cultural and political transformations on the mainland without close archipelagic analogy receive little or no attention” (Lieberman 1995, 799). Where connections and crossings characterize historic social formation in insular Southeast Asia, Lieberman focused on a different shore – territorial consolidation of kingdoms in mainland Southeast Asia, from over 20 in the pre-modern era to only three major empires, Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, by the end of the seventeenth century. Yet Reid's two-volume work was exquisitely timed with the theoretical pulses of globalization and their keywords of crossings – diasporas, flows, linkages, mobilities, networks, routes and travels. Closely related to the poststructural theoretical shift, these themes have guided ...
Critical Inquiry
The geohistorical disjunctures between Hong Kong—colonial territory, global city, and special adm... more The geohistorical disjunctures between Hong Kong—colonial territory, global city, and special administrative region—and China challenge understandings of the relationship. Hong Kong officially maintains certain core values that differ from those of the People’s Republic of China, while unofficial Chinese Communist Party united-front activity in Hong Kong has arguably narrowed the range of the sayable, in Jacques Rancière’s terms, in the public sphere. How does this admixture of core values, at turns antithetical and contested, appear in the space and time of Hong Kong? Interventions in the ideational dynamic between the city and the state—through images, utterances, performances, and alternative artworks—produce space for the appearance of subjects defined by the people. Not a postcolonial culture of disappearance but an ontology of politics where spaces of disagreement make apprehensible that which is politically unsayable. During the decade before the Umbrella Movement, in a fervent aesthetics of politics at the crossroads of hurtling urban transformation and accelerating illiberal governance, alternative art in Hong Kong populated social-movement activity with claims on public space and the possibilities of the people in the sightlines of a democratic future.
The significance of practising theory in context reflects current debates in urban studies as wel... more The significance of practising theory in context reflects current debates in urban studies as well as the history of poststructural thought whose scholarship, informed by postcolonial critique and understandings of ethics and responsibility in international research collaboration, continues to give evident substance to the nature of epistemological violence. This essay takes up the challenge of contextual theory and empirical research through a critical comparative approach that ultimately finds how the expansive gentri fication balloon pops as a consequence of assumptions and misassumptions that leave consequential data hiding in plain sight. The contributions of this essay include treatment of the transposition of ideas as a theoretical, methodological and ethical problem, and an original comparative summary of the frequency of 'gentrification' in the news media of ten major cities in addition to the print and online media of Hong Kong. The analysis demonstrates not only how context matters in research design, but also how distinction in the articulation of theoretical argument will be upheld or deflated by knowledge of, and acquired in, context. The essay summarizes the arguments for the larger Interventions forum, and concludes that a criticaltheoretical comparative international urban studies generates and builds through refinement of theory in iterative dialogue with historical processes.
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Papers by Carolyn Cartier
Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial trans- formation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital- centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.
through plans, ideologies and representations of domestic and transnational e ́lites to establish legitimacy. The continuing strong role of the state in China makes the production of a new city centre a state-dominated enterprise; contesting meanings of these new landscapes takes place indirectly and symbolically in the arena of the state’s spiritual civilisation campaign.
the honour of the title ‘Civilised City’ on chosen places of reform. A hybrid form of social control and urban governance, the National Civilised City program sets out goals that encompass government accountability, air quality monitoring and improved public infrastructure including cultural facilities, in addition to programs promoting volunteerism and ‘healthy’ ideals for urban youth. It is a broad-based approach for all cities that recalibrates the party-state’s political and social agendas in relation to standard urban development benchmarks.
Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial trans- formation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital- centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.
through plans, ideologies and representations of domestic and transnational e ́lites to establish legitimacy. The continuing strong role of the state in China makes the production of a new city centre a state-dominated enterprise; contesting meanings of these new landscapes takes place indirectly and symbolically in the arena of the state’s spiritual civilisation campaign.
the honour of the title ‘Civilised City’ on chosen places of reform. A hybrid form of social control and urban governance, the National Civilised City program sets out goals that encompass government accountability, air quality monitoring and improved public infrastructure including cultural facilities, in addition to programs promoting volunteerism and ‘healthy’ ideals for urban youth. It is a broad-based approach for all cities that recalibrates the party-state’s political and social agendas in relation to standard urban development benchmarks.