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Considering China's 'isolated' digital ecosystem, this paper examines China's 'check-in' activities to understand how the wanghong economy is driving China's new rounds of urban development, with the purpose of supplementing existing research on digital economies from the Chinese context. Focusing on a representative case study area called Dongshankou in Guangzhou, which is regarded as one of the most popular wanghong places and an emerging commercial centre, I sought to enrich existing studies about digital economies and extend scholarship on platform urbanism from the cultural economy perspective. First, I argue that Chinese consumers' check-in activities function as the data accumulation process, structuring Dongshankou's digital capital through the assemblage of online posts and geotags. Therefore, Dongshankou's urban development challenges the conventional view of creativity as the key factor in the cultural economy for urban development, given that digital capital is now the key driver for urban development in the digital age. Second, the growth of wanghong stores in Dongshankou reveals how the wanghong economy is materialised into urban cultural objects. Emotional value – a crucial selling point that these wanghong stores aim to provide to facilitate consumers' check-in activities – illustrates how China's highly participatory digital ecosystem extracts users' emotions and bodily experiences into the process of capital accumulation, which structures the 'platform urbanism' through our daily lives. This paper broadens the horizon for an alternative theoretical agenda in platform urbanism: beyond focusing solely on platform algorithms, how digital platforms and emotions become inextricably linked in economic production should be further explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editors of EPA: Economy and Space have announced the winners of the Ashby prizes for the most innovative papers published in the journal in 2022. Kun Wang, Junxi Qian, and Shenjing He were awarded for their paper on global destruction networks and hybrid e-waste economies in Guiyu, China. Andrea Ricci was awarded for his paper on global locational inequality. The papers have been made free to access for one year. The authors express their gratitude for the recognition and discuss the importance of their research in addressing cultural and economic issues in the Global South. [Extracted from the article]

The portrayals of "new state capitalism" in both the popular media and policy-making circles have become a potent geopolitical category. This politically realist categorization is understandably popular because of its simplicity—states proactively participating in capital accumulation are construed as threats to institutions underpinning the "free market". This paper complicates this portrayal by framing what appears to be a "rise" of state capitalistic maneuvers from China as a dynamic sovereignty–accumulation nexus. Specifically, Chinese state capitalism—and arguably state capitalism in general—constitutes the reproduction of sovereign rule. Underpinning this tension-filled process is territoriality: the use of territory for political, economic, and social ends. This dynamic relationship will be illustrated through an examination of how and why Yunnan, a southwestern Chinese province that was economically marginalized for several decades, emerged as a geostrategic platform for facilitating new rounds of capital accumulation. Through large-scale infrastructural investments in Yunnan, the Chinese state generated new territorial configurations that (a) enabled the positioning of Yunnan as a "bridgehead" of Chinese economic statecraft and (b) encouraged investments aimed at capturing new growth opportunities. While this state-led developmental process partially resolves tensions generated by previous rounds of capital accumulation, it also generates new tensions. Building on this case study, the paper demonstrates how Chinese state capitalism more accurately exemplifies a state-building process that is embedded in and is constituted by a central contradiction between the territorial and capitalistic logics of power. It concludes by presenting two directions for future research on Chinese state capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state has been pivotal in both facilitating financialization and dealing with its consequences, through which the state itself has also been reshaped. This paper proposes a "state selective financialization" framework to highlight the intentionality and selectivity of the state in (de)financialization. Based on practices in China, we examine the latest state efforts to reconfigure the land reserve system in order to cope with local financial risks associated with land-backed borrowing. The state de-leverages reserved land locally and uses it to secure bonds through a state-managed top-down process. The changing mechanism demonstrates the central state's intentional role in selecting financial instruments and recentralizing its control over land financialization, whereby it has tried to mitigate financial risks and oversee local development. Instead of financialization versus de-financialization, we find financialization in China is a selective governance tactic to address state concerns. Moreover, rather than seeing financialization as a process outside the state, this research emphasizes that selective financialization is an internal process to reconsolidate the power of the central state and rebuild alignment among multi-scalar state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent formulations of state capitalism tend to present it as a distinct system, anchored in China, in opposition to a neoliberal model represented by the United States and its global armatures. As an alternative to this binarism, this paper argues for Gillian Hart's relational-comparative approach to the geographies of the new state capitalism. It outlines three of Hart's theoretical-methodological principles—multiple trajectories, conjunctural analysis, and articulation—and demonstrates how they can be used to analyze the interrelations between "statist" and "liberal" development trajectories, through an empirical account of conjunctural struggles in and between China and the World Bank during the Tiananmen Square crisis. It argues that Tiananmen was an inflection point in the relation between the development trajectories of the Chinese state and the World Bank, where conflicts over the continuity of economic reform were simultaneously struggles over the boundaries of the state. Examining these institutions conjuncturally shows that China's "state capitalism" is not an opposite of the Bank's liberal model, but has been, in part, produced through power-laden contests over the meaning and materiality of state and market in multiple arenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces an Exchange section dedicated to the question of the new state capitalism. It is suggested that the new state capitalism, both as an ascendant concept and as marker of socioinstitutional facts on the ground, signals a significant geohistorical moment, perhaps not a new "era" as such, but a notable inflection point. This warrants critical attention, even if first-generation treatments of the phenomenon itself may have been somewhat wanting. Contributions follow from Ilias Alami, Jennifer Bair, Isabella Weber, Marion Werner, and Heather Whiteside, each of whom provide a critical take on (debates around) the new state capitalism from their own theoretical perspective and vantage point. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to the contributions to the review symposium on How China Escaped Shock Therapy. I discuss the strategy of economic system reform that started from the non-essential parts of the industrial system in order to eventually transform the commanding heights; the spatial dimension of reform in relation to "dual circulation" and the coastal development strategy; the nature and meaning of Chinese gradualism; and China's price stabilization strategies of the 1980s in relation to later inflationary challenges. Finally, I reflect on the symposium as a dialogue between economic geography and a history of ideas in action that I pursued in my book. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical engagement with Isabella Weber's fascinating new book, How China Escaped Shock Therapy. It foregrounds the book's contributions to knowledge on a hitherto under-explored topic – why shock therapy advocates were unsuccessful in launching all-out price liberalisation across China during the 1980s – and introduces new questions through assessing Weber's analysis vis-à-vis three geographical aspects of Chinese political-economic evolution: (a) the role of landownership control and redistribution in stabilising the Chinese economy following the Communist Party of China's (CPC) revolutionary victory in 1949; (b) the path-dependent effects of Mao-era (1949-1976) landownership institutions on economic reforms during the 1980s; and (c) Deng Xiaoping's approach to the multi-dimensional emergence of coastal-oriented industrialisation. These three aspects collectively accentuate how the territorial configuration and regulation of the Chinese political economy, so fundamental for producing and sustaining CPC regime durability, undermined the neoclassical bias towards price liberalisation. Understanding the geographical preconditions that underpin post-1949 Chinese political-economic evolution is therefore crucial for understanding why shock therapy was ultimately deemed incongruent with CPC rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of digital platforms as a new form of business organisation concentrates power in the United States and China. Platform capitalism further intersects with and reinforces pre-existing trends towards state capitalism, where states more actively direct economies in response to economic turbulence and heightened geopolitical tension. The concentration of global business power within two states, combined with the increasing capacity for these states to leverage and direct platform activities for their own geopolitical–economic ends, has catalyzed the rise of 'state platform capitalism' (SPC). This paper develops the notion of SPC as an emergent logic of competition for both states and firms – in particular, the ways in which Beijing and Washington instrumentalise and mobilise domestic platform firms in pursuit of geopolitical–economic objectives, while platforms become increasingly interdependent with their home state institutions. Competition in the global political economy is increasingly centred on the recruitment of users and nations to these rival state-platform nexuses (national 'stacks') as a means of establishing and exercising extraterritorial economic and political power. Empirically, we identify variations between American and Chinese modes of practicing state platform capitalism, and we examine three axes within which this competition unfolds internationally: currencies, standards and cybersecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

State capitalism is experiencing a revival as a term to capture the current capitalist constellations and departures from neoliberalism. Unlike, neoliberalism, however, the term state capitalism has a long history reaching back to the age of imperialism in the late 19th century. Although state capitalism has been used as a prerogative term by Marxists, liberals, and neoliberals alike, it has served as a programmatic label for developmentalist and neomercantilist projects in reaction to imperialism in the periphery. This paper argues that we need to bring the intellectual history of state capitalism into the 'new state capitalism' debate. China has played a major role in the revival of state capitalism in the social sciences, but the long history of China's engagement with state capitalism as a concept and program dating back to the late Qing reformers has been overlooked for the most part. State capitalism is by no means new to China, from Liang Qichao, Sun Yatsen, and Mao Zedong to Deng Xiaoping, the idea that China had to create a modern nation-state and industrial capitalism in the name of economic progress and to get ahead in the global competition is a recurring theme. What is new is that for the first time, the ambition to use state capitalism as a means to catch up with the West is bearing fruits in ways that could undermine the predominance of Western economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid urbanisation of China has increased public awareness of rising housing prices, particularly in large and medium-sized cities. The popularisation of the Internet in China has driven a shift in the public's attention to housing prices, moving from geographic space to cyberspace. Based on web search engine data using geotag, this paper attempts to create a better visualisation of the shift in the public's attention to housing prices from the perspectives of geographic space and cyberspace. Intercity interaction is also analysed in the context of cyberspace-based urban networks, through hybrid featured graphics. Specifically, data regarding public attention to housing prices are gathered (via queries data through Baidu Index) in 363 Chinese cities. The data are divided into a local city housing price attention index and an offsite city housing price attention index. Second, public attention flows are presented using origin-destination flows maps, chord diagrams and violin diagrams. These hybrid feature graphics show the interrelationship between cities and the complexity of public attention flows. This information will help us to reveal intercity interaction and the cyberspace-based urban network structure in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Short-term rentals facilitated by online platforms (like Airbnb) have recently become a subject of intense debate, leading many city governments to pass new regulations attempting to control both their proliferation and platform activities. While these policy responses vary greatly from city to city, there is little comparative research to explain this diversity. This paper employs a sociological approach to public policy analysis to compare the politicization process, collective action around and regulation of platform-mediated short-term rentals (PM-STR) in three cities – Barcelona, Paris and Milan. They were chosen to represent most-dissimilar cases in terms of regulatory outputs, both in terms of stringency (weak in Milan, intermediate in Paris, strong in Barcelona) and choice of policy sectors (sharing economy and tourism in Milan, housing and land use in Paris, urban planning and tourism in Barcelona). Two main findings emerged from the comparison. First, the differences between regulations can be explained by the type of actors who politicized the issue in the first place and framed it within a specific policy sector, the pre-existing policy instruments traditionally used in that sector and the distribution of competences between the city and higher tiers of government. Second, the regulations remain continuously subject to intense political mobilization by six types of actors with clashing interests: professional STR operators, associations of hosts or 'home-sharers', the hotel industry, residents' associations or citizens' movements, 'sharing economy' advocates and corporate platforms. Each actor constructs different narratives regarding PM-STR, claiming different types of rights in this contentious politics of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the role of local external linkages in supporting regional industry entry in new activities, by specifically considering the role of foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs). Theoretically, we construct an original conceptual framework encompassing different potential trajectories of regional diversification based on the presence of MNEs. Empirically, we focus on the case of 279 Chinese prefectures over 1998–2007 and our results suggest that the presence of MNEs is associated with industry entry in unrelated and complex industries, supporting the idea that regional external linkages can activate processes of diversification that modify the technological and industrial portfolio of local economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent studies on precarity among gig workers has turned away from labour process factors to explore the role of the wider social, cultural and institutional environment. Existing western-centred studies in this aspect argue that platforms reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies to leverage control over vulnerable populations. This study extends this literature by focusing on the migration factor in a non-western context. Using the case of Didi, drawing on ethnographic and interview data, it is argued that migrant drivers' high tolerance for platform precarity should be understood as an imposed position, for they are actually trapped in the platform by China's state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring project, through a new mode of migrant labour differentiation comprising three factors – changes in the labour market, hegemonic gender norms and the reformed hukou system. It thus enriches our understanding of worker precarity in the gig economy by highlighting the impact of migration and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how Chinese rural migrant workers are subject to the contradictory integrated regimes of capitalist advocates of migration and urbanisation, which are, in reality, distinctive integrating constraints. Online platform work has become a key site for rural migrant workers in China to experience and experiment with obfuscating sets of promotions and disciplines about labour, migration and urbanness. We propose the concept of platformed distinction work to explain how platforms have played a complex and multifunctional role that enhances migrant workers' participation in the digital economy while concurrently defining and conditioning their labour as disadvantaged distinct work. This dual process of migrant workers' social integration and distinction in platform work reveal the multilayered, complicated relations between migration and platformisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To offer a fresh angle on the state capacity to advance decarbonization, this article brings into dialog political economies of scale and the Mannian notion of state infrastructural power, animating this conceptual cross-fertilization with an analysis of China's evolving policy framework for decarbonization. This article begins with building the conceptual construct of scalar practice as a source of state infrastructural power and categorizing three key scalar practices, namely, interscalar rearranging, interregional reshuffling, and urban‒rural scalar mixing. Building upon this, the article critically evaluates China's policy framework and state actions against the notion of infrastructural power: the Chinese state applies noncoercive means to elicit support, extract resources, and coordinate actions while transitioning to decarbonization-driven accumulation regimes, and these noncoercive means are mobilized together with coercive means through the art of scalar structuration that (re)defines central–local, urban‒rural, and interregional relations. Overall, this study elucidates how state-orchestrated processes of (re)territorialization for the decarbonization agenda give rise to the expansion of the state's autonomous power in relation to civil society, albeit in a manner that manifests contested power struggle and conflicting internal logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local government bonds (LGBs) have become the most important tool of the Chinese state for financing infrastructure projects. The underwriters and investors in LGBs are mostly commercial banks, with state actors holding the overwhelming majority of shares. We call these state-controlled market actors. This article investigates the role of state-controlled market actors in LGB issuance to extend the understanding of state actors and state–market relations in the financialisation of urban governance. The findings show that they underwrite and invest in LGBs to support the government's development objectives and make profits. They can hardly affect the government to create the terms and conditions of bonds to favour their financial interests, but they manage to make substantial profits. They follow the policy trends to identify LGBs as risk-free and reflexively change their investment priority towards the bonds. Due to the low interest rates, the banks mainly profit from bond trading in the secondary market and fiscal fund investment. There are preferential policies for LGB trading in the secondary market, and local governments deposit fiscal funds in the banks to motivate them to do LGB business. We argue that reflexively making investment decisions according to the policy environment and making profits by exploiting political resources represented by preferential policies and fiscal funds show the adaptability of the state-controlled market actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research attends to how urban tenants bring matong (toilets in the form of urine buckets)—which are a material, semiotic, and marketable piece of infrastructure—into the debates over the remaking of a heritage district in Hongkou, Shanghai. Challenges abound for the site, which is occupied by prewar buildings where Jewish refugees found shelter during the war and more than 10 thousand Chinese tenants moved in after the Jews left. Until 2020, the dilapidated buildings accommodated an aging population of tenants who wish to stay relevant to the redevelopment vision of Shanghai and a variety of community business, including urban waste recycling. To find a crack in the state-led, neoliberal system, the tenants managed to exercise infrapolitics—an everyday form of resistance—over an urban infrastructure that is of particular significance to their bio-well-being and beyond. We analyze a set of spatial politics on sanatory infrastructure in Hongkou to understand how the tenants are desperately capitalizing on their disadvantages and reassembling memories, waste, and housing inequality into something more promising from below. The theorization of infra-bio-urbanism upon toilets sheds light on the accumulating anxiety upon housing inequality and infrastructural mobility in globalizing cities in China and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Isabella Weber's book is a prodigious contribution to the political economy of Chinese development. One of the text's most valuable contributions is its identification of the consistently anti-inflationary stance of CCP policy. Its coverage of debates surrounding price stability and liberalisation during the shifts away from the plan in the late 1980s is particularly valuable. Here, I focus on the question of inflation, which since 2021 has dramatically appeared on the agenda for the first time in the professional lives of many political economists and geographers in the global north. The book provides valuable, fine-grained evidence from contemporary Chinese policymakers (above all through a reading of Zhao Ziyang's writings) to make the case that the inflationary pressures experienced in China as the government experimented with reforming the planned economy during the late 1980s were not principally monetary phenomena – nor were they understood as such by contemporary actors. I build on the text by showing how it demonstrates the relevance of exploring the inflation question at a variety of spatial scales. I conclude by considering how contemporary Chinese policymakers may negotiate this inflationary 'scale-jumping'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2010s, foreign direct investment in real estate (FDIRE) by Mainland Chinese firms has emerged as a major force within global real estate markets, challenging Western investors' traditional dominance. It is unclear, however, whether Mainland Chinese FDIRE is fueled by the same motivations as those of investors from advanced economies, which to date have represented both the primary investors and main objects of study. One major difference may be that Mainland Chinese investment originates in an institutional environment comprised of strong state intervention and social networks important for fostering business and ethnic ties. To uncover the potentially unique determinants and heterogeneity of Mainland Chinese corporate real estate investors, we build and analyze a state-level panel dataset of Mainland Chinese FDIRE by state-owned enterprises and private enterprises in the U.S. from 2010 to 2017. Our empirical results reveal the importance of Chinese migrants in promoting Mainland Chinese real estate investment, especially by private enterprises. Our findings also demonstrate that at the state level, Mainland Chinese FDIRE exhibits few agglomerative tendencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent geographical scholarship on the illicit e-waste geographies and e-waste processing hubs in the Global South has shed light on the global mobilities, production/destruction networks, and political economy/ecology of e-waste. However, their views about the reactivation of value in waste and the dialectics between waste and value rest predominantly on networks of material linkages shaped by broader political-economic structures at macro scales, but are relatively reticent about how mobilities and networks are coordinated by specific places, and how economic practices conducted by a broad diversity of local actors, often informal, constitute economic relations, transactions and dependencies, mediated by place-sticky social and cultural fabrics and vernacular institutions. Based on a study of Guiyu town in Guangdong Province, China, an (in)famous hub of global e-waste recycling, this study unpacks its cluster evolution through a perspective that works with the concept of embeddedness but by way of an emphasis on practice. By tracing a multiplicity of territorial, sociocultural, and political dynamics that articulate between the local and the global, this study enriches existing scholarships on e-waste geographies, global production/destruction networks, and the economic geographies of the illicit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central-local dynamics are crucial to understand the implementation of China's reform policies and regional economic development. Until recently, the research has focused on either end of the political spectrum, celebrating the top-down channeling of neoliberal-like reforms led by the central government or detailing the bottom-up process of policy innovation and entrepreneurism centred on local states. Knowledge is not substantial about how the central state interacts with local authorities in the localization of central public policies and, to a lesser extent, why some policies are properly implemented at the local level but others not. Through investigating the implementation of major national low-income housing policies in Chengdu and Shanghai, we interrogate three proposed theoretical constructs: political conformity, entrepreneurial governance and local contingency. Results show that institutional conformity manifests in cross-scale consistency in policy goals, political obligation of local states to conform to the central authority, and balance between local incentives and central state sanctions. In the process of balancing local and central interests, the local development priorities are framed along the line of local state entrepreneurism favoring fiscal responsibility, economic efficiency, and economic growth. Finally, locally contingent factors often interact with and mediate external forces and have a significant impact on localizing public policies in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]