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The investigation of intergovernmental conferences is an important lens to examine international geopolitical issues that seem to remain understudied in the existing literature, especially from the perspective of how emerging countries shape their discourse, image, and geopolitical imaginations through such conferences. This paper aims to read China's relationships with the outside world from both its holding and participating in intergovernmental conferences between 2002 to 2017. Based on the textual analysis of conference materials from 919 intergovernmental conferences in which China has been involved, this paper highlights three lines with which China's self-definition of its geopolitical positions in international politics can be understood. First, China's delicate balance between the United States and Russia consists of the most fundamental structure of Chinese geopolitical views; second, China's self-construction as a responsible regional power also makes up a large portion of China's geopolitical view; third, the crucial role of intergovernmental conferences for the Chinese government is to convey China's nonthreatening model of development, which is also the most important principle of China's foreign relations. This paper helps to understand how China constructs its international relations and shapes international discourse and image through intergovernmental conferences. Such conference-based and self-defined geopolitics has furnished a special and, most importantly, a Chinese-styled geopolitical view that can further the understanding of international politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critique of the "specialty towns" program, a key constituent of China's current new-style urbanization campaign. It problematizes the contradictory accounts of the program, namely, emphasizing "place-based" strengths while simultaneously standardizing forms, functions, and goals with a strong "place-neutral" approach. We argue that three key building blocks are critical for understanding specialty towns: place dependence, embeddedness, and locational advantage. Through multiple-case studies in Zhejiang, evidence has shown that there is a mismatch between national policies and local practices in specialty town development. The latter has its own place-specific logic of development shaped by history, geography, institutions, and agency. In particular, existing small-scale growth settings (e.g., industrial parks, specialized markets) and characteristics of local agency are the main factors affecting local practices. This paper argues that without considering the specificities of places in a broader socioeconomic context, the program may fail to work as effectively as expected in its local implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world economy shifts towards services, transnational corporations ( TNCs) in the service sector have accelerated their expansion in emerging economies. This paper examines the development and embeddedness of foreign hypermarket retailers in China. It also analyzes the spatial penetration patterns of retail TNCs, the impacts of home and host economies on their local embeddedness, and how they resolve the structural paradox between enforcing standardization and conducting localization. The expansion of retail TNCs has been influenced by the gradual liberalization policies of the Chinese government. Spatially, they expanded in two directions: from the eastern costal region to the central and western hinterland, and along China's urban hierarchy from larger cities to smaller cities. While home economies greatly influenced their initial strategies, foreign hypermarket retailers are constantly adjusting to better embed in the Chinese market and to more effectively resolve the structural paradox. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the relationship between the 2008 Beijing Olympic Torch Relay mega-event and contemporary imaginings of China's geopolitical position and the Chinese national geo-body. The performance of China's territorial presence at the international and domestic scales drew both support and resistance. Chinese media coverage of the spectacle reiterated tropes of geopolitical struggle and national unity. While these tropes resonated with some Chinese audiences who have been primed to recognize the Chinese geo-body through banal nationalism, Chinese citizens' satirical online comments reveal that some rejected the stilted ideological representations of the relay. Further, protesting groups' high-profile disruptions of the relay mega-event outside of the national territory of the host country worked to undermine the relay's international reception. Drawing from analyses of Chinese and international media sources and Chinese Internet satire, this article suggests that the scripted nature and geographical extent of mega-events compromises the geopolitical and nation-building aspects of such events in both neoliberal and postsocialist contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation policies have become an important element in national and regional innovation systems. This study presents a framework to analyze innovation policies and outputs, in terms both of knowledge and economic benefits, in China, with a focus on Jiangsu. We classify local innovation policies into seven major categories and twenty-one subcategories as well as five categories of national policies based on their characteristics. We find that main local policies vary largely depending on the level of economic development, and the spatial evolution of national policies is not homogenous, concentrated in the relatively more -developed region of southern Jiangsu (Sunan). Our analysis using a vector error correction model shows that the time lag effect of various policies on economic output is longer than on knowledge output, and cumulative local policies have a significant impact on both types of outputs. The model also confirms the important roles of innovation subjects, intellectual property, and talents related policies on outputs. Last, the questionnaire identifies the reasons for unsatisfactory implementation of policies, such as low level of policy awareness, insufficient financial support, and imperfect innovation and entrepreneurial ecological environment. Our study reveals innovation policies in China favor more-developed regions, which reinforces the digital divide and spatial polarization. Our study suggests that China's regional innovation policies need to be better integrated, should pay more attention to less-developed regions, and improve the role of the market in the allocation of innovation resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the pursuit for global competitiveness and economic growth, Chinese cities have recorded massive urban land expansion. This article examines the effects of development policies and economic restructuring on urban land expansion in China through a case study of Nanjing, representing the rapidly growing and globalizing coastal cities in China. Wei investigate the development process and changing contents of government policies, and analyze development zones and key projects as privileged, trait making, and even path-breaking elements of the development process. We highlight the transition and paradox of the Chinese state in the urban development process, and the broad contexts underlying urban land expansion in Chinese cities. We see urban expansion in China as a process largely responding to top-down policy change and economic transition initiated by the central government. We hold that the role of the state has to be analyzed to understand urban transformation and land expansion, moving beyond local factors of accessibility and feasibility. Development-zone and project fevers, and lagging administrative reforms, however, have made Chinese cities heavy with debt and led to wasteful development, corruption, and social unrest in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the local experience of a state-initiated campaign to improve the grassland in Uxin Ju, a Mongolian community in northern China, from 1958 to 1966. The contrast between the local experience and the official representation reveals great discrepancies and attests to the ability of local people to utilize state policies to meet local needs, transforming socialist ideologies into local rationales. Applying Michel de Certeau's theory of everyday practice that sees book reading as poaching and the use/consumption of political and cultural discourses as a process of creative empowerment, I examine how the Mongols in Uxin Ju "poached" state politics to their own advantages and appropriated the grassland campaign in the making of the local landscape. This poaching further elucidates James Scott's concept of ideological resistance by focusing on the creative use of nonoppositional nature, which is an important way in which local people could express their agency in the oppressive regime of socialist China. This article calls attention to how nonsubversive co-optation of state policies can function as an expression of agency in the making of local human-environmental history, even on the part of individuals who are actively accommodating to the ideology of the dominant regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]