Translocal China: Linkages, Identities And The Reimagining Of Space (routledge Studies On China In Transition)

Inter-disciplinary in approach, this collection of essays explores China’s reform era development within the concept of translocality. A key element of spatial change in today’s China has been the unprecedented geographic mobility of millions of labour migrants, tourists, brides, entrepreneurs, and many others. But translocality doesn’t just mean people. It is crucially constituted by the circulation of capital, ideas, images, goods, styles, services, and disease to name but a few. With contributions from well-respected China specialists, the essays focus simultaneously on mobilities and localities, drawing our attention to the multiplying forms of mobility in China whilst retaining the importance of localities in people’s lives. The book provides a clear path to understanding the importance of translocality as a concept along with concrete examples of its operation in China. Unique in approach, it is at once a study of the connections between location and culture, politics, economics, bodies, gender and technology. In recent decades, China has experienced an explosion of new types of mobility. Translocal China details how this mobility affects different localities and identities across China. Much previous scholarship has focused on the rapid increase in migration within China, particularly that of rural labourers moving to the booming coastal cities. This volume, however, assembles a broader array of mobilities, including finance capital, print and visual media, disease, tourists, brides, and entrepreneurs, as well as migrant workers. The contributors suggest that identities and other ties in contemporary China have not been simply uprooted from their localized cultural foundations to float free in the rapidly urbanizing reform era. Rather, people and institutions have come to be translocal, that is, to belong to more than one locality simultaneously. The volume breaks new theoretical ground by bringing together the concepts of place, space, and scale to bear on China's current transformations.With contributions from well-respected China specialists, Translocal China offers a multidisciplinary approach to understanding China's new networks through raising issues such as how meanings and germs travel with tourists, how the internet generates new exchanges between formerly isolated localities, and how business location strategies are defying conventional spatial hierarchies. Translocal China presents a comprehensive study of the connections between location and culture, politics, economics, gender and technology, and as such will have huge appeal to both students and scholars of China studies as well as those interested in the burgeoning mobilities of our globalizing world. Book Cover......Page 1 Half-Title......Page 2 Series Title......Page 3 Title......Page 6 Copyright......Page 7 Contents......Page 8 Illustrations......Page 10 Notes on contributors......Page 11 Preface......Page 13 1 Translocal China An introduction......Page 16 2 The original translocal society and its modern fate Historical and post-reform south China......Page 51 3 Shanxi as translocal imaginary Reforming the local......Page 71 4 Openness,change,and translocality New migrants’identification with Hainan......Page 89 5 Corporate locality and translocality of private enterprises in China......Page 108 6 Urban transformation and professionalization Translocality and rationalities of enterprise in post-Mao China*......Page 124 7 Symbolic city/regions and gendered identity formation in south China......Page 153 8 “Net-moms”-a new place and a new identity Parenting discussion forums on the Internet in China......Page 170 9 The village as theme park Mimesis and authenticity in Chinese tourism......Page 181 10 Flows of heroin,people,capital, imagination,and thespread of HIV in southwest China......Page 208 11 Negotiating scale Miao women at a distance......Page 228 12 The leaving of Anhui The southward journey toward the knowledge class......Page 253 Index......Page 278