Urban China through the lens of neoliberalism: Is a conceptual twist enough?

• Published in: Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland) Scotland), 2019-01, Vol.56 (1), p.33-43
• Main Authors: Zhou, Yu, Lin, George CS, Zhang, Jun
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Authoritarianism; Critical commentary; Discourse; Entanglement; Geography; Governance; Governmentality; Hegemony; Human geography; Inequality; Intellectuals; Land; Neoliberalism; Preoccupation; Property; Property values; Real estate; Reconfiguration; Representation; Social classes; State-society relations; Transformation; Urban areas; Urban development; Urban studies
• ISSN: 0042-0980; 1360-063X
• DOI: 10.1177/0042098018775367

Neoliberalism as a hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance has been the subject of extensive critical analyses in geography and urban studies. Despite the conceptual difficulties involved, a growing number of scholars have attempted to apply this critical discourse to China. In this commentary, we critically interrogate the urban China literature that deploys the neoliberal lens, mostly authored by scholars outside China, and we raise the fundamental question as to whether this discourse can ever capture the central stories or trajectories of China’s urban transformation. We examine the interpretations of China’s urban land property market, urban inequality and its spatial manifestation, and the emerging urban governmentality – the areas in which neoliberalism has been most often invoked – to highlight the utility and limitations of a neoliberal treatment of China. We argue that the neoliberal representation of China’s urban (re)development, with its preoccupation with capital and class interests, is unable to effectively capture the distinctive nature of entanglement of capital, state and society in China, and thus obscures the driving role and the competing rationalities of the authoritarian state, and the rapid reconfiguration of urban society. By citing examples of recent urban China research, we show that the neoliberalism framework, even in its ‘variegated’ or ‘assemblage’ versions, tends to trap China’s analysis within a frame of reference comfortable to Western researchers, and ultimately hinders the development of diversified, potentially more fruitful inquiries of the urban world. 作为占主导地位的全球意识形态和治理框架，新自由主义一直是地理和城市研究中广泛批判性分析的主题。尽管涉及到概念上的困难，但越来越多的学者试图将这种批判性的话语体系应用于中国。 在这篇评论中，我们批判性地拷问了中国城市化文献中采用新自由主义视角的文章，这些文章主要由中国以外的学者撰写。我们提出了这样一个根本性问题，即这种话语体系能否捕捉到中国城市转型的核心故事或轨迹。 我们研究了中国城市土地资产市场、城市不平等及其空间表现、以及新兴城市统治性（governmentality）（这些是新自由主义最常提及的领域）的解释，以突出在中国采用新自由主义处方的效用和局限性。我们认为，中国城市（再）发展的新自由主义表述过于关注资本和阶级利益，无法有效地捕捉到中国资本、国家和社会纠缠的鲜明特征，从而掩盖了中国专制国家的驱动作用和竞争理性，以及城市社会的迅速重构。通过引用近期中国城市研究的实例，我们发现新自由主义框架即使在其“杂色”或“组合”版本中也倾向于将对中国的分析陷入适合西方研究者胃口的参考框架内，并最终阻碍对城市世界更为多元化、潜在更有成效的研究。