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This paper conceptualises digital displacement as both a way through which the digital, dynamic and fragile spatialities of contentious politics can be examined and as a geographic critique of censorship. Digital displacement, understood here as the act of removing users from the digital places and spaces they wish to remain in and use, often through the act of deletion, is conceptualised through the digital displacement of two contentious political groups that attempted to contest the forced eviction of migrants from Beijing in 2017; hashtag focused #BeijingSurgery# and instant messaging group using BeijingTogether. Explored through participant observation, interviews and playful digital exploration, this paper examines the spatialities that made multiple digital displacements possible and the activist spatialities that emerged during and post‐displacement. In exploring this, I develop a flexible vocabulary around digital place, space, scale, territory and mobility to analyse the practices of digital displacement, to understand the socio‐spatial positionality of activists involved in digitally centred contentious politics and to contextualise their territorial positionality within Chinese digital territory and global digital territories. Through the examination of #BeijingSurgery# and BeijingTogether, the article highlights: the importance of digital territorial positionality for both activists and the digital places and spaces used for contentious politics; that within systems of digital spatial governance, deletion and displacement can be effective strategies of repressive governance with wide‐ranging displacement effects; and that while digital displacement is not necessarily the ending point of contentious politics, the re‐production of activist spatialities is more difficult when the authority being protested against governs the digital territory used for protest. This paper conceptualises digital displacement as: a way through which the digital, dynamic and fragile spatialities of contentious politics can be examined; a way to understand China's digital territorialization project; and as a geographic critique of censorship. Digital displacement is conceptualised through the ethnographic research conducted in Beijing and examines efforts to contest the forced eviction of migrants from Beijing in 2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of smart technology, endorsed by government institutions and recognised for its societal benefits and potential for urban management, has carved a niche for smart eldercare. However, discourses around smart care vary among stakeholders, leading to a constant (re)production of it. This paper investigates three overlapping and sometimes converging stakeholders' (governments, corporations and capital investors) discourses in defining ‘smart eldercare’, arguing that these discourses significantly influence the promotion, implementation and acceptance of smart eldercare in urban Chinese communities. Government entities view smart eldercare as an efficient tool for facilitating community‐based population governance and providing a social safety net. In contrast, eldercare corporations view smart eldercare as a powerful narrative to attract investment and secure government funding, while also serving as a means of surveilling in‐home care labour. For capital investors, eldercare stands out as a burgeoning and resilient sector, encompassing latent values that warrant careful consideration, especially during periods of economic downturn. Through the lens of discourse analysis, this study underscores the tensions between different discourses and the ways it produces ‘smartness’ in urban China. This paper advocates for understanding ‘smartness’ as a complex, multifaceted concept shaped by diverse stakeholder discourses and socio‐economic‐political contexts, necessitating flexible, context‐sensitive interpretations through discourse analysis. To advance ongoing debates in geography on smart care, smart cities and ageing, this paper reveals how these stakeholder discourses co‐produce the notion of ‘smartness’ in urban eldercare, while highlighting the socio‐political dynamics underlying technology‐driven governance in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how public servants in aid‐recipient countries perceive and encounter the development structures and normative discourses of South–South partnerships. The paper draws on interviews with senior public servants in the Antigua and Barbuda government who interface directly with Chinese aid delivery. The public servants perceive that ‘Northern’ development models have largely failed and that ‘Southern’ donors can facilitate alternative development pathways. They understand that South–South partnerships give aid‐recipient countries greater control over their development futures, invoking some of the original radicalism of South–South partnerships. The public servants also perceive that Western critiques of Chinese aid are underpinned by orientalism, and they reject notions that they are being passively integrated into the Chinese government's global vision. Yet, they do not passively internalise the normative discourses on South–South partnerships. This paper advances a multi‐scalar postcolonial geographical analysis of South–South partnerships and will be of interest to those exploring how aid‐recipient countries navigate the politics and power relations of the contemporary global aid landscape. The paper also advances debates on how subaltern geopolitics play out in the context of increasing South–South partnerships. Finally, with its focus on South–South partnerships, the paper contributes to the aid ethnographies literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human geographers are increasingly concerned with how 'futures' are imagined and rendered governable, yet mostly their methods lack the sensitivity to explore the functioning of complex relations between heterogeneous actors across places. The world's electric vehicle (EV) sector is booming, presaging a widely expected decarbonised future, associated with a restructuring of the automobile industry as anticipated by proactive players. This paper interrogates the spatiality and politics of the EV future‐making through disentangling the translocal practices involved in realising Tesla's Gigafactory in Shanghai (TGS) as assemblage. Informed by interviews with industrial insiders and opensource information in Chinese and English, the article finds that, first, TGS's imagined future embodies a multiplicity of interdependent but divergent expectations, the coherence of which underlies the formation and operation of the TGS assemblage by virtue of the concerted actions of its member‐actors. Second, such coherence is conditional as designed by TGS's central planners—namely, Tesla and Chinese government agencies at central and local levels—for their differentiated but overlapping interests. The TGS's imagined future is rendered actionable, enrolling other agents at certain moments, through anticipatory practices of regulatory changes, strategic arrangements interweaving land and financing, firm acquisition and intra‐firm reorganisation linking up places in and outside China, as well as the selection of key suppliers and technological use of critical raw materials. Concluding after a sketch on the TGS's 'possible futures' and broader implications, the paper contributes an assemblage‐informed approach to disentangle futuremaking practices and generates timely insights into the 'future‐oriented' restructuring of the automobile industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper contributes to the recent geographical debates on the connection between dispossession and informality. Existing scholarship recognises that informality is an integral part of capitalism. Arguments reinforcing the formal–informal dichotomy dominate research on processes of dispossession. Drawing on analyses of the struggle of waste recyclers in Beijing, this paper conceptualises informal activities in relation to circuits of capital. It contends that theories of dispossession need to be extended in order to analyse processes of enclosure in the informal economy. The conclusion discusses the potential of reconceptualising dispossession as a variegated process operating both outside and within the capitalist space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade, new forms of Tibetan entrepreneurship have emerged and proliferated in China, at the intersection of a national push for entrepreneurship in response to a slowing economy, the closure of non‐governmental organisations in Tibetan areas, declining state‐sector employment, and state concerns about stability. This paper explores the rise of these new Tibetan entrepreneurs in relation to two inter‐related concerns. First, it contributes to geographers' calls for comparative studies of culturally specific meanings of entrepreneurship across the Global South. It explores the cultural politics of Tibetan entrepreneurship – active debates about what it means to be a proper Tibetan, in terms of religious commitments and cultural pride, in relation to money‐making activities. Second, it analyses these in relation to critiques of neoliberal subjectivities associated with entrepreneurship. One of the key themes of Tibetan entrepreneurship is the effort to create economic value in the service of cultural value and a sense of self‐worth for Tibetans living in rural areas. Thus, elements of the neoliberal self are sutured together with a sense of responsibility to Tibetan communities and historically sedimented idioms to form an entrepreneurial subjectivity that is broadly oriented to the project of revalorising Tibetan places and people. This paper explores the cultural politics of new forms of Tibetan entrepreneurship that have proliferated in China over the past decade. It finds that new entrepreneurial subjectivities are broadly oriented toward the revalorisation of Tibetan places and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interrelationship between forced migration, return migration and ethnicity remains relatively unexplored in current scholarship. By using the case of China's resettlement policy towards diasporic Chinese descendants expelled from Southeast Asia during 1949-1979 and examining their contemporary situation, this paper highlights the way scholarship on forced migration and ethnically privileged (return) migration can mutually enrich one another. The paper, first, examines the geopolitical context of Chinese forced migration and the premises of China's preferential policy towards co-ethnics, which labelled the 'refugees' as 'returnees' intentionally. It argues that metaphors of extraterritorial ethnic kinship and 'return' are used to justify ethnic privilege but the co-ethnics experienced socio-spatial exclusion in China because of their cultural distinctiveness. Second, the paper explores the impact of the post-1980s reforms on the rural overseas Chinese farms in which the co-ethnics were resettled. This discussion suggests that the rescaling of governance brought about policies that capitalise upon their distinctive Southeast Asian identities to reinvent the farms as economic zones and tourism sites. The sustainability of this economic strategy is, however, questioned in the third part of the paper, which considers intergenerational change now happening on the farms. It argues that international migration histories are transitioning to new internal migration flows. Such migration succession trends may transform the ethnically privileged status of the farms and their inhabitants. The qualitative findings in this paper direct broader inquiry into the complex ethnic geopolitics underpinning mobilisations of diasporic belonging and also the implications of intergenerational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, narcotics control has been unable to overhaul the durable and arguably self‐regulating socio‐economic networks driving heroin production and distribution in northern Myanmar, the second biggest drug production area in the world. To overcome this territorial barrier, the Chinese state introduced in 2000 an opium substitution programme that involved bringing Chinese agribusiness firms together with ex‐poppy farmers and local elites in northern Myanmar to form a formal cross‐border market. The programme raises a unique empirical puzzle: how could formal market building play a socially progressive role when it is superimposed in a border region underpinned by a well‐established informal, if also mostly illegal, market structure? This paper addresses this question through a reflexive Polanyian analytical framework that examines the "market" through its connections with non‐economic factors over time. It makes a distinct conceptual contribution by incorporating the border as a tangible anchor from which to assess how the processes of redistribution, reciprocity, and market exchange constitute the opium substitution programme as a social "countermovement." Findings indicate Yunnanese firms negotiate border politics to engage in exchange with ex‐poppy farmers, establish reciprocal relations with local military elites, and implement the redistributive strategies of the Chinese state. Despite some success, this formal market‐building process continues to experience barriers generated by the pre‐existing informal market structure across the border region. Whether market building could further impact on economic restructuring in this border region and fully remove opium production from the border economy therefore remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insofar as the production of space is intimately bound up with the bodily senses, it would be reasonable to posit that the politics of space is also at the same time a politics of the senses. In this context, the theoretical remit of this paper is to extend our analysis of the role of the senses in theorising a visceral politics of urban exclusion. Using the case study of a middle-class neighbourhood or xiaoqu in Shanghai, the paper interrogates how class-based sensory 'othering' is deployed to preserve and regulate the socio-metabolic environment of the neighbourhood sensorium and justify urban exclusion. Such revanchist (sensory) urbanism, however, is irreducible to the cultural politics of neoliberalism, but also deeply implicated in actually existing metabolic inequalities in contemporary urban China. In particular, those whose metabolic needs are devalued are often stigmatised and cast as 'sensorial others' with repulsive sensory and metabolic bodily practices that are at odds with the urban middle-class. By bringing together critical literature on sensory urbanism and urban metabolism, a key contribution of this paper is to advance the theorisation of visceral micro-politics of urban exclusion that is experienced and 'sensed' through everyday metabolic inequalities in urban China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how webs of connection bridge people from different social worlds and engender affinity ties that can be mobilised to nurture caring relationships, despite the physical and cognitive borders that exist within and between societies. Territorial contestation between the Myanmar military and the Kachin Independence Army has precipitated internal displacement in Kachin state (Myanmar). The situation of Kachin internally displaced people in camps at the China-Myanmar border directs attention to how geographical and geopolitical constraints deter international humanitarian assistance yet provide opportunities to engage a different set of humanitarian actors. The paper first argues that Kachin internally displaced people are treated as surplus populations by the sovereign states in both Myanmar and China. Surplus populations come into existence when nation-states impose punitive measures that compromise the survivability of populations that are considered threatening to national sovereignty. Second, the paper examines how mobilising affinity ties enables Kachin humanitarian workers to leverage the citizenship resources of empathetic Chinese nationals to negotiate humanitarianism constraints at the China-Myanmar border. Affinity ties refer to connections emanating from a dynamic constellation of cultural attributes to do with history, ethnicity, religion and place among other malleable identity constructs. Interlocking constellations form webs of connections that transverse essentialising categories of social difference and contribute to shared biographies that allow for cultivating emotional attachments to a place and its people. Affinity ties may congeal into durable ties of solidarity and activism, but no less significant are vernacular expressions of affinity that prompt empathy for proximate or distant strangers and a predilection to act on behalf of those experiencing oppression. The paper proposes that conceptualising affinity ties draws out transversal webs of connections that bridge people of differential social positionings. This approach provides a potential ethical stance and productive analytical lens for advancing wider migration and citizenship debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholars have extensively investigated the post‐study career experiences of international students, there has been a dearth in the literature on the mediation of intersubjectivities in the local valorisation of international education, particularly neglecting the perspective of recruiters. Through the lens of geographical imaginaries and drawing on qualitative data from recruiters in professional sectors and returned students in China, this paper reveals the significant role of imaginaries in shaping the perceptions and practices of both parties during the university‐to‐work transitions. The findings underscore that overseas credentials, codified knowledge, and embodied competencies were central to recruiters' and returnees' imaginaries regarding international education. However, conflicts in these imaginaries between recruiters and graduates resulted in the distinct valorisation of the socioeconomic value of overseas education between the two groups and created challenges for returnees' transitions from overseas education to local professional employment. This study emphasises the importance of emplaced intersubjectivities in comprehending international student mobilities as an ongoing transnational process across global educational spaces and local labour markets. It also underscores the role of local contexts and networks in valorising and mediating the value of international education, creating place‐specific patterns of university‐to‐work transitions among returnees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transformations of the energy system are unfolding in China at an unprecedented scale and pace. The dynamics of China's energy transitions impact global trends of energy decarbonisation. Transition theories within the Anglophone academic tradition have been used to examine this process, but they tend to misrepresent the social, cultural, and political structures that shape energy transitions in China. This paper proposes a move from an analysis of energy transitions "with Chinese characteristics" to alternative thinking on energy transitions truly rooted in Chinese epistemological and philosophical constructs. The correlative epistemology refers to a Chinese tradition of social studies that describes the cosmos as a structured order of relations (guanxi). This tradition sees guanxi as the fundamental constituent of Chinese society. Such a relational focus enables a culture‐led reading of China's energy transitions, thus responding to calls for transition theories "from elsewhere." In particular, correlative interpretations of innovation and transition processes in China frame energy transitions within broader societal transformations, define the operation of transition governance, and reveal that pre‐existing guanxi networks shape the activities of actors in transition processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tourists have long been neglected in the literature on home and mobility, although they constitute a massive mobile population within and across national borders. Addressing this gap, this paper advances geography's critical engagement with home in relation to mobility and modernity, and questions the binary distinction between home and unhomeliness in tourist mobility. It focuses on the alienation of Chinese modernity and how one group of domestic tourists negotiates this alienation through their imagination and consumption of home in a popular tourist site (i.e. Lijiang, a World Heritage site in Yunnan province) within the context of China's transformation, which started in 1978. This paper has two objectives. First, it examines why home is woven into the touristic imagination of Lijiang; and second, it links tourists' personal experiences with China's broad sociospatial transformation in order to explore individuals' resistance against and compliance with modernity. I argue that the imagination and consumption of home generates intensely contradictory configurations of struggle that simultaneously push tourists towards an ideal of home for inner freedom and premodern paradise, yet pull them back into the whirling vortex of 'modern' life and commercial forces. The paper sheds light on micro-geographies of people's lives in the context of China's rapid transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically highlights the role of nationalism in the development of the semiconductor industry in Taiwan. First, it demonstrates how the pre-1980s Taiwanese developmental state mobilised Chinese economic nationalism against Japanese colonialism and Chinese communism and adopted the strategies of graduated sovereignty, selectively subsidising certain areas and sectors, and promoting national (homogeneously imagined) territorialisation to integrate with the international market. Second, the paper exhibits how in the late 1980s, when the outflow of capital to Mainland China became a compelling phenomenon and Taiwan democratised, popular sovereignty became the norm and Taiwanese nationalism emerged. In response, the democratised state started employing Taiwanese economic nationalism and implementing populist territorial policies to consolidate the support of 'us' (the Taiwanese/Taiwan) versus 'them' (the Chinese/China). This made China and everything related a security concern that had to be excluded as 'the other'. This paper responds to the appeals of political geographers to give nationalism a central place in contemporary theories of the nation-state and contributes to the theory of the developmental state by bringing 'the nation' back. While most of the existing developmental state literature focuses on how the roles and effects of 'the state' influence economic development, taking 'the nation' seriously can provide more accurate explanations for how and why the state focuses on development or not. Accordingly, through valuing the nation this paper promotes a theory of the developmental nation-state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International movements of scientists and researchers have become more common in the increasingly inter-connected global knowledge economy. Geographic mobility is often perceived as a key to academic excellence and career advancement by scholars, especially in advanced economies. In China, where international geographical mobility is a newly-gained privilege after the advent of the Open Door Policy, academics belong to one of the most mobile subsets of the population. This paper interrogates the impact of academic mobility at the individual level among Chinese scholars who have conducted research visits in Germany. Specifically, the paper operationalises the equivocal notion of personal development with the concepts of capital accumulation and conversion (after Pierre Bourdieu). Drawing upon findings from 64 in-depth interviews with Chinese scholars of postdoctoral level or above and six key informants, and a postal survey (123 Chinese scholars with mobility biography to Germany), this paper illustrates how geographical mobility can be conceptualised as a form of capital that can be accumulated and converted to cultural, social, economic and symbolic capital. While geographical mobility is predominantly considered as a capital for positive self- and professional development, examples also demonstrate the potential detrimental effect on social capital, especially among young Chinese scholars. Using an agent-centred approach, this paper argues against a mechanical translation of geographical mobility to capital accumulation, but for a grounded understanding of the highly individualised and contextualised development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the evolution of China Mobile - one of China's pioneer 'national champions', and one of the world's largest telecom companies - through the lens of global financial networks, focusing on the role of advanced business services, financial centres and offshore jurisdictions in economic development. It demonstrates that despite being a domestic company, China Mobile is plugged firmly into the global financial networks, with incorporation in Hong Kong, cross-listing in Hong Kong and New York, and opaque offshore companies registered in the British Virgin Islands. Global advanced business services firms, with Goldman Sachs in the lead, have been instrumental in the very conception of China Mobile in 1997 and its subsequent expansion, thus helping the Chinese government consolidate and modernise the whole telecom sector. The study highlights the position of Hong Kong as an onshore-offshore financial centre intermediating between global financial markets and mainland China, and underwriting the reputation of China's 'national champions'. The analysis also points to the advantages of Beijing over Shanghai as a command centre of state-owned and controlled enterprises, acting as a magnet for advanced business services. The relevance of global financial networks to China, a latecomer on the stage of financial globalisation, highlights the scope for applying the concept to the rest of the world, and its potential contribution to economic geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social geography research on familial spaces and intimate relations has generated valuable literatures on parenting and grand-parenting in modern nuclear families. However, the complex intergenerational relations and geographies of multi-generational households remain under-researched, limiting geographers' understanding of familial spatialities. This paper reports on research exploring intergenerational relationships through the lens of family-based food practices in temporary three-generational households of Guangzhou, the largest city in south China. It draws on five case studies with Xiaokang (middle-level) households. It examines how intergenerational relations are performed through everyday food practices, exploring their geographies in terms of both domestic space and wider family geographies. The key arguments suggest that domestic spaces are significant to cultural transmission and transition and emotional communication across generations, and key sites for intergenerational segregation and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of ‘globalization’. Thinking about a ‘globalizing’ rather than a fully ‘globalized’ world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have ‘customized’ their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and ‘public culture’ in India, ‘consumer nationalism’ in China, and ‘artful consumption’ in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]