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Whilst China's aid and development model has been traditionally understood as divergent from the dominant post‐1945 liberal development model, scholars are also increasingly exploring convergence between features of the two development models. Recently, scholars from a range of disciplines including development studies, development geography and international (business, environment and legal) studies have explored a process whereby China's Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals converge ('BRI‐SDG integration'). This paper brings these multidisciplinary strands of scholarship together and places them in dialogue with social sciences convergence theory to understand how BRI‐SDG integration aligns with or challenges previous conceptualisations of Chinese‐dominant development convergence. The paper first demonstrates that BRI‐SDG integration proposes a novel and deliberate convergence process ‐ which the paper names 'complementary convergence'. However, BRI‐SDG integration also underscores the need for more multidirectional frameworks that reject Eurocentricity for evaluating the contemporary Chinese‐dominant relationship, and an enhanced focus on how China is influencing dominant development institutions. Finally, BRI‐SDG integration reiterates the methodological difficulties of delineating between 'development models' in an increasingly interrelated global governance of development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wang Lingguan is a significant deity in Chinese Daoist beliefs and folk worship. His belief's formation and proliferation are rooted in specific spatial contexts. This paper introduces a spatial perspective to provide a fresh interpretation of Wang Lingguan's belief, examining it through the lenses of ritual, temple, and geography. In Daoist rituals that bridged sacred and secular spaces, Wang Lingguan emerged as Sa Shoujian's protector, manifesting his divine power to devotees. For the purposes of ritual simplification and spatial solidification, believers constructed Daoist Temples as emblems of sacredness and reimagined Wang Lingguan as the protector of these temples in their design. The active involvement of the Ming royal family in building Daoist Temples significantly contributed to establishing regional belief centers for Wang Lingguan. During the Qing Dynasty, although Wang Lingguan's royal patronage waned, his belief spread across most of China, becoming more localized and secularized. The dynamic interplay of ritual, temple, and geographical factors illuminates the establishment, dissemination, and evolution of Wang Lingguan's belief throughout China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to debates about the globalisation of higher education by providing a pioneering geographical exploration of Chinese–foreign cooperation in running transnational higher education, or TNHE, programs. Departing from widespread neoliberal and postcolonial critiques of TNHE, which tend to emphasise liberal market forces and Anglo‐American hegemony in the circulation of academic knowledge, our study examines how the Chinese state's developmental targets, strategic policies, and political–ideological considerations have shaped the evolutionary trajectory, geographical distribution, and cross‐border connections of China's TNHE programs. We demonstrate that the place‐based development of TNHE is mediated by governments' interventionist policies and embedded in existing higher education regimes, especially in the context of East Asian developmental states. By maintaining a higher education system dominated by public universities and by being the ultimate examination and approval authority, the Chinese government both determines the status of TNHE in the national higher education system, constrains the typologies and sources of knowledge flows, and shapes the national landscape of TNHE development. The territorial geographies of TNHE thus reflect complicated interactions between the state and the market, the global and the local, and economic and political/cultural forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article advances an affective geography of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in contemporary China. Drawing on existing theorizations of the potential roles of affect, emotion, and pre-consciousness in (re)shaping socioeconomic landscapes, we argue for an affective geography based on Ruez and Cockayne's affirmative theorization of ambivalence. The paper contends that SOEs are affective socio-spaces with divergent possibilities arising through workers' everyday life and not just a-priori institutional products of state power. The paper illustrates this framework with a close reading of the assemblage of workers' everyday life with the emergent socio-spatial formations of SOEs. The original case is based on in-depth interviews and on-site observations in 13 SOEs in the Northeast provinces of China. Ambivalent affects include sense of belonging and human kindness. These embody ambiguities and transformation of intense feelings, further acting on workers' ongoing employment practices to actualize the reproduction of SOE socio-spaces and workers' affective practices of "stabilities" and "mobilities". The results strengthen the affirmative meaning of ambivalence in (re)configuring SOE social, spatial and temporal relations. We thus call for further affective geographies that investigate the emergence of feeling-knowing-acting regime of ambivalence with possibilities for multiple becomings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The era of digitization is revolutionizing traditional humanities research, presenting both novel methodologies and challenges. This field harnesses quantitative techniques to yield groundbreaking insights, contingent upon comprehensive datasets on historical subjects. The China Historical Christian Database (CHCD) exemplifies this trend, furnishing researchers with a rich repository of historical, relational, and geographical data about Christianity in China from 1550 to 1950. The study of Christianity in China confronts formidable obstacles, including the mobility of historical agents, fluctuating relational networks, and linguistic disparities among scattered sources. The CHCD addresses these challenges by curating an open-access database built in neo4j that records information about Christian institutions in China and those that worked inside of them. Drawing on historical sources, the CHCD contains temporal, relational, and geographic data. The database currently has over 40,000 nodes and 200,000 relationships, and continues to grow. Beyond its utility for religious studies, the CHCD encompasses broader interdisciplinary inquiries including social network analysis, geospatial visualization, and economic modeling. This article introduces the CHCD's structure, and explains the data collection and curation process. Dataset:  https://github.com/chcdatabase/data Dataset License: CC BY 4.0 DEED [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]