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This special issue originated from a similarly titled forum organized by the guest editor of this special issue at the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University, in November, 2013. The ...

Henri Lefebvre has enjoyed wide currency over the past two decades. One of his path-breaking contributions to urban research is the thesis of complete urbanization, producing an urban society that is not only real but also virtual. This thesis has enlightened research on urbanization across the world. Nevertheless, like other great thinkers at any time, Lefebvre, being a Frenchman born at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as someone who experienced the rapid rise of industrial capitalism since the 1950s, the turbulent years of the 1960s and the signicant change in the nature of state intervention since the 1970s, is very much spatiotemporally bounded (Gardiner 2000: 10-17; Merrield 2006: 8). Smith (2003: xx-xxi) has objected that The Urban Revolution is incapable of addressing the rapidly expanding urbanizing world as well as the more complex web of capital and the state in the present day. In response, there are numerous attempts either to defend Lefebvre by commenting that he had already foreseen these ‘anomalies’ or to explore seriously the ways to extend Lefebvre over time and across space. As an example of the latter, Kipfer et al. (2008: 299) think that it is straightforward: just extend Lefebvre by taking into account colonialism and patriarchy. Globalizing Lefebvre entails ‘linking considerations of everyday life to a broad critique of the imperial and patriarchal aspects of capitalist world order’. How feasible is this task?

This paper takes issue with the desakota model developed by Terry McGee by elucidating the illegal land use and construction in the rural–urban transition zone in China, with the additional case study of Tianhe Village in Guangzhou City. The paper emphasises the need to examine the geography of illegal activities along the approach of geographies of difference. It has shown that illegal land use and construction is prevalent in rural China. In rural areas where cultivated land has been converted to non-agricultural purposes, peasants are left with no alternative but to use land and construct buildings illegally. Some have increased their income by leasing out flats to migrant workers, whereas others have not been able to do this. This study has revealed that underneath the positive and integrative picture portrayed by the desakota model is its negative and disintegrative counterpart. Illegal land use and construction is one such example. Unless we incorporate both into our studies, we will not be able to comprehend the urban morphology of Chinese city regions in the new millennium.

Chinese human geography started its development more than 2500 years ago, recognizing a naive human–land relation based on Confucian and Daoist constituted ‘human–heaven harmony’ cosmology. Unlike the West, this relation emphasized the dominance of human, yet paying heed to local conditions. Since then, human geography was widely practiced as Fang Zhi (local gazetteers), covering a wide range of practical topics, relying on concrete sense impressions as the methodology, and serving mostly for state governance. Undoubtedly, the discipline has interacted with the outside world, first via expeditions and Western missionary encounters in her dynastic past, and then in the contemporary period from challenges by modern geography. While spatial determinism at the beginning of the last century might have concentrated efforts on physical geography, Soviet geography in the 1950s might have reinforced the practical orientation, and Western geography since the 1980s might have introduced post-Enlightenment concepts, human geography in China as a discipline has not departed much from its original course. It has continued emphasizing the objective of deploying geographical knowledge to revitalize the nation, relying on the methodology of sense impressions at the expense of abstract speculation and showing a distaste for critical scholarship to avoid possible conflicts with the state. Nevertheless, the Wuxing principles enlighten us in that we should not de-contextualize the object of study and set up unnecessary, discrete boundary between human and nature. In short, its unique path, including conceptualization and emphasis, has rendered Chinese human geography relatively distinctive.