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The construction of "cultural infrastructure facilities" (wenhua jichu sheshi) in China - auditoria, exhibition halls, libraries, museums, performance centers - for state administration of culture and information originated in the 1950s with Sino-Soviet exchange and has continued throughout the reform era. However, scholarship on urban development in China, embedded in discourses of capitalism and modern planning, generally does not recognize this category of infrastructure construction by contemporary city governments. To address the lacunae, this article analyzes the history of cultural infrastructure facilities in socialist urbanism, their transfer to the People's Republic of China from the Soviet Union, the conditions of socialist realism, and the continuity of cultural infrastructure construction since the 1980s. Evidence from the Guangzhou Cultural Infrastructure Facilities Projects Plan (2003 - 07) and cultural facilities sites in the new city center projects of Shenzhen, Shunde, and Dongguan demonstrate how the party-state prioritizes the planning and construction of cultural infrastructure facilities. Contemporary architectural designs for new cultural buildings represent the international aesthetic of reform while cultural facilities continue to house and display party-sanctioned culture and information for the people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Special Issue focuses on historical and contemporary transformations of territory in China's "vast land of borders". While the idea of China and borders typically indicates a contested national boundary, a biopolitical geobody, or transnational borderlands, critical insights of geographical debate have yet to grasp the extent of bordering within the state including the reactivation of frontiers and the implementation of new territorial arrangements with historical elements to support future interests. This Introduction to the Special Issue conceptualizes dynamic bordering and territory within the state and its emergence from the historical geography of governing, settling, enfolding, and controlling contingent lands and peoples within the centralizing state's ecumene. The contributions of the Special Issue analyze the vast land of borders through combinations of six themes: frontier peripheralization, geopolitical imagination, territorialization and the administrative divisions, variability of space and time, uneven development, and dynamic toponymy. Together they contribute to identifying and defining new questions about historical and contemporary state formation in China and yield new understandings for the study of territory in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In The Communist Postscript, Boris Groys identifies convictions in question when concepts assumed to be valid are revealed to contain a certain paradox. Among these in China, the concept of the city stands out. Since the imperial era, the Chinese state has organized subnational territory and governed society and space through the administrative divisions (xingzheng quhua 行政区划), but only in the 1980s, with economic reform, did cities become administrative divisions. Urban theory does not recognize the primary power of reterritorialization in China's urban process. Framed by dialectical reason, this analysis plumbs the history of territorial transmutation and the redefinition of cities in the reform era. It gives attention to the establishment of cities as vast rural-urban territorial-administrative areas, the special economic zone, and the special administrative region. Through changes to the administrative divisions, party-state power to change the map propels urban-industrial development for national transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grid systems for local governance and administration in China, known as grid management or wanggehua guanli (网格化管理), have been implemented since the mid-2000s. Where existing research focuses on the embeddedness of grid technology in state-society relations, the spatial dynamics of urban grid administration and their significance in China's state structure receive less attention. This analysis adopts the idea of the spatial process for a dynamic approach to grid governance, from its incorporation in China's urban management efficiency drive to its implementation in city districts through local territorialization, to assess the urban grid system as an administrative area and inter-scaled spatial governing strategy. Implementation of the grid system establishes smaller governing areas while networking higherlevel jurisdictions, with the result of overcoming some of the authority fragmentation in the state structure. Grid governance contributes to increasing local state power in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the origins and significance of the "victim" debate within global feminism. Focuses on the divide produced by the victim debate by examining the evolution of two development planning platforms. Discusses issues facing women in a China under reform and the relevance of the victim debate in the Chinese context. (CMK)

Economic restructuring in the health services industry in the USA exemplifies general patterns of economic change propelled by neoliberalism, especially industry privatization, diminished social services, and dependence on 'flexible' labor and management regimes. Combined with the widespread entry of women into the labor force, an aging population, and minimal assistance for high quality long-term care at the end of life, these economic and social conditions, raise a set of difficult policy questions for health services planning. Set in these broad contexts, this paper situates access to and experience of health services in the home, the hospital, and nursing facility, to demonstrate how economic changes have relocated and redefined health services in ways that distinctively impact how people experience the places where they receive care. This place switching of health services externalizes costs of subacute and 'daily life care' (the so-called custodial care) to the sphere of the individual, their family, and communities. The theoretical analysis uses current geographical and philosophical approaches to place and space, and considers the tensions between institutionally managed health care space, and the patient's experience of receiving health services in place. The place/space dilemma of health services provision is examined through several interrelated subjects: long-term care at the end of life, gendered characteristics of care giving, the limitations of Medicare and Medicaid, historical changes in hospital length of stay, the restructuring of nursing practices, and the 'no-care zone'. The analysis is based on examples of stroke and incontinence care to demonstrate the importance of considering place and space issues in health care planning. Keywords: Economic restructuring; Gender; Health services; Long-term care; Place; Space; USA

'Chinese Landscapes: The Village as Place' belies its name. This collection of essays on Chinese villages expands traditional landscape study in geography. It is the first book about rural China [...]

In 'Tokyo: The Changing Profile of an Urban Giant,' Roman Cybriwsky has produced an introduction to the city at the heart of the largest urban agglomeration in the postindustrial world. [...]