Transnational practices in urban China: Spatiality and localization of western fast food chains

Foreign consumer goods and brands have proliferated in recent decades in Chinese cities, helping transform the urban landscape. The transformation is multifaceted. Aside from the economic bottom line, for instance, foreign fast food chains bring with them influences on people's diet, consumption preferences, and lifestyle choices. Focusing on two of the most popular chains in China, McDonald's and KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken), and their operation in the city of Nanjing, this paper addresses two research questions. First, how have foreign fast food chains configured into China's changing urban landscape? Second, how do these restaurants interact with local consumers and become their space of everyday life? Our analysis is based on data from multiple sources, including business establishment data from the municipal industrial and commercial registrar, location data from Baidu (a Chinese website) maps confirmed by field reconnaissance, and interviews with consumers at select locations. Clearly, there is plasticity of transnational practices, as our analysis shows. In shaping the local consumer culture and space, they themselves are refashioned, by forsaking some degree of standardization to be more versatile and agile, and through locational (re)configuration to capture consumers. Local consumers, on the other hand, have altered their perception and use of the chains from more visceral and elective to more rational and routine, eventually making their own space out of the restaurants.