Translocal China

Inter-disciplinary in approach, this collection of essays explores China’s reform era development within the concept of translocality. A key element of spatial change in today’s China has been the unprecedented geographic mobility of millions of labour migrants, tourists, brides, entrepreneurs, and many others. But translocality doesn’t just mean people. It is crucially constituted by the circulation of capital, ideas, images, goods, styles, services, and disease to name but a few.

With contributions from well-respected China specialists, the essays focus simultaneously on mobilities and localities, drawing our attention to the multiplying forms of mobility in China whilst retaining the importance of localities in people’s lives. The book provides a clear path to understanding the importance of translocality as a concept along with concrete examples of its operation in China. Unique in approach, it is at once a study of the connections between location and culture, politics, economics, bodies, gender and technology.

1. Translocal China: An Introduction 2. The Original Translocal Society and its Modern Fate: Historical and Post-Reform South China 3. Shanxi as Translocal Imaginary: Reforming the Local 4. Openness, Change and Translocality: New Migrants’ Identification with Hainan 5. How Local are Local Enterprises?: Privatization and Translocality of Small Firms in Zhejiang and Jiangsu 6. Urban Transformation and Professionalization: Translocality and Rationalities of Enterprise in Post-Mao China 7. Symbolic City/Regions and Gendered Identity Formation in South China 8. "Net-Moms": A New Place and a New Identity – Parenting Discussion Forums on the Internet in China 9. The Village as Theme Park: Mimesis and Authenticity in Chinese Tourism 10. The Flows of Heroin, People, Capital, Imagination and the Spread of HIV in Southwest China 11. Negotiating Scale: Miao Women at a Distance 12. The Leaving of Anhui: The Southward Journey Towards the Knowledge Class