Carolyn Cartier - download.e-bookshelf.de · xii PREFACE individuals and within cultural groups, in...

Globalizing South China

Carolyn Cartier

RGS–IBG Book Series

The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Book Series provides a forum for scholarly monographs and editedcollections of academic papers at the leading edge of research in humanand physical geography. The volumes are intended to make significantcontributions to the field in which they lie, and to be written in amanner accessible to the wider community of academic geographers.Some volumes will disseminate current geographical research reportedat conferences or sessions convened by Research Groups of the Society.Some will be edited or authored by scholars from beyond the UK. Allare designed to have an international readership and to both reflect andstimulate the best current research within geography.

The books will stand out in terms of:

• the quality of research• their contribution to their research field• their likelihood to stimulate other research• being scholarly but accessible.

Published

Geomorphological Processes and Landscape Change: Britain in the Last 1000 YearsDavid L. Higgitt and E. Mark Lee (eds)

Globalizing South ChinaCarolyn Cartier


Carolyn Cartier

Copyright © Carolyn Cartier 2001

The right of Carolyn Cartier to be identified as author of this work has been asserted inaccordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published 2001

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JFUK

Blackwell Publishers Inc350 Main StreetMalden, Massachusetts 02148USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes ofcriticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that itshall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwisecirculated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover otherthan that in which it is published and without a similar condition including thiscondition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cartier, CarolynGlobalizing South China / Carolyn Cartier.

p. cm. — (RGS-IBG book series)Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 1–55786–887–5 (hbk : alk. paper) — ISBN 1–55786–888–3

(pbk : alk. paper)1. China, Southeast—Economic conditions. 2. Globalization—Economic

aspects—China, Southeast. 3. Globalization—Social aspects—China,Southeast. 4. China, Southeast—Foreign economic relations. 5. China, Southeast—Commerce. I. Title. II. Series.

HC428 .S74 .C37 2001337.51 2—dc21

2001037468

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Plantinby Ace Filmsetting Ltd, Frome, SomersetPrinted in Great Britain by T.J. International, Padstow, Cornwall

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

List of Plates viList of Figures and Tables viiList of Maps viiiSeries Editors’ Preface ixPreface x

Chapter 1 Negotiating Geographical Knowledges 1

Chapter 2 Region and Representation 37

Chapter 3 Maritime Frontier/Mercantile Region 72

Chapter 4 Open Ports and the Treaty System 106

Chapter 5 Revolution and Diaspora 143

Chapter 6 Gendered Industrialization 176

Chapter 7 Zone Fever 205

Chapter 8 Urban Triumphant 230

Epilogue 260

References 270Index 309

Plates

4.1 Straits Chinese style architecture, Xiamen 1385.1 Bukit China, aerial view 1575.2 Bukit China summit, Eng Choon Association monument 1646.1 Family planning billboard, Xiamen 188

Figures

2.1 Growth triangles 642.2 Southern China natural economic territory 653.1 Xiamen walled city 854.1 Exports carried by the Liuqiu tribute mission, 1851 1085.1 “The war over San bao shan [Bukit China]” 1606.1 Cartoons from One Country, Two Wives 1987.1 Trends in arable land conversion under reform, selected

coastal areas 2218.1 Rendition of the future Hong Kong central business

district 2458.2 Rendition of the future Pudong New Area, Shanghai 2508.3 The Jin Mao Building 2518.4 The Shanghai World Financial Centre 252

Table

7.1 Decreases in cultivated land under reform, selectedcoastal areas, 1000 ha 220

Maps

1.1 Coastal areas opened to foreign investment, 1996 51.2 Macroregions and natural watersheds 142.1 Route of official journeys to south China 462.2 Kingdom of Chu 553.1 Coastal settlement, Qin dynasty 733.2 Regional soil quality 803.3 Coastal settlement, Ming dynasty 823.4 The monsoon 903.5 The Zheng He voyages 923.6 The Amoy network 984.1 “The Chinese world order” 1074.2 (a) Number of Protestant communicants per 10,000

inhabitants. (b) Population density, Inner China 1244.3 (a) Distribution of Protestant communicants, Fujian.

(b) Population density, Fujian 1254.4 Merchant organizations. (a) Fujian. (b) Guangdong.

(c) Zhejiang. (d) Jiangxi. (e) Shandong. (f) Jiangsu 1295.1 Dialect regions 1505.2 Chinese overseas populations by dialect group 1515.3 Melaka town and Bukit China 1587.1 The Yangzi delta region 2117.2 The China–Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park 2128.1 (a) The Hong Kong SAR. (b) The Hong Kong–Shenzhen

border area and Deep Bay 233

Series Editors’ Preface

The RGS-IBG Book Series publishes the highest quality of research andscholarship across the broad disciplinary spectrum of geography. Ad-dressing the vibrant agenda of theoretical debates and issues that char-acterize the contemporary discipline, contributions will provide a synthesisof research, teaching, theory and practice that both reflects and stimu-lates cutting-edge research. The series seeks to engage an internationalreadership through the provision of scholarly, vivid and accessible texts.

Nick Henry and Jon SadlerSeries Editors

x PREFA CE

Preface

[G]eographical knowledge is too broad and too important to be left togeographers. Its reconstruction as a preparation for a civilized life and itssynthesis as an endpoint of human understandings depends on overcom-ing the old Kantian distinctions between history (narration) and geogra-phy (spatial ordering) and between geography (the outer world of theobjective material conditions) and anthropology (the inner world ofsubjectivities). It would probably require the reconstitution of some newstructure of knowledge.(David Harvey, 2000, p. 558)

This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of research on an urban andindustrializing transboundary region, the south China coast, which hasexperienced some of the most rapid economic growth in world history.Numerous accounts about the region have examined its contemporaryeconomic transformations. This analysis instead is based in critical per-spectives on regional scholarship in geography and China area studies,and departs from existing work on regional economies in Asia. Alterna-tively, the book approaches regional analysis from the perspective of “in-tellectual globalization,” the debates about the organization of knowledge,in universities and scholarly research, and their adequacy for negotiatingsocietal complexities in the contemporary era.1 How can organizationsof knowledge suited to a cosmopolitan geographical ethic intersect ininnovative ways that transcend the problems of (inter)disciplinary stud-ies, and reinvigorate diverse worldviews, replacing partial knowledgeswith whole and situated accounts? The book that follows presents oneanswer to this epistemological problem through the region in south China,by foregrounding debates about its processes of formation and by re-placing portrayals of rapid economic growth with critical perspectivesabout regional transformation. Thus “globalizing” south China meansfirst working to open up a cosmopolitan knowledge about the region, inways that recognize both historical processes at the basis of regional for-mation and how places in the contemporary region have experienced thetransformations wrought by internationalized transboundary activity.

Because, in Fredric Jameson’s (1998b, p. 55) words, “globalization is

PREFACE xi

a communicational concept, which alternately masks and transmits cul-tural or economic meanings,” entering the arena of scholarship aboutglobalization requires some cautionary remarks. While the idea of glo-balization became popular in the late twentieth century, what may be“globalized” must be understood in the context of historic cultural prac-tices, political activities, and economic processes, now transformed. Simi-larly, in this project globalization does not focus on the currently typicaldebates in political and economic studies, about the effects of globaliz-ing processes on economic activity or nation-state power, because thosedebates, despite their important contributions, have tended not to sus-tain engagements with the emplaced conditions of regional formations.This project instead concerns how to understand the complexities ofregional formations as situated intersections of cultural, political, andeconomic forms. In the same vein, what is globalization is not global in alanded geographical sense, but global as unprecedented possibilities forrapid transference and new combinations of resources, especially capi-tal, labor, information, and ideas. Regional formations, where these andother resources originate, touch down, accumulate, recirculate, and gen-erate new social relations, are especially important sites of globalizingprocesses. The largest cities of the south China coast have been the centersof transboundary regional activity and are a primary focus of the study.

While studies of “the local and the global” proliferated in geographyand related fields through the 1980s and 1990s, the phrase often appearedmore as a metaphorical signifier, substituting recognition of transnationaland transboundary processes for examination of how such processes actu-ally work out and how they connect diverse places and regions. The prob-lems of the “local and the global” also effectively elided the region, whereascontemporary theorizations of dynamic scale relations help us to thinkthrough spatialities that constitute and interrelate places, regions, states,and other territories. The conceptualization of transboundary regionalactivity through relations of scale is one of the most important ways ofmoving toward seeing the realities of globalized activity. A focused studyon scale relations in China would form its own subject of investigation,and so this book introduces concepts of scale and depends on a dialecticalscale perspective as a framework for analysis.

The methodological orientation of this project reflects late twentieth-century shifts in Anglo-American geography, when geographers beganto adopt approaches reflecting the broader poststructural theoretical shiftin the academy. The approach adopted in this study retains a materialgrounding yet understands constructivist knowledges in order to exam-ine both realities of the south China coast and changing representationsabout the region over time. The analysis recognizes too the instability ofhuman categories, and the importance of understanding “difference” in

xii PREFACE

individuals and within cultural groups, in issues of class, race, ethnicity,gender, sex, and sexuality. This stance is not one that reflects methodo-logical trends, but rather one that finds how theory has finally caught upwith practice and empirical reality. Maintenance of a relatively fixed andunchanging identity is, on a world scale, often a privileged position ofpower and an elite and male-gendered opportunity. Feminist scholar-ship has allowed us to understand that the “normative” perspective isregularly a patriarchal position, and the analysis depends on feministcritiques to understand a range of issues, including embodied subjectiv-ity and gendered economic activity.

The book is also a product of the era of Orientalism, Edward Said’s(1978) exposition of the practices and representations of Europeanorientalisms. It uses the basic precepts of the Orientalism project as a toolto intervene in normative social scientific conceptualizations of Asia andChina. I assume in this book that what Said achieved for humanisticscholarship, in conceptualizing how the West invented “the Orient”through myriad representations, has not been reliably achieved for socialscientific analyses of Asia, and especially economic accounts. Becausesocial scientific acceptance of the problem of representations has beenincomplete if it has begun at all, this project challenges continuing West-ern-centrisms retained by many political economic analyses about China,and the larger Asian region. Organization of knowledge for a truly cos-mopolitan ethic could not begin to proceed any other way.

Similarly, the critical interventions in Western political economic per-spectives about China are not wholly indebted to the legacies of struc-tural Marxism, not least because that mode has tended to presupposeplaces and processes of Western industrialized geographies. This bookcontends, as one of its central arguments, that Han Chinese culturalunderstandings of place and space, human–spatial relations, and someeconomic reworkings of the space economy in the industrial era havetheir own logic, and that they reflect a long history of cultural complexesand dynamic spatial relations in Chinese society, and organizational strat-egies of the Chinese state. One book can only begin to explore theseissues, and for this reason alone, the approach must be historical. Thecritical edges do belong to understanding that globalization, in certaininstitutional contexts, is deployed as a euphemistic disguise for theneoliberal regime and its problems, a contemporary legacy of the En-lightenment project and diverse forms of imperialism. Still, treating glo-balization as the property of the West denies how ideas and experiencesof globalization have global contexts and localized meanings. Ultimately,the critical interventions belong to concern for the problems of unevendevelopment and ethical accountings of political economic activity, atall scales.

PREFACE xiii

An important observation about neoliberal capitalism at the turn ofthe millennium is the set of experiential contradictions that have emergedas economic activity works its course and leaves new extremes in its wake:“it appears both to include and to marginalize in unanticipated ways; toproduce desire and expectation on a global scale yet to decrease the cer-tainty of work or the security of persons; to magnify class differences butto undercut class consciousness; above all, to offer up vast, almost in-stantaneous riches to those who master its spectral technologies – andsimultaneously, to threaten the very existence of those who do not”(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000, p. 298). In this complexity of extremes,the world economy promotes the learning of certain kinds of knowledgesand the jettisoning of others. The contemporary south China coast hasbeen a region of riches, and the stories repeated about it have been par-tial accounts that reflect the decades of rapid accumulation that rico-cheted across the Pacific in the second half of the twentieth century.This book assembles regional knowledges that have not been reliablytold.

Several chapters of this book draw on material published (or aboutto be published) in different versions elsewhere. A short section in chap-ter 1 is taken from “Origins and evolution of a geographical idea:the macroregion in China,” Modern China, 28(1), 2002. The discussionof the Bukit China movement in chapter 5 was originally publishedin “The dead, place/space, and social activism: constructing the nation-scape in historic Melaka,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,15(5), 1997. A longer version of chapter 7 appeared as “ ‘Zone fever’,the arable land debate, and real estate speculation: China’s evolving landuse regime and its geographical contradictions,” Journal of ContemporaryChina, 10(28), 2001. Chapter 8 includes short sections from“Cosmopolitics and the maritime world city,” which appeared in TheGeographical Review, 89(2), 1999, and “The state, property development,and symbolic landscape in high rise Hong Kong,” Landscape Research,24(2), 1999. I thank the editors and referees of these pieces for theirhelpful comments.

Over five years the conceptualization and materialization of this bookspanned three colleges and universities in the USA, and work on threecontinents, from China and Southeast Asia, to the USA, and the UK,and I am especially grateful to the people and institutions who supportedthe project throughout. I owe a special debt to John Davey, who origi-nally contracted the book for Blackwell, and to my editor, Sarah Falkus,who has followed the manuscript to completion. Joanna Pyke, the edito-rial controller, Brian Johnson, who managed the graphics, and JohnTaylor, my copy editor, were especially helpful during the publication

xiv PREFACE

process. I am grateful to the reviewers for the press who encouraged aleaner and restructured manuscript, and especially to Larry Ma, whosedetailed suggestions were subtle, precise, and brilliantly insightful. JaneSinclair, who produced the line illustrations, has been more a collabora-tor than a cartographer and created a set of distinctive contemporaryillustrations to accompany the text. David Hooson read an earlier draftand staunchly supported my rewriting regional geography before it be-came fashionable again to do so, and Roland Greene read the manu-script from the perspective of a literary critic and encouraged developmentof the ideas about regionalism and geographical representations.

Diverse institutes and sources of funding supported research and writingrelated to the book: the Association of Asian Studies, the Centre forAdvanced Studies at the National University of Singapore, the ChiangChing-kuo Foundation, the Freeman Foundation, the Luce Founda-tion, the Nanyang Research Institute at Xiamen University, the Univer-sity of California Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine, theUniversity of Oregon Department of Geography, and the University ofOregon Humanities Institute. I am deeply grateful to many individualsin China, Hong Kong, and Malaysia who granted interviews, some re-peatedly, for material that appears in chapters 5, 7, and 8 of the book.

The process of producing this book has also been richer for conversa-tions and correspondences with many colleagues and friends, especiallyJohn Agnew, Tony Bebbington, Bill Barron, Karen DeBres, CynthiaBrokaw, Bob Burnett, Bob Cartier, Cezanne Cartier, Kam Wing Chan,Josephine Chua, Lily Chua, Stephen Durrant, Maram Epstein, MaryErbaugh, Cindy Fan, Susanne Freidberg, Katherine Gibson, BrynaGoodman, David S. G. Goodman, Julie Graham, Wang Gungwu, DavidHarvey, Laura Hess, Lisa Hopkinson, Richie Howitt, Denise Humphreys,Jean K. M. Hung, Nayna Jhaveri, John Paul Jones, Ron Knapp, DickKraus, Wendy Larson, Marcia Levenson, Alan Lew, Martin Lewis,Christine Loh, Li Si-Ming, George Lin, Larry Ma, Mary MacDonald,Janet Momsen, Dick Peet, Tim Oakes, Kim Rhody, Sang Sze-lan, Eliza-beth Sinn, Victor Sit, Helen Siu, Chris Smith, Paul Starrs, LauraSteinman, Wing-shing Tang, Greg Veeck, Billy Villet, Peter Walker,Kären Wigen, Anthony Yeh, You-tien Hsing, and Yue-man Yeung. TheChina Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers hasserved as a forum for initial presentation of some of the ideas in thebook, and I am thankful to Cindy Fan especially for encouraging mycentral participation in the group.

The seeds of this book were in a dissertation I wrote at Berkeley ingeography, when that department was experiencing the chaotic proc-esses of a paradigm shift. Only after I left that milieu could I producescholarship that transcended the political–intellectual boundaries that

PREFACE xv

otherwise were entrenched there at the time. I am grateful to the Berkeleygeography department for support over three degrees, and especially toDavid Hooson and Jay Vance, and also to Dick Walker. David Hoosonand Jay Vance were unstintingly supportive, and Dick Walker coachedme through postdoctoral academic politics. I am also appreciative toMichael Watts, for being the leading model of professionalism, AllanPred, whose boundary breaking theoretical work has been an inspira-tion, and Bob Reed, who steered me toward Southeast Asian studies. Ilearned to think critically about Chinese historiography from courseswith Frederic Wakeman in ways that have proved particularly sustainingover time.

The origins of this book more properly lie in a course I taught at VassarCollege in 1993–4, “China and the Chinese Overseas.” I am thankful tothe students of that class for apparently finding the subject matter aboutas interesting as I did. From Vassar I remember gratefully the collegialtyof Gabrielle Cody, Miriam Cohen, Harvey Flad, Donald Gillin, BrianGodfrey, Lucy Johnson, David Kennett, Jannay Morrow, and Cindy Wall,none of whom bear any responsibility for my failure to acculturate to theeast coast.

I sought to return to the west coast – from where Asia simply nevercould have been the “Far East” – to build an alternative basis for thekind of scholarship I wanted to produce. While I was at the University ofOregon, the university’s exchange with Xiamen University allowed meto spend the summer of 1995 in Xiamen, after a research period inSuzhou. The following summer I was at the Stanford Center for Chi-nese language study in Taipei, and the next summer at the NationalUniversity of Singapore. These experiences proved foundational in mywork to rethink the region, and I am grateful to the people who madethem possible, especially Stephen Durrant, Cynthia Brokaw, CuiGonghao, Liao Shaolian, Su Zixing, Kris Olds, and Peggy Teo. WendyLarson, Bryna Goodman, and Cynthia Brokaw formed the faculty re-search group at Oregon, “Gender in Historical and Transnational China,”which sustained my intellectual interests there. Cynthia Brokaw, BrynaGoodman, Stephen Durrant, and Dick Kraus read parts of the first draftof the manuscript and offered valuable suggestions. My graduate stu-dents in geography at Oregon provided inspiration and some researchassistance, especially Jeff Baldwin, Becky Mansfield, and JessicaRothenberg-Alami. My research assistant, Xingli Zhang, a doctoral stu-dent in international relations at the University of Southern California,scrupulously compiled the index.

In a variation on a well turned phrase, this project could only havecome together in Los Angeles: my warmest professional thanks are formy colleagues at the University of Southern California, Bernie Bauer,

xvi PREFACE

Michael Dear, Rod McKenzie, Stephanie Pincetl, Laura Pulido, DougSherman, Billie Shotlow, Chris Williamson, John Wilson, and JenniferWolch, who make the geography department an eminently collegial en-vironment, without equal in my experience. I am especially thankful toJennifer Wolch and Michael Dear for ensuring that I had the three re-sources at the basis of scholarly production – space, time, and money –and the best professional counsel. Jennifer and Michael also introducedme to Los Angeles in ways that have made me feel incredibly fortunate.Jennifer particularly makes the department an energized place of the high-est standards, and I have been grateful for her presence and mentorship.

The book is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Helen D. BollerCartier and Raymond E. Cartier, whose ends of life have marked thisproject like monuments to historical eras. After prolonged illnesses, myfather passed away before I left for my first journey to China and South-east Asia, and my mother passed away while I was in middle of the finalrevisions of the manuscript for the press. I have much to thank them for,in propelling me into the international world, thinking the world of me,and in their various activities and passions, for reminding me of the lim-its of scholarship.

NOTE

1 On this subject see, in addition to Harvey (2000), ideas of Masao Miyoshi(1998) and Bill Readings (1996).

NEGOTIATING GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGES 1

1

Negotiating Geographical Knowledges

As the last remaining socialist country with perhaps the fastest economicgrowth in the world today, China presents a challenge to critical thinkingabout globalization. It is imperative that the question of alternatives andother possibilities and potentialities be raised in any attempt at theorizingor conceptualizing the process of globalization. Globalization is generallyperceived as the result of the collapse of Soviet-style socialism, as well asthe unprecedented expansion of transnational capitalism. While avowedlyEurocentric in its hegemonic formations, globalization also sets up an in-dispensable structural context for analyzing what happens in the worldtoday. Therefore, globalization must be grasped as a dialectical process: itrefers at once to an idea, or an ideology – that is, capitalism disguised as atriumphant, universal globalism – and a concrete historical condition bywhich various ideas, including capitalism in its present guise, must bemeasured. China’s challenge to globalization can be perceived in bothsenses, first to global capitalism as an ideology and then to the “new worldorder,” or “world-system,” as an accepted reality. China has become in-creasingly integrated into the global economic system, yet retains its ideo-logical and political self-identity as a third-world, socialist country. WillChina offer an alternative?(Liu Kang, 1998, p. 164)

Globalization has emerged as a common term, yet is an unwieldy con-ceptual idea used in diverse contexts and to signal, or disguise, a varietyof different cultural, economic, and political positions. It is funda-mentally associated with the increasing internationalization of capitalistpractices, through firms and transnational corporate activities in the worldeconomy, backed and challenged by political forces, accompanied bycultural forms, and mediated by local resistances. In the contemporarygeographical imaginary, coastal south China is one area of the worldwhose economic processes and social relations, in dialectical formationwith the world economy, have contributed to contemporary under-standings about globalization. South China’s rise has also destabilizedthe national order of things on the Chinese domestic scene. These events,though, were not entirely new to the late twentieth century. For mostof its history, the south China coast has been an internationalized

2 NEGOTIATING GEOGRAPHICAL KNOWLEDGES

transboundary region, the primary zone of contact between the largerempire of which it has been a part and the world economy. It has alsobeen a region of social activism and revolution. Despite the totalizingqualities of some globalization narratives, regions, like coastal south China,continue to be distinctive in particular ways. The focus of this analysis isthat basic geographical problem – the tension between the forces of glo-balization and the production of local and regional difference.

The book that follows has had several points of intellectual origin.One of those points was the recognition that much of post-Second WorldWar scholarship about the south China coast, and especially about theperiod of the nineteenth century, when China faced Western demandsfor free trade (how much has changed in a century?), bore all the marksof Cold War era politicized debate. In the 1990s the political rhetoric ofthe Cold War era was refashioned into discourses of neoliberalism, whichcontinue to promote Western political economic goals in new “glo-balized” ways. Another pivotal concern was the set of methodologicaldisjunctures between research paradigms in China area studies and con-temporary theoretical approaches in geography and related fields, andresulting gaps in knowledge about regional formation in China. Theinterrogation of prevailing paradigms and the formation of other modesof explanation have been in order. The most important concern wasunderstanding that most of the material processes that constitute a re-gional formation in coastal south China coast are transboundary,transnational, and, in a few significant ways, simultaneouslytranshistorical in nature. Coming to terms with these perspectives meantthat the analysis had to treat regional space as a set of dynamic, scaledprocesses, which would frame a globalizing regional formation in rela-tion to the territorial coherence of the dynastic era and twentieth-cen-tury state-making project in China. What follows is a course ofunbounding south China, to raise complex questions about the impli-cations of historical geographies for understanding contemporary re-gional formations, and their imaginations; how regional formations,materially and discursively, are responses to other territorial transfor-mations and processes of globalization; the ways in which regional for-mations emerge in contexts of economic restructuring; whetherarticulating regional formations may lead beyond the problems of statistparadigms and nationalisms; and how in a transhistorical maritime re-gion, oceans connect rather than divide.

This chapter introduces these issues to set forth larger-scale contextsof understanding China in the contemporary world order, and also tobegin to establish how what we may know about a country and its re-gions are regularly partial and shifting accounts of more complex pro-cesses. My strategy is to place an unfolding geography about south China


in the history of its scholarship, and at the same time, to call into ques-tion some of the ways in which that scholarship has been written. This isa critical and contexualist approach, which combines theoreticalorientations with understandings of regional realities, and seeks to medi-ate between ideas about the conceptual space of flows in transboundaryspace economies, located geographies of production and exchange, andcultural spheres of agency and symbolic meaning. The first half of thebook concerns historical geographies of the south China coast and theircontested representations, in the sense of what Felix Driver (1992, p.35) has assessed less as “a prop for the present,” and more as a means ofarticulating between geographical realities and understandings of the past,and their conditions and representations in the present. Instead of a lin-ear accounting of the regional past, the historical analysis recalls howhistory matters in situated and lived geographies – that is, explorationsat the intersection of place/space, time, narrative, and body – and indoing so substitutes for progressivist history a regional geography formedof diverse places and landscapes of disruption and discontinuity. Thesegeographical reorientations establish the means for understanding causalrelations at the basis of many questions about the contemporary regionalformation, the rise of the south China coast under reform. The nextsections begin with an empirical account of contemporary regional trans-formation, but with the recognition that the apparently factual descrip-tion is a partial view of what must be assessed in a broader and historicizedtheoretical analysis.

Region of Reform

The south China coast erupted on the world economic map in the finalquarter of the twentieth century, compelling widespread interest in spe-cial economic zones, capital flows, the global shift in low-wage manufac-turing industries, Chinese overseas business networks, and the rise ofChina as a potential economic superpower. The process of economicreform was formally initiated at the Third Plenum of the Eleventh PartyCongress Central Committee in Beijing in December 1978 and has un-folded incrementally in diverse market-oriented economic policies. Chi-na’s economic transformation has been wide-ranging and complex, andwhile central state policy has appeared to drive reform, innovative eco-nomic practices undertaken by local and regional officials have also sub-stantially led reform initiatives.1

The geographical foundation of the export-oriented sector of reformwas the “open policy” and its system of special economic zones, opencities, and open development regions, all established by the state to


concentrate foreign investment and export-oriented manufacturing incoastal China. China’s leadership established the four original specialeconomic zones (SEZs) in Guangdong and Fujian provinces, which arethe two homeland provinces of the majority of Chinese overseas. At thetime of their selection, the first four SEZs were not important locationsin China’s existing administrative system, but were strategically linkedto historic trading economies or Chinese overseas communities, or both.Two of the cities, Shantou and Xiamen, are centers of historic trade andemigration and had also been open ports under the treaty system.2 Theother two cities, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, were border frontiers with HongKong and Macao, respectively. The geographic specificity of reform wovethe economies of Hong Kong and Macao into Guangdong province fif-teen to twenty years ahead of the scheduled repatriation of the two colo-nies. Through the 1980s, economic relations between Hong Kong,Taiwan, and the coastal zones of Guangdong and Fujian provinces be-came so closely tied that the greater part of Hong Kong’s former manu-facturing industry relocated to Guangdong, and the majority of externalinvestment in Fujian had come from Taiwan (Luo and Howe, 1993). By1997, Hong Kong had already served as the major source and conduit ofcapital and manufacturing expertise for southern China.

The successful establishment of the four SEZs led to a series of specialopen cities and development zones which enlarged the spatial scope ofreform. As Dali Yang (1997, p. 30) has assessed, “These special zonesgrew at a torrid pace and prompted Deng Xiaoping to urge . . . that morecoastal cities be given various special policies.” In 1984, Beijing an-nounced the opening of fourteen coastal port cities to trade and foreigninvestment. As economic activity grew beyond the special zones, the statekept pace by designating open counties and open regions. In 1985, thestate established three open economic regions, which formed areas ofconcentrated economic transformation: the Zhujiang delta in Guangdong,the Minnan delta region in southern Fujian, and the Yangzi delta regionencompassing Shanghai and its hinterland in the Su’nan area of Jiangsuprovince (map 1.1). As a result of this geography of export-oriented re-form, Guangdong and Fujian rapidly changed places in the hierarchy ofprovincial significance, from middling and low economic importance,respectively, to become the first provinces in China under reform to re-ceive foreign investment.3 In 1988, the State Council named HainanIsland the fifth SEZ and the thirty-first province of China, and declaredall coastal provinces open to foreign investment. In 1990, the State Coun-cil finally granted Shanghai its own special zone, the gargantuan 350km2 Pudong New Area across the Huangpu River from central Shang-hai. The geographical nature of reform put the south China coast atthe center of domestic economic planning for the first time in Chinese


Map 1.1 Coastal areas opened to foreign investment, 1996Source: Zhongguo duiwai jingji maoyi nianjian (1996/7); line work by Jane Sinclair.


history. In the process, the south coast between Shanghai and Hainantransformed from a relatively peripheral Chinese region into a series ofport city-based boom towns tied to the world economy. The state con-tinued to open coastal counties to foreign investment so that by the mid-dle of the 1990s open areas formed a continuous sub-provincial opencoastal zone. As the SEZs in Guangdong and Fujian shed their experi-mental status, cities and provinces across China, especially in the inte-rior, began to press the central government for their own specialdevelopment privileges.4

From social science perspectives on world economic activity, the rise ofthe south China coast has appeared as evidence about how foreign invest-ment and export-oriented development can turn a once remote maritimefrontier into a magnetic center of regional change. The World Bank’s in-fluential publication The East Asian Miracle confirmed the role of SEZs inChina’s new internationalized economy: “An export-push strategy has beencentral to China’s rapid development since the government opened theeconomy to the outside world in 1978. Mechanisms have included ex-port-oriented special economic zones (SEZs) and open cities; export in-centives for domestic enterprises and foreign investors in targeted sectors,and for some firms, mandatory export targets. Success has been spectacu-lar: in five years, exports grew nearly tenfold to $72 billion in 1991”(Panagariya, in World Bank, 1993, p. 144). Enough literature in the samevein has been published on this subject to stock a small library.

Representing South China

On the world scale, the transformation of the largest central plannedeconomy into a market economy – in China’s terms, a socialist marketeconomy with Chinese characteristics – has challenged other countriesand global economic institutions to reconceptualize China’s role in theworld order. Inside China, the world’s largest national population neg-otiates yet another massive rupture in the organization of production,consumption, and daily life. The scale and rapidity of economic trans-formation in China have been staggering. Compared to cataclysms inChina’s twentieth century, understanding China in the new millenniumis a relatively reasonable project, since information about China’s changingcondition is now widely available. Yet in the intensive interest to publishmaterials about China’s transformation as rapidly as it has unfolded,accounts of the reform experience have often lacked contextual and space–time dimensions and have typically disregarded relevant geographies andregional histories. The goal here is to examine some of the scholarlyperspectives on rapid growth in south China as an exercise in repre-


sentations, and to clear the ideological ground in order to build a differ-ent kind of account of the transboundary region. Critical assessment oftwo reform era representations of China, the SEZ “experiment” and the“miracle”economy approach, suggest ways of seeing beyond normativepolitical economic discourses.

Special zone “experiment” meets “miracle” development

Deng Xiaoping, recently emerged from a power struggle to capture theleadership of the Communist Party in the wake of the death of formerChairman Mao Zedong, introduced the geographical component ofChina’s export-oriented reforms as an “experiment.” In 1979, a Com-munist Party document named Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shantou andXiamen “experimental special economic zones” (Selected Works of DengXiaoping, 1984, p. 416, n.113). The language eased in the new policiesand helped quiet opponents of reform.5 Yet after just months of SEZimplementation, notions of experimentation faded as realities of neweconomic activity began to result in completely new geographies of pro-duction and accumulation, and consequent new geometries of power.Deng Xiaoping promoted the success of the SEZ experiment by highlypublicized site visits. In 1984, during a tour of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, andXiamen, Deng encouraged the use of international capital and expertise,and invited Chinese overseas investment. In 1992, at a critical juncturein the second decade of the reform era, after a period of high inflationfollowing the Tiananmen crisis, Deng purposefully conducted anothersouthern tour of the SEZs and exhorted officials to stay the course ofreform and intensify rapid growth. As the new economic practices takingplace in SEZs were sanctioned at the highest levels, they became geo-graphical symbols of nationalist reform ideology (Crane, 1996). Whatwas once SEZ “exceptionalism” became normative practice, as citiesand towns across China implemented the special zone concept, oftenwithout official permission.

The success of the reform program has typically been measured interms of economic growth. From 1979 to 1999, China’s economy grewat an average annual rate of 9.7 percent. In the first decade of reform,China’s economy grew at an average annual rate of 9 percent. China’seconomy slowed especially from 1989 to 1991, and began to improveagain after 1992. From 1993 to 1997, China’s economy again main-tained a relatively high growth rate around 9 percent. Even in 1998 and1999, after the economic downturn in the Asian region, the annual growthrate maintained between 7 and 8 percent (ZGTJNJ, 2000). Through-out, the high national growth rate was achieved by higher than average


growth rates in the southern coastal provinces, especially in the first dec-ade of reform. Coastal provinces regularly led the country with double-digit growth rates, and at its peaks in Guangdong, in 1985 and 1992, therate was as high as over 20 percent per annum (ZGTJNJ, 1986, 1993).But the use of aggregate economic figures abstracts and homogenizesspace, as well as a vast array of diverse and transforming conditions un-der reform. Economic accounting measures, even as they record andlegitimize economic policies, absorb and mask particular kinds of differ-ences in the economic landscape. Separated from historical and geo-graphical context, these contemporary measures of China’s economicgrowth have presented a new China as another “miracle” economy.

The miracle economy position originated in economic analyses aboutHong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea, during the periodfrom the 1970s to 1997, and was a collective product of writings bysocial scientists, the World Bank, and the media, in their attempts toforge general explanations for high-growth economic conditions in Asia.6

These four Asian economies, variously termed the NIEs (newly indus-trialized economies), the NICs (newly industrialized countries), the FourTigers, or the Four Dragons, became in certain ways models for China’sexport-oriented economy.7 The miracle position has been intensivelydebated, and was only fundamentally sidelined by the events of the so-called Asian financial crisis that set off in Thailand in 1997. Proponentsof the miracle position have attributed rapid regional growth in Asia to aset of economic policies associated with the neoliberal regime, includingprivatization and free market policies, and a diminished role of the state.But Robert Wade (1990, 1993a, b) and other regional specialists havecautioned against the totalizing quality of the miracle position, whichhas not considered differences among Asian countries, and the fact thatacross Asia the state has actively intervened in economic planning andarticulated industrial policy. Nevertheless, part economic theory, partideological platform, perspectives derived from the neoliberal regime,especially in its US-based worldview, have been powerful determinantsof which research topics scholars privilege and what conclusions theyfind.

The miracle account would also understand China’s decision to opento the world economy as evidence of the failures of communism, theglobal success of Western economic systems, and a vindication of theentire Cold War project. But the leading Asian account of China’s policyshift reflects Chinese leaders’ recognition of rapid development on non-Western terms in the NIEs, and while on initial state visits in the regionafter 1976 (Shirk, 1994; Yabuki, 1995). The four NIEs share with Chinaa Confucian cultural base, and Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore areall majority Chinese populations. In China’s enduring historic perspec-


tive, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore are peripheral islands of Chi-nese immigrants that developed well beyond the conditions of the moth-erland, a frank upset to the ideological remnants of the Chinese worldorder. In reform planning, China adapted policies of the NIEs and in-vigorated these historic connections to tap capital flows for SEZ devel-opment. Thus the Asian account of China’s economic transformationunderstands a regional cultural economy in which establishing the SEZswas one event in the articulation of a regionally based “Confucian capi-talism,” an alternative, albeit in many ways a discursive one, to the he-gemony of Western forms. At this juncture we would do well to keep inmind Arjun Appadurai’s (2000, p. 13) recognition that “actors in differ-ent regions now have elaborate interests and capabilities in constructingworld pictures whose very interaction affects global processes. Thus theworld may consist of regions (seen processurally), but regions also ima-gine their own worlds.”

Area studies debates

The disjunctures suggested by these different methodological approacheshave also played out in Asian area studies fields. By contrast to economisticapproaches, organizations of knowledge generated in area studies arenashave more dependably maintained historical and cultural perspectives.They have also maintained greater distance from prevailing theory indisciplinary fields, and, in the need to evolve culturally appropriate ap-proaches, have tended to question methods derived from the Westernsocietal experience. In China area studies, research on the arrival of theWest, especially the period of the nineteenth century when Europeanpowers forced China into a “semi-colonial” status, necessarily piercedthe nation-state boundaries of the area studies paradigm and engendereda first significant wave of transnational research. The historiography ofthis period has stirred some of the field’s most contentious debates. Thefollowing sections assess the area studies debates through changes in theChina field to establish how the globalization of knowledge is pressingscholars to rethink their approaches to international research.

China’s “response to the West”

For China scholars concerned with the relationship between China andthe West, John King Fairbank’s account of foreign trade under the treat-ies established a research paradigm that would endure for two decadesafter its initial appearance in the 1950s: what was the nature of China’s


“response to the West” (see Teng and Fairbank, 1954)? This themeinfluenced many scholars in the middle decades of the twentieth cen-tury, including Rhoads Murphey, who was among the final doctoral stu-dents in geography at Harvard University.8 Murphey (1953, 1970)focused on the conditions of Shanghai and general questions about theroles and impacts of the “treaty ports” in China. The response to theWest perspective treated open ports as nodes of Western practices, andassessed how Chinese society reacted to Western forms of knowledge,economic activities, technology applications, and religious beliefs. Basedon such perspectives, the treaty port appeared to have begun its exist-ence in the nineteenth century as a unique type of city. As Paul Cohen(1984, p. 9) evaluated the “response to the West” perspective, “Thisconceptual framework rested on the assumption that, for much of thenineteenth century, the confrontation with the West was the most sig-nificant influence on events in China.” In the early 1970s China scholarsbegan to openly question these Western-oriented approaches, and JosephEsherick (1972) challenged the Fairbank school for its tendency to con-strue China as a nation that reacted to Western policies and institutions.Esherick renamed this preoccupation with China’s response to the Westthe “impact-response” school of Chinese historiography. Against thisbackdrop, Cohen (1984) called for a “China-centered” view of Chinesehistory. Partly as a result of these shifts in historiographic method, Chinascholarship has moved toward localized studies of social and economichistory.9 These debates, however, did not foreground the complexitiesin China area studies scholarship engendered by China’s opening to theworld economy.

In the face of rapid regional development and similarly intensive needsto account for it, few social scientists have paused to consider largerepistemological questions about how to understand Asian politicaleconomy. In other terms, what Edward Said’s Orientalism achieved forthe humanities, in demonstrating how Western writers constructed par-tial and problematic ideas about Asia, has not substantially influencedsocial scientific analysis. One alternative reading has emerged from AndréGunder Frank (1998) in a new account of world economic history. Con-trary to widely accepted views of European economic hegemony fromthe time of the Renaissance to the middle of the twentieth century, Frankhas argued that the Asian region, with China at its center, really domi-nated the evolving world economy until less than two centuries ago. Bythis account, only in the early nineteenth century did China cede centralworld economic position to Europe and the West. The gross fallacyin scholarly analysis that led to the misunderstanding of Asia’s positionin world history, according to Frank, has been widespread dependenceon Western theory and philosophy. Scholarly analysis based in Western


European social thought, from all points on the political spectrum – the“Marx–Weber” complex – has constructed a hegemonic world view ofWestern exceptionalism, based on assumed superiority of “rationality,institutions, entrepreneurship, technology, geniality, in a word – race”(Frank, 1998, pp. 4, 20). Frank’s position underscores the socially con-structed bias obtainable in Western accounts, in which race as “white-ness” is practically synonymous with Western society, however rarelythe subject is foregrounded. According to this argument, Europe’s earlymodern position in the world economy is better understood as havingtapped into accumulation strategies of existing Asian markets and trade,rather than having developed them. On these terms, the rise of Asianregional economic power in the late twentieth century represents a re-turn to historical conditions rather than a sea change.

The critiques mounted by both Cohen and Frank share a certain an-tipathy toward Western political and economic theory. Yet as Arif Dirlik(1996) has pointed out, the complication of pledging allegiance to aChina-centered approach has denied the significance of approaches origi-nating in the West and appropriately applied or adapted in the Chineseand larger regional contexts. For example, the concept of modernizationhas taken on new contexts and meanings as deployed by the state andthe intelligentsia in China and the NIEs. Rapid economic growth in Asiapartially undid the Western teleological narrative of modernization theory,and led to ideas about different cultures of capitalism, Chinese capital-ism, and Confucian capitalism in “Greater China.” While some Chinascholars called for an approbation of the application of Western modelsand Western world views to China, their views, once appropriate in leadingthe paradigm shift from imperialist orientations to less ethnocentric schol-arship, have been in part swamped by forces of intellectual globalization,in which the flow of ideas represents not one point of origin, linear flow,and singular interpretation, but mutual influence, and new confidencesabout reinterpretations to suit specific cultural and regional circumstances.In the contemporary context, Chinese adaptation of once Western mod-els has been the very result of the economic reforms that propelled Chinainto the world economy after 1978.

Restructuring area studies

In its reflection of the Cold War world, area studies research served toorganize knowledge about countries and continents for international se-curity analysis. On the other hand, area studies has been the professionalarena of internationalists who have eschewed Western models andpursued area studies on culturally appropriate terms. This latter point


creates its own problems on the intellectual high ground of theory. BruceCumings (1997b, p. 8), an active critic of the area studies debates, wroteabout Asian area studies as “an opera-bouffe which goes as follows:China (or Japan, etc.) is an ‘area’. Area studies, as we all know, are a-theoretical. Therefore ‘area studies’ should be abolished – except forthat ‘area’ known as America, which is far too idiosyncratic and com-plex to yield to abstract theory, and, of course, no foreigner can reallyunderstand it either.”10 The conventions of area studies practice havetended to keep fields circumscribed, organized around Asia, Africa, LatinAmerica, and so on, and, in distancing from theoretical approaches,distinct from the disciplines and scholarly debates over globalization.By contrast, scholars based in disciplinary perspectives have tendedto emphasize current method and theory over complex area analysis.Similarly, theorizing globalization has arguably been dominated byscholars who do not reliably maintain comparative area expertise (seeFeatherstone, 1990; Jameson and Miyoshi, 1998). The area studies–theory divide is also reflected in epistemological divisions between na-tional and transnational positions. The organization of area studiesresearch in the national “container” of the nation-state prevailed throughmost of the twentieth century. As Vincente Rafael (1994, p. 91) haswritten, “by privileging the nation-state as the elementary unit of analy-sis, area studies conceives ‘areas’ as if they were the natural – or at leastthe historically necessary – formations for the containment of differ-ences within and between cultures.” The contemporary emergence ofresearch on transnational processes has broken down the traditionalspatial biases of area studies, but has not dependably bridged dividesbetween national and transnational approaches.

In addition to the area studies–theory divide, area studies has alsobeen plagued by the epistemological separation of classical from mod-ern research fields, so that many area specialists divide regional historyinto distinct “classical” and “modern” periods of study. A related topi-cal division is the separation of cultural from economic subjects. Suchhistorical divisions have the effect of organizing academic work by as-signing the classical period and cultural subjects to the humanities, andthe modern era and economic subjects to the social sciences. This ob-servation holds true for the majority of economic analyses of China’sreform era, which regularly do not consider cultural contexts, or rel-evant events of the Maoist era, the rest of the twentieth century, theQing dynasty, or any other period. This particular (dis)organization ofknowledge reflects the problems of the methodological divide betweenthe humanities and social sciences in the academy, arguably undergirdedby the legacy of modernization theory (Rostow, 1960). Modernizationtheory proposed a linear trajectory of societal organization from tradi-

Carolyn Cartier - download.e-bookshelf.de · xii PREFACE individuals and within cultural groups, in...

Documents

Transcript of Carolyn Cartier - download.e-bookshelf.de · xii PREFACE individuals and within cultural groups, in...