ABSTRACT
The global capitalism into which coastal China is increasingly integrated is characterized by what David Harvey calls “flexible strategies of accumulation,” which have brought into play a new set of spatial-temporal practices. Over the past few decades, innovations in transportation and telecommunication have further overcome traditional spatial boundaries, thus bringing about a new round of “time-space compression” in the flows of capital, people, commerce, and images (Harvey 1990, 284-306; Appadurai 1990; Nonini 1993, 63-65). Fredric Jameson notes that one of the major characteristics of “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is the domination of spatial images and categories in everyday experience (Jameson 1984, 64). Lefebvre further distinguished three interrelated and mutually conditioned aspects of spatial practices-the experienced, the perceived, and the imagined (Lefebvre 1991).5
