ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses critical geography in China. There is a consensus in the literature that critical geography had evolved from the West in the early 1970s, fuelled on the one hand by student movements, and, on the other, by critical inquiry in social science as informed by Marx and others. Critical geography is centrally concerned with exposing the power relations and socio-spatial processes that (re)produce inequalities between people and places, including a critique of the mainstream geography discipline and the academic institutions and their rules, and advocating transformative praxis (e.g., Best, 2009; Blomley, 2006). That being the general consensus, Timár (2004, 535) once argued from the Hungarian perspective that there is hegemony even within critical geography itself, with the allegation of “Western (basically Anglo-American) theories – Eastern empirical studies”. While she refers to the ideological East (within the traditional Cold War East-West divide), I would argue that it is equally true for the geographical East (in the global sense). As in Asian area studies in general (e.g., Dutton, 2005; Goss and Wesley-Smith, 2010), there is a tendency to treat China and other Asian countries as empirical cases to verify or refute theories or models developed in the West (Savage, 2003, 71). This problem cannot easily be rectified by claims that critical geography takes plural forms in many different spaces and places, as critical geographies so understood still underscore the fact that there is only one centre – the West – with one source of dynamics. I argue that developments of critical geography in China should not be understood as mere variegated critical geographies of the West (Brenner et al., 2010). Instead, critical geography in China has its own historical trajectory, and should be investigated within its own historical geography.
