ABSTRACT
What are the lessons from this book in terms of thinking about China? Perhaps just as important is what are China’s lessons for how we might more generally think about both economic life and urban change? We have argued in this book that some of the contours of mainstream debates about China are unhelpful, anachronistic or redundant. At the heart of the book is an argument that the current processes of modernisation in China fundamentally change the workings of capitalism and consequently how we will come to think of the relationship between economy and society in the twenty-first century. In making sense of China Constructing Capitalism we are focusing on the diverse social and economic changes of today’s China but in doing so argue that we need to rethink the basic categories of analysis and thought across the social sciences. The significance of patterns of relationality, situated propensity and ‘empiricist’ sociality and incremental reform we see in today’s China will speak to the socio-economics of the West’s future as well as the developmental trajectories of the globe.
