New geographies of development: grounding China’s global integration

Abstract

The introduction to this themed issue, ‘New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration’, contributes to ongoing reconceptualization of research approaches to China’s global integration and situates the contributions of the issue within the growing body of multiscalar and ethnographic research on the subject. Grounded studies (1) complexify the actors involved in China’s global integration to focus on those who work in a variety of (un)intentional ways to attract, implement, sustain and resist specific initiatives that constitute China’s overseas activities; (2) revise fixed notions of core and periphery, especially with respect to the origins, flows and destinations of capital, power and goods emanating from China’s metropolises; (3) and rescale the state, capitaland elite interests to identify the key scalar moments at which big policy ideas are transformed into new development geographies. This introduction and the papers in the issue focus specifically on those actions and actors whose work is key to extending the natural resource hinterlands of China, China’s firms and specific subnational interests in partner states to the Americas, Africa and Eurasia under the policy banners of the ‘Go Out strategy’, the ‘Great Western Development Plan’ and the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’.