Grounding China's global engagements: narratives, spatial forms, and coalitional state capitalism.

This Comment takes the nine contributions in the Eurasian Geography and Economics Special Issue as a collective invitation to reflect on how we understand China's global engagements. Instead of treating the so-called "Global China" as a coherent, central Chinese state project radiating outward, the...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Publicado en:Eurasian Geography & Economics Vol. 67; no. 4/5; pp. 632 - 647
Autor principal: Fei, Ding
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Taylor & Francis Ltd Jun/Jul2026
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Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
Descripción
Sumario:This Comment takes the nine contributions in the Eurasian Geography and Economics Special Issue as a collective invitation to reflect on how we understand China's global engagements. Instead of treating the so-called "Global China" as a coherent, central Chinese state project radiating outward, the articles approach it as a constellation of situated, multi-scalar practices whose meanings and material effects emerge through uneven encounters among discourses, infrastructures, states, firms, and local political economic processes. Three cross‑cutting themes have emerged. First, narratives as infrastructure attends to the production, reworking, and contestation of narratives about China, which demands a multi-lingual, multi-scalar approach to understanding how hegemonic storylines are affirmed, appropriated, or fractured across sites. Second, spatial forms as political technologies explores how material interventions of China, such as corridors, special economic zones, and investment flows, become territorial, anticipatory, and relational tools that fix authority in space, script future development trajectories, and reconfigure power relations across scales. Third, coalitional state capitalism unpacks state-capital relations as the ongoing construction of coalition through inter-governmental negotiations over trade, finance, and economic cooperation, inter‑firm dynamics of hierarchy, complementarity, and competition, and project‑level frictions over issues of land, labor, and equity. The Comment concludes by calling for comparative, grounded, and mixed‑method research to capture the uneven, evolving, and often contradictory outcomes of China's global engagements.