Changing Discourses in China Geography: A Narrative Evaluation

Existing literature on the status of the field of China geography has been focused either on what has been written or on the internal advancement of knowledge in the field, without considering its relationship to the broader social context and academic environment. In this study I adopt a contextual approach to analyzing two interrelated issues: (1) the changing position held by China geography in the grand geographic discipline; and (2) the evolution of discourses formulated by China geographers as a result of interactions with the broader academic environment. A systematic survey of research papers published in leading international journals has placed China geography in a peripheral position, with a volume of research output disproportionate to the size and importance of the nation. Nevertheless, several encouraging trends are observed, including the dramatic growth of research output since the 1990s and the broadening of the field beyond physical geography to encompass human geography and urban studies. A narrative investigation of the professional experience of a leading China geographer reveals a process of discourse (re)construction conditioned by both the changing political economy of China and the shifting emphases in the geographic discipline. Four periods of discourse formation are identified in this case study, namely the conception of the Chinese city as the center of change in the 1970s, interpretation of the uniqueness of Chinese urbanism in the 1980s, modeling of spontaneous town-based urbanization and regional development in the 1990s, and, most recently, the use of the notions of space, place, and transnationalism to construct the Chinese diaspora as a geographic system. Discourse formation in China geography can be understood as the consequence both of the rapidly changing material conditions in China and of discursive practices in the geographic discipline. Much needs to be done by China geographers to go beyond the empirical arena of area studies and become more actively engaged in the ongoing theoretical debates in the mainstream of geography and China studies.