Dialogues in Human Geography typically employs an anchor article-and-response format designed for academic, critical, and comparative debate. This includes a long-form research article, followed by several peer-reviewed commentaries, and a final response from the original author(s). Click here for our anchor article, “Six paths of Global China: A genealogy of a contested geographical imaginary,” and its responses are below.
Response articles
Abstract
‘Global China’ has emerged as a shorthand for China's relationship to the global, but its axiomatic uses disguise considerable complexity. This article troubles self-evident uses and tidy categorizations of Global China by approaching it as an emergent, pluralistic geographical imaginary warranting critical analysis. Employing a genealogical approach that privileges indeterminacy and inconsistency over linearity and singularity, we draw on wide-ranging sources to reveal the contested, contextual, and contradictory uses of Global China in the contemporary moment. Our analysis identifies six ‘paths’ of Global China: Other, Integration, Bridge, Status, Threat, and Alternative. Each path facilitates distinct yet interlinked claims about the relationship between China and the global, creating a web of interrelations that enables ‘Global China’ to encompass a range of world-making and meaning-making projects – from south-south solidarity and people-to-people connections to superpower rivalry and geoeconomic competition. The fluidity and open-endedness of Global China make it a site of contestation where competing visions clash and coalesce – but also a site of possibility. We conclude by discussing how scholars can use and build on the identified paths to engage Global Chinas in practice – and perhaps to envision and enact additional paths of Global China as well.
The lingering exceptionalism of global China
by Tim Oakes
In response to DiCarlo and DeBoom's recent article ‘Six paths of Global China’, this commentary argues that the power of the ‘global China’ idea derives from the baggage of lingering exceptionalism that it continues to carry within it. While global China has been embraced by many scholars as a move away from the methodological nationalism, othering, and exceptionalism that has characterized much of the China studies field, the wide-ranging global China discourse has instead breathed new life into exceptionalist views of China. Because of this, we may do well to abandon the term altogether.Unsettling global China
by Jessica DiCarlo and Meredith DeBoom
This response reflects on four commentaries that engage our article on the six paths of Global China. The commentators’ interventions call on us to interrogate Global China's entanglements with (racial) capitalism, resist exceptionalism, foreground multiplicity and ambiguity, and attend to the everyday, embodied, and relational. Our response builds with these insights to illustrate how the structural logics of capitalism, the production of difference, and quotidian encounters jointly manifest through Global China and to consider how scholars shape and are shaped by its (mis)uses. We conclude that the task is not to resolve the tensions of Global China but to engage them, embracing ambiguity as an analytic and ethical stance.Global China as positionality: A reflexive account from a Chinese scholar in Africa
by Zhengli Huang
This commentary reflects on ‘Global China’ as a question of positionality by drawing from the author's experience as a Chinese scholar conducting fieldwork in Africa. Moving beyond state-centric or geopolitical framings, I consider how Chinese researchers navigate identity, essentialism, and knowledge production within a global academic system still shaped by binary logics – such as East/West, North/South, insider/outsider. I propose that Global China is not only a methodological object or strategy but a lived condition and reflexive space of scholarly engagement. I call for a critical reading of Global China as a site of in-betweenness – an ambiguous yet productive space for epistemic negotiation.
Theorizing Global China in situ
by Mingwei Huang
This commentary reflects on Jessica DiCarlo and Meredith DeBoom's insightful essay ‘Six Paths of Global China’ through my ethnographic work on Chinese capitalist projects in Johannesburg, South Africa. I consider the theoretical and methodological import of their work for scholars of Global China and the Global South, and what ‘integration’ might mean for situating Global China within geographies of racial capitalism.Unbinding Global China:
Fieldnotes from a West African fishing port
by Hang Zhou
This commentary engages with DiCarlo and DeBoom's unveiling of ‘Global China’ as a contested concept by drawing on my field research on China's maritime engagements in West Africa. While concurring with the need to interrogate this geographical imaginary, I caution against this field's lingering tendencies of exceptionalization and territorial fixation, and probe into how these tendencies might risk confining our understanding of the differently situated actors and relations that constitute maritime ‘Global China’.