Urban China through the lens of neoliberalism: Is a conceptual twist enough?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neoliberalism as a hegemonic global ideology and framework of governance has been the subject of extensive critical analyses in geography and urban studies. Despite the conceptual difficulties involved, a growing number of scholars have attempted to apply this critical discourse to China. In this commentary, we critically interrogate the urban China literature that deploys the neoliberal lens, mostly authored by scholars outside China, and we raise the fundamental question as to whether this discourse can ever capture the central stories or trajectories of China’s urban transformation. We examine the interpretations of China’s urban land property market, urban inequality and its spatial manifestation, and the emerging urban governmentality – the areas in which neoliberalism has been most often invoked – to highlight the utility and limitations of a neoliberal treatment of China. We argue that the neoliberal representation of China’s urban (re)development, with its preoccupation with capital and class interests, is unable to effectively capture the distinctive nature of entanglement of capital, state and society in China, and thus obscures the driving role and the competing rationalities of the authoritarian state, and the rapid reconfiguration of urban society. By citing examples of recent urban China research, we show that the neoliberalism framework, even in its ‘variegated’ or ‘assemblage’ versions, tends to trap China’s analysis within a frame of reference comfortable to Western researchers, and ultimately hinders the development of diversified, potentially more fruitful inquiries of the urban world.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it