The expansion of China’s market margins: Navigating contingencies and conjunctures

Abstract

In this exchange piece, I engage with Weber’s critical analysis, destabilizing the ideological dichotomy of the big bang approach versus experimental gradualism. I suggest that China’s past decades of conspicuous economic success are attributed to the political tactics of navigating the variegated sociospatial contingencies, as well as the conjunctures of new rounds of spatial division of labor globally in the 1980s. In sum, I point to the role of the arts of governmentality in reconfiguring domestic economic geography to sustain and facilitate the expansion of market margins for the growth of state power.