Translocal China: Linkages, Identities and the Re-imagining of Space

In recent decades, China has experienced an explosion of new types of mobility. Translocal China details how this mobility affects different localities and identities across China. Much previous scholarship has focused on the rapid increase in migration within China, particularly that of rural labourers moving to the booming coastal cities. This volume, however, assembles a broader array of mobilities, including finance capital, print and visual media, disease, tourists, brides, and entrepreneurs, as well as migrant workers. The contributors suggest that identities and other ties in contemporary China have not been simply uprooted from their localized cultural foundations to float free in the rapidly urbanizing reform era. Rather, people and institutions have come to be translocal, that is, to belong to more than one locality simultaneously. The volume breaks new theoretical ground by bringing together the concepts of place, space, and scale to bear on China's current transformations.