Reassessing Human Geography

in the Wake of China’s Rise

Alexander B. Murphy1

Abstract: A prominent human geographer, introducing a series of papers in a Eurasian

­Geography and Economics mini-symposium devoted to China’s emergence, surveys the
­myriad global impacts of that country’s rapid recent rise. The topics covered include the
economic (i.e., rapid growth in the size of China’s economy, preeminence as an exporter of
manufactured goods, and role as a major natural resource consumer, overseas investor, and
purchaser of U.S. debt obligations), the geopolitical (increasing involvement in international
organizations, rising assertiveness in defense of territorial claims), and the environmental
(e.g., carbon footprint, accelerated urbanization, dam building), as well as the implications
of China’s rise for the study of geography and development. He argues that assessment of
the consequences of the country’s emergence should not be based on simple extrapolation
of present trends, but must take into account a number of looming questions relating to the
competitiveness of China’s manufacturing labor force (vis-à-vis other developing countries),
capacity to innovate (as well as imitate), and transformative societal impacts of moderniza-
tion and development. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: F020, F500,
O180. 26 references. Key words: China, human geography, globalization, geopolitics, migra-
tion, cultural geography, neoliberalism.

O n August 15, 2010, China officially surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest
­economy (Barboza, 2010). There are, of course, many different ways of assessing and
comparing economic importance, but by almost any measure China is now one of the world’s
most influential economic players. Moreover, China has come to assume that role with remark-
able—indeed unprecedented—speed. Just three decades ago China’s economy was smaller
than Spain’s—a country with one-thirtieth of China’s population and one-­twentieth of its land
area. Yet the scale and influence of China’s economic might is now impossible to ignore. With
thousands of Chinese companies producing for the global market, China is the world’s big-
gest exporter, putting the country in a position to influence the price of a wide ­array of major
commodities (Chou et al., 2009). At the same time, China’s need for energy and raw materi-
als affects the global supply and demand of critical resources (Thomson and Horii, 2009).
China is now the world’s largest importer of iron ore and copper, and the ­second-largest con-
sumer of crude oil (International Trade Centre, 2010). Three of the world’s top 10 companies
by market capitalization are Chinese (Global 500, 2010), and outcries over the value of the
­renminbi (China’s currency) show the impact China can have on global currency exchange
rates. China’s economy may still be considerably smaller than that of the United States, but
more passenger vehicles are now purchased in China each year than in the U.S. (Hogg, 2009),
and China’s annual domestic investment in infrastructure now greatly outstrips the U.S.

1
Professor of Geography, Rippey Chair in Liberal Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography, University of
Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 (abmurphy@uoregon.edu).

563

Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2010, 51, No. 5, pp. 563–568. DOI: 10.2747/1539-7216.51.5.563
Copyright © 2010 by Bellwether Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved.
564 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS

The wider impacts of China’s economic rise are evident in places all over the world.
Germany’s ability to weather the recession of recent years with relatively minor negative con-
sequences can be attributed in significant part to the growth of its exports to China (Dempsey,
2010). China’s rapidly expanding overseas investments are shaping local economies from
Southeast Asia to Subsaharan Africa to Central and South America (e.g., see Pannell, 2008).
The extent of the U.S. debt held by China has implications for how deficits are perceived and
how interest rates are set in the United States (Miller, 2010). Japan’s recent economic trajec-
tory has been shaped by China, both as a consequence of Japanese firms moving production
to China to take advantage of comparatively low wage rates and of rising Japanese exports to
the expanding Chinese market (Alvstam et al., 2009).
Importantly, none of the foregoing is without consequence in realms that extend beyond
the economic. China is becoming an increasingly important geopolitical player—particularly
in Southeast Asia. China’s expanding influence within ASEAN provides a case in point; as
part of the ASEAN Plus Three forum, China has entered into a free trade agreement with
ASEAN, proposed measures to strengthen economic ties to combat the effects of the recent
financial crisis, and hosted a recent conference focusing on non-traditional security threats
(Ming, 2010). China’s geopolitical assertiveness is also evident in the increasing forcefulness
with which it is pressing maritime claims in the South China Sea and its growing assertive-
ness on the international stage. In the cultural realm, the penetration of China into foreign
markets and the accompanying migration of ­Chinese people have consequences all over the
world. The establishment of major Chinese business nodes in foreign places can become
lightning rods for comment and controversy (e.g., the Baltic Pearl residential complex in
Saint Petersburg,2 even as Chinese cultural institutions and restaurants have an impact on
local landscapes. And the environmental consequences of China’s rise can hardly be missed.
China is now the largest single-country producer of carbon dioxide emissions (Wang and
Watson, 2009), and its dams—existing and prospective—on the Yangtze and the Mekong
have massive consequences for hydrologic, geomorphic, agricultural, and settlement systems
(see Pearce, 2004). In a more amorphous, but still important, vein, China is in an increasingly
powerful position to shape the global dialogue on a variety of issues. For example, the recent
assertion by Chinese officials that the dollar should be phased out as the world’s primary
reserve currency found its way into a 2010 United Nations report ­(Charbonneau, 2010) and
continues to echo through the halls of government and commerce in Europe, Central Asia,
and beyond.
The extraordinary character and wide reach of the sorts of developments noted above
point to the need to take stock of China’s rise. There is a growing body of literature seeking
to do just that (e.g., see Ikenberry, 2008; Gu et al., 2008), but with only a few exceptions
(e.g., de Blij, 2005), there has been little general consideration in human geography circles
of what China’s rise might mean for the content, modes of theorization, and practices of
human geography itself. Part of the problem lies in the institutional character of the discipline
of geography—at least in the Anglo-American realm—which often leaves commentary on
China primarily in the hands of a relatively small group of China specialists. Articles about
China in the mainstream geography journals are dominated by these specialists, while much
of the rest of the geographical establishment goes about its work with only tangential refer-
ence to their work.
This state of affairs needs to change if we are to come to grips with the implications of
China’s rise for the emerging political, economic, cultural, and social landscape of the 21st

2
See Dixon (2010).
 ALEXANDER B. MURPHY 565

century. China’s changing internal circumstances and expanding external role carry with them
empirical and theoretical consequences for scholarship and teaching in a wide array of human
geographic subdisciplines. In empirical terms, efforts to assess what is happening economi-
cally, politically, socially, and environmentally in different parts of the globe need to consider
the penetration of China into different regions and to focus attention on the new international
linkages that are being forged in the wake of those penetrations. China’s changing domestic
circumstances and foreign role raise questions about how we describe and analyze human
geographic processes ranging from migration3 to economic development to the shifting vul-
nerabilities of coupled human-environment systems. Even the ways we depict and understand
such core geographic concerns as globalization, human security, and environmental change
need to be reassessed in light of China’s rise.
The breadth and magnitude of these empirical challenges have conceptual and theoretical
implications as well. What does China’s rise mean for our theories and models of develop-
ment? In what ways does China’s experience of the past two decades challenge the assump-
tions we make about the relationship between governmental types and socio-economic
change? Do core geopolitical and geoeconomic concepts such as hegemony, dependency,
and neoliberalism need to be rethought in the wake of China’s rise? What are the implica-
tions of China’s changed circumstances and emergent global role for the ways we understand
­urban-rural interactions, urban growth, and sustainability? Questions of this sort go to the
very heart of how we conceptualize and practice human geography.
With such matters in mind, my colleague at the University of Oregon, Xiaobo Su, and
I worked with faculty members Jigang Bao, Zhigang Li, Desheng Xue, and Shenjing He in
the School of Geography and Planning at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China, to put
together a major international conference at Sun Yat-sen on China and the future of human
geography. The conference took place in late August 2010, just after the formal announce-
ment that China had surpassed Japan as the world’s second-largest economy. Our goal was
to provide a forum for work focused on specific aspects of China’s rise and, more generally,
to invite broader consideration of the implications of that rise for the ways in which human
geographers understand and approach the world of the 21st century. Several of the invited
plenary addresses at the conference that took up the latter challenge are set forth in the special
written symposium that follows. John Agnew (University of California, Los Angeles) leads
off the symposium with a paper that considers the implications of China’s rise for geopolitical
conceptions that focus overwhelming attention on the role of hegemons, particularly coun-
tries in Western Europe and the United States, in shaping world politics. Agnew argues that
China should not be understood either as the latest hegemon in Western-centric terms or as a
completely distinctive case bringing wholly novel elements to the global geopolitical stage.
Instead, he makes the case for a middle position that challenges both the traditional preoc-
cupations of the “critical geopolitics” project and the ways in which China is dominantly
framed.
Michael Webber (University of Melbourne) and Lily Kong (National University of
­Singapore) took a different approach to the central conference theme, considering how
research practices in particular subdisciplines of human geography might respond to China’s
rise. Webber looks at economic geography. In his view, China’s rise requires reconceputalizing
key ideas and concepts in economic geography, but he contends that the Western and Chinese

3
Of note in this regard is an effort to enumerate China’s “floating” population (of unregistered rural migrants
residing and working in the country’s cities) in the forthcoming November 1, 2010 census, so that the overall popula-
tion count will more closely approach a de facto enumeration, as opposed to a de jure one (Hvistendahl, 2010; for
background, see Chan, 2007, 2009).
566 EURASIAN GEOGRAPHY AND ECONOMICS

geographical communities will only succeed in developing satisfactory new modes of under-
standing if they can extricate themselves from a weltanschauung that marginalizes China and
develop frameworks that take seriously the specificities of the Chinese experience. Kong’s
focus, in contrast, is cultural geography. She argues that China could have a signal impact
on the development of cultural geography, but only if the intellectual hegemony of Anglo-
American cultural geography is challenged and if a road is found between the ­Western-centric
theoretical predispositions of contemporary mainstream cultural geography and the practical,
applied tendencies associated with much human geographic research in China.
The final paper in this issue, authored by Fulong Wu (Cardiff University), looks at China
against the backdrop of a development that is currently shaping the human geography of the
planet: the widespread turn toward neoliberalism of the past few decades. Wu is interested
in the degree to which the dramatic changes that have unfolded in China since 1990 can be
understood as being a product of neoliberalism. He argues that the Chinese state embraced
key aspects of neoliberalism to address a legitimation crisis, but that the state is not in retreat.
As such, he contends that neoliberalism does not capture key aspects of China’s recent
­trajectory.
One other plenary address at the Guangzhou conference addressed the environmental
dimensions of China’s rise. That address, given by Joshua Muldvain (Sarah Lawrence ­College)
will appear in the next issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics. Muldavin argues that
how one understands the environmental dimensions of China’s rise depends on whether
the country’s recent environmental history is looked at from an ecological ­modernization
­perspective or a critical political ecology perspective. The former has dominated in China,
but Muldavin suggests that the latter can offer important insights into the environmental and
social consequences of China’s rise.
Considered collectively, the papers in this symposium are suggestive of the breadth and
depth of the practical and epistemological challenges that come into focus when China’s rise
is taken seriously. They can thus serve both as gateways to further investigation of the ­specific
issues each of them addresses and as invitations to a wider consideration of the thematic
­raison d’être behind the Guangzhou conference. Engaging more fully with the nature and
implications of China’s rise in human geography, however, should not mean ignoring hard
questions about how enduring or significant the rise of China might be. China’s economy
is still heavily dependent on exports and foreign investment, and China’s GDP per capita,
while on the rise, is only one-tenth that of Japan and one-twelfth that of the United States
(IMF, 2010). Urban-rural and East-West disparities in levels of socioeconomic well-being
remain stark (see generally Fan and Sun, 2008), and China may not be immune from nega-
tive economic shocks. Harvard Professor and former IMF Chief Economist Kenneth Rogoff,
for example, has warned of a collapse in China’s property market in the near future (Li and
Greber, 2010). Moreover, China faces potentially difficult internal political challenges, and
environmental crises could slow or reverse forward progress. Even though China is playing
a growing role in the development of new green technologies and introducing more environ-
mentally friendly approaches to economic output (see Yang and Poon, 2009), there are poten-
tially alarming economic and social consequences that may accompany the rapid alteration of
the physical environment occurring in parts of China.
These cautionary matters suggest that grappling with China’s rise requires more than
extrapolating current trends into the future, for important questions loom. Can China sus-
tain substantial growth during the coming decades in the face of competition from lower-
cost labor markets, especially in Southeast Asia? Can China move from being a producer of
goods for others to being an innovator and setter of trends? To frame such questions in more
 ALEXANDER B. MURPHY 567

general terms, does having one of the world’s largest export economies necessarily translate
into global leadership? As Paris-based journalist and commentator William Pfaff recently
observed:

Europe dominated the world from the Renaissance until the terrible European civil
wars of the 20th century because the Europeans explored the world, learned from
what they found, created modern science and technology, organized their own soci-
eties in ways never before known, with unprecedented systems of administration and
power, providing a quality of life for their populations that maintained the allegiance
of their societies. They did not simply out-produce everyone else in manufacture and
agriculture; they revolutionized medieval methods of material production and feudal
farming (Pfaff, 2010).

China is clearly out-producing most of the world and raising material standards of living
for significant segments of its population. But if Pfaff is right, the question of China’s global
influence in the 21st century is tied to whether some of the other ingredients that underlay
Europe’s rise to dominance will apply to China in the coming decades. There are certainly
signs that China is becoming a progressively more important innovator as well as a producer
(the country unquestionably has a long history of innovation), and China is increasingly a
leader in research and development spending. But the question that remains to be answered is
whether such developments will lead to a more transformative, post-Western, even Chinese
form of modernism or civilization in the decades ahead. Putting China more centrally into
our assessments of the changing geography of the planet is likely to be critical if we are to
speak meaningfully to this question, and to the many others that are necessarily raised when
the Chinese juggernaut of the past two decades is taken seriously.

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