Lecture 2: Monsters & Machines: State, Space and Territory

- That’s about the state – political geography.

- Recaps: Space: absolute and relative space – directions
 relative space: e.g. around 20 mins from MK to Sheng Wan – implying some kind of transit to the
place – relationship and dependent on things.
 absolute space: e.g. around 8.3 km – relies on universal measure.
- Place – cultural and subjective meaning attached to a specific space by humans.
- Important Concepts: Political geography; Territory; Territoriality; State; Territorial Trap; State Trap
 Political Geography: politics and conflicts/ create spaces and places/ in turn partially determined
by the existence and nature of geographical entities (simple words: how politics and conflicts
affecting space + how the space affect politics and conflicts)
 Territory: sections of space occupied by individuals, social groups, or institutions, most typically
by the modern state
 Mixed with dimensions of social life and social power:
 (1) material element: land.
 (2) functional element: control of space e.g. establishment and enforcement of law,
control of human flow into or depart from the territory.
 (3) symbolic element: social identity e.g. citizenship, culture and tradition
 Territories are social processes in which social space and social action are inseparable. They
are made and destroyed in social and individual actions, contested and actively negotiated
(e.g. usually violently wars)
 Social groups or states are made into territories in a multitude of social practices and
discourses by using abstract, culturally laden symbolism. This occurs in all social contexts,
from local neighborhoods and ganga to nation-states and supra-state territories. (Identity
rooted with the land – What happens if you home country people must move somewhere
else? Who are you now?)
 Territoriality: a strategy that human beings employ to control people and things by controlling area
… a primary geographical expression of social power. Territoriality is an effective instrument to
reify and depersonalize power. This is obvious in the case of states, which exploit territoriality in
the control of their citizen and external relations.
 “Control”: depersonalize power – not a person order that cannot do so – but change the law
and the rules and the law tells you not to do these things. – not a personal judgment but a
social judgment e.g. law, travel permissions, border control
 State: a body that has the ability to exercise sovereign power over a defined area, so laws as
instrument to exercise power are territorial… The state has one overwhelming advantage over
other territorial entities the monopoly of force and power.
 Not only on the map within an area - Three Wrong Assumptions (Territorial Trap):
 (1) modern state sovereignty requires clearly bounded territorial spaces.
 Yes, China has boundaries to exercise power; No, consider the law of protective
principles.
 (2) there is a fundamental opposition between ‘domestic’ and ‘foreign affairs.
  Yes, country restrict their power within a boundaries or own sandboxes; No,
sometimes country work in other sandboxes consider China and Taiwan problem.
 (3) Territorial state acts as the geographical container of modern society.
 No Consider a war, war does not end the sovereignty there would be other powers.
 you should not be trapped that a state is within a boundary on the map.
 State Space: (a) an ongoing process of change rather than as a static thing, container or platform;
(b) as having a polymorphic rather than a merely territorial geographical form; (there should be
multiple level of state) (c) as having a multi scaler rather than merely a national organizational
structure (e.g. community or cities is sometimes more powerful or influential than national
structures)
 Narrow sense: spatial organization as a discrete, territorially centralized, self-contained and
internally differentiated institutional apparatus.
 Integral sense:
 Consider the URA – it is a quasi-governmental and private – public-private partnership –
narrow sense: yes instiutional
Lesson 3 - Geopolitics
- How geopolitics shape geographical imagination?
- Geopolitics = a tittle of an academic journal, a catch-all category for international violence an orphaned
sub-field of late imperial geography resurrected in Neo -imperial America and simultaneously e focus of
diverse forms of demythologization and debunking b by scholars of critical human geography the sis a
term that defies easy definition
 Reliable guide of global landscape – (1) describing the world by certain terms – (2) taking the
view why it happens what the effects.
- Classical geopolitics
 Imperial – to be of empire – e.g. colonization. – describe the history
- Critical geopolitics
 To criticize representation – what does that do and what effect have
- Feminist geopolitics
 Study of a particular issue – e.g. popular geopolitics – the feature to help us how to understand the
world
- How is it expressed and how it shape geological imagination
 When you said about the western  you imagination
 E.g. Sick man of asia  describe Asians  Bruce lee try to burst the disrespectful description
(Fist of Fury)
 E.g.
Lesson 4 – Cultural Geography
- What is culture
- E.g. Not identified as CG but is CG itself:
 Rule by aesthetics; Wan Chai research is still cultural geography; Artic Climate change
- The politics of aesthetics = CG
- Cultural Geography = Many have written of a cultural turn in geography paralleling those in other
social sciences. Often the subject of controversy over its approaches, claims and methods cultural
geography has seen the reinvigoration of some topics and the development of whole new topics of
geographic enquiry. Indeed, it may be that we can identify a recent ‘culturalization’ of many branches of
geography, rather than simply a field of ‘cultural geography’—thus, it is not always clear if the field is
defined by culture as the content of study, and what its limits might be, or the approach used (Gregory et.
Al 2009:129)
- Spatial imaginaries = ideas that we have about a space or place’s past that form the political, economic
and social experience of the present, it influences the way in which we perceive bodies and the place of
identity and identification
 E.g. Iron curtain = imaginary: it is a term invented vs real: the boundary under the cold world is
real you will get shot
 E.g. The West = imaginary: it is a relative term that the West is the West vs real: the people is
influence and signifies
 Spatial Imaginary vs Place (human meaning attached to some section of space)
- Edward Said reading: Orientalism – type of SI
 Stereotypes that the West view the East
 (a) an academic field / speciality / identity –an academics who study a particular area e.g.
Africanist is a person who study Africa – but orientalist now is kind of stereotype and no one call
themselves – c.f. occident: the West describe themselves with their relationship with the East (who
study the orient and describe what they are like)
 (b) a style of thought – a style of thought that based upon ontological (a study of existence, what
exist) and epistemological (how we know what is exist) distinction made be the Orient and the
Occident (Said 1978:25)
 (c) a discourse (including the details in the thought) – as the corporate institution for dealing with
the Orient by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, teaching it, settling
it, in short, the Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient
(Said 1978:25)
 Therefore, as much as the West itself, the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of
thought, imaginary and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West.
The two geographical entities thus support and to an extent reflect each other (a tool for the
West to understand the East) (Said 1978:25)
 Therefore, Orientalism is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively
by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it a large and diffuse collection of texts about
the Orient; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious ‘Western’ imperialist plot
to hold down the ‘Oriental’ world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into
aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an
 elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal
halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as
scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and
sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a
certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to
incorporate, what is manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world (Said 1978:26)
 “…it is, above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with
political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with
various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a
colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like
comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power cultural (as
with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about what
‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do). Indeed, my real argument is that
Orientalism is—and does not simply represent—a considerable dimension of modern
political-intellectual culture, and as such has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’
world.”
- Immobility Policy
 Sham Shui Po – poor district and gentrification – poor neighbor but having a lots of new fancy
cafes after COVID in Tai Nan Street
 Territorial stigma – not a static condition, a neutral process or an innocuous cultural game, but a
consequential and injurious form of action through collective representation fasten on the place
(Wacquant et al. 2014: 1278)
 “It is hardly possible for residents...to disregard the scorn of which they are the object since
the social taint of living in a [place] that has become closely associated with poverty, crime
and moral degradation in the public mind affects all realms of existence—whether it is
searching for employment, pursuing romantic involvements, dealing with public agencies
such as the police, the health and social services, or simply talking with acquaintances.”
Wacquant (2008: 173)
 e.g. SSP is a dirty poor dangerous neighborhood, good place to get cheap things … - a person may
be hesitant to tell you that they live in SSP
 (1) young people are trapped in Hong Kong; (2) new dangerous adventure for social media stories
Lecture 5: Violent Environment: Probing the Nature/Culture Nexus (I)
- Human geography and Physical Environment could be related (not necessary always about physical
geography)
- E.g. Tourism – increasing flights and Singapore have to pay more for their air tickets as the Govt require
plane companies to use greener and more expensive jet fuel
- (1) What is nature and why should we care? (2) How and why human geographers think about the nature
world?
- Key concepts: nature, political ecology, ecoscarcity, TINA (there is no alternative), the resource curse,
environmental determination
- Nature:
 (1) essence or defining property of something (biological nature, inherent instincts); (2) a material
realm untouched by human activities (non-human, not human-tainted, culture vs nature); (3) the
entire living world, of which the human species (everything that exist) (Gregory et al 2009:492)
 Nature is perhaps the most complex world in the language. It is relatively east to distinguish three
areas of meaning: (i) the essential quality and character of something; (ii) the inherent force which
directs either the world or human beings or both; (iii) the material world itself, taken as including
or not including human beings (Williams 1976:164-165)
- Environmental determinism
 E.g. the First Book of Geography – Yellow Race: people live along rivers and canals, tea plants are
grown in parts of China – why? to explain the living environment of these people, to determine the
course of the people – the environment determines the behaviors and characteristics of the people
 E.g. people in the tropical regions are lazier because the place provides them with what they need
vs people in arid areas are more persistent to environmental and more laborious
 A type of reasoning that holds the character and form of a society, culture or body can be
explained by the physical condition within which it has developed. Determinism is a form of
explanation that finds not place for other factors, outside forces, or random features. In this sense,
there is a strong assumption that nature and culture exist as a dualism and that culture are shaped
by the nature (Gregory et al, 2009: 196-197)
 Jared Diamond writes to explain why some societies flourish and collapse – but other criticized
him e.g. Maya civilization JD: climate collapse = social collapse; critique: the dramatic climate
change happen over 200 years, not only once collapse; the argument of climate change is not
determinative to social collapse but some other explanations (the argument that “the geography
determines everything in that area or places”)
- Paul Robbins
 Political v apolitical ecological
 A field of critical research predicted on the assumption that any tag on the strands of the
global web of human-environment linkages neverberated throughout the system as a
whole…. All practitioners all query the relationship between all backgrounds and training,
some physical scientist, while most are social and behavioral scientist, all share an interest in
the condition of the environment and the people who live
 A field that ecological and political processes
- Ecoscarcity
  Explanation of ecological crisis
 Human multiplied that the environment can support (Robbins 2012:14)
 The more fundamental problem with this formulation, however, is thatit posits the environment as
a finite soure of basic unchanging and essential elements, which set absolute limits for human
action. However intuitive (divide a limited stock of earth materials by a potentially infinite hungry
human population and result always approaches zero), this assumption has proved historically
false and conceptually flawed
 Even so, the Malthusian population pressure model poorly reflects the complexity of global
ecology. The argument does, however, hold serious implications for the use and management of
resources
- Apocalyptic narratives and TINA
 Climatic apocalypse
 Climate refugees
 Socio-ecological collapse
 Extinction
 Post politic / authoritarianism
- Modernization
 Explanation of ecological crisis
 There approach to environmental management and ecological change generally assert that efficient
solution determined in optimal economic terms can create win-win outcomes where economic
growth (sometimes called development) can occur alongside environmental conservation simply
by getting the prices and techniques just rights
- Resource Curse
 Explanation ecological crisis
 Countries rich in natural resources tend to perform badly (Sachs and Warner 2001:87)
 The resources curse argument suggests that resources dependence creates a context for the
emergence of armed conflicts through its negative effects on economic performance and the
quality of governance institutions
 Empirical evidence for the resources curse argument is strong, although historically and
institutionally contingent
Lecture 6_ Environmental human geography (Animals)
- Key concepts: food, animals. Plants climate, mineral/fuel, environmental perception, natural hazards,
environmental catastrophe, health, environmental degradation.
- How do geographers contribute to our understanding of environmental issues and / or processes?
- Jared Diamond – geographical determination to justify a quick dismissal of a proposed geographic
interpretation of a human phenomenon; societies rise and collapse because of the environment – his
defence: why people reject him because (1) geographical explanation is racism; (2) historians have a
tradition, of stressing the role of contingency; (3) geographic explanation is too technical; (4) people
yearn to believe that the human spirit, free will and individual agency are the noblest expression, but the
fact it is not because the human spices is influenced and shaped by environment and the geography
- “Environmental determinism” and “Orientalism” in common – explaining of carving out and describing
the world with imaginaries (images of the world)
- Agnotology – (Tom Slater 2021:1)
 the allure of fashionable concepts and policy buzzwords, we are locked onto these concepts
 scholar have to talk about these and give policy-driven research because of the pressure of
finances (doing the researches that the policy maker wants but not really what the real world is
about decision-based evidencing making at the expense of evidence-based decision making)
 Tradition: epistemology (why do we know), producing knowledge vs Current: intentional
ignorance production (we already how the answer, producing propaganda and give that a solution
we already wanted)
 Example: resilience – (1) convincing citizens to embrace shock treatment on their own, (2)
lauding them as a form of collective heroism undergirding the creation of a shock-ready city –
celebrate the people’s ability how to bounce back from the flood disaster, but no people are asking
why there is a flood and the issue of climate change
 Sustainability – HK Govt: the strike a balance for economy, society, environmental without
affording the expense of future generations – but if the societies’ need is trash and unaffordable,
can that be sustainable? – people cannot foresee the future, the government uses terms such as
resilience or sustainability to make people continue to feel good (the future is going to be good)
allow their policies to continue
 Apocalyptic narratives & TINA
- Wet markets and animals – western people are very suspicious about wet market e.g. disagreement to
what animals could be eaten – Hong Kong’s Geographies of Lively Commodification beyond
Companionship – why animals should be live instead of frozen
- Commodification (Karl Marx 1867) – commodify is produced for sales – living commodities e.g. pet
dogs (dogs are breed to satisfy human needs for pets, companion commodity; exotic animal trade,
decommodification by telling the animals that human are not friends) –
 Induce and flop in a predictably futile attempt to survive – watching it die to make it looks alive
(abundant, safe and delicious life) – even if the fish is lazy and does not move make, make it
flopping to make it look alive (Brown-Marbled Grouper)
Lecture 7_ (Online Class Please Read)
Global production network – specific commodities e.g. microchips – corporation of firms and components
of a production eco-system
Lecture 8_ Rubbernecking Revolution
- Urbanization – urban revolution – 2012 the world become majority urban; why hard to count whether
majority urban? Very hard to count people because undocumented / semi-documented (informal
urbanization at the grey zones in legality (e.g. a house for 2 families, but the house will choose to tell the
regulators that there is only 1 family, to circumvent taxation / regulations) / stripes around the city )
- Rubbernecking – turn one's head to stare at something in a foolish manner – some scholars say that city
is going to save us, while the others said that urban is going to destroy us – something easier something
difficult
- Questions: what is UG and why should we care? Is that a rural geography, if so, what is that about? What
is urbanization and what is it about?
- Key terms: Urban Geography, Rural geography, Urbanization, Central business district
- Commodification:
 Commodification is the most crucial important process for the human and the world to interact –
land to property; animal to pet; animal to food – more and more things are commodified in the
globalizing world – solving problem through commodification, can the problem be brought to the
market for a solution? E.g. global warming
 Land Fiction Commodification of Land in City and Country (2021 Asher Ghertner)
 Hard to transform land to property; hard to transform human power to a commodity
- What is UG and why should we care? Is that a rural geography, if so, what is that about?
 Urban geography and Rural geography
 UG: the geographical study pf urban spaces and urban ways of being (Gregory et.al 2009)
 urban ways of being: urban culture, urban politics, urban anthestics …
 cities and urban life – urban life and non-urban life is extremely different
 UG / RG as containers – economic geography; cultural… can happen in urban or rural 
economic urban geography for example
 Origins – concentric zone models – the Chicago School Model – does not apply to a model of
other places – help to understand but are not meant to be the same – center of town is most
expensive; outstrips are for migrants
 Zone 1: the first and smallest zone is the central business district, this is the focus of the
commercial, social and cultural life of the city, an the area where land value are highest. Only
activities that profits is located here.
 Sector model: by mapping the average residential rent value for every block in each city,
Hoyt concluded that the general spatial arrangement was
 Multiple-nuclei model – do not grow around one CBD but a number of separate nuclei
 LA school of mid-late 90s
 A generalized model of land use areas in the large southeast Asian city – have a port zone for
colonial cities
 A generalized model of Latin American City Structure – CBD/ market – the spine for emperor –
squared center, an open square (plaza)
- What is urbanization and why does it matter
 Making predicted models vs the descriptive model for the Chicago school …
 68% of the world population to live in urban areas by 2050
 Urbanization Prospects by the UN
 World city population is close to coastal cities – sea transportation make large city around the
coast in the past; these cities are old and stay where their ancestors were
 Karita Kan: urbanization and commodification reading
 Commodification: beginning in the 1980w rapid industrialization and urbanization have
created raising demand for rural land and resulted in the large-scale conversion of farmland to
non-agricultural uses
 This transformation in property rights had significant implications for the rural land regime.
In China, rural land is owned collectively by village communities while urban land is owned
by the state. For urban users to obtain rural land, the process of expropriation must first take
place to convert rural land into state-owned urban land. Expropriations are undertaken by the
government, who, having obtained ownership of a land parcel, can then sell its use rights in
the conveyance market to commercial users. Because the sum obtained from conveyance
often far exceeds the required amount of compensation paid to villagers, rural land
expropriation has become a lucrative mechanism for local states to accumulate capital.
 The emergence of land-based regimes of accumulation has been accompanied by intensifying
processes of dispossession. The profitability of rural land expropriation has resulted in
widespread landlessness and deterritorialization. Surveys estimate that almost half of China’s
rural communities have experienced land expropriations since the late 1990s and that the
number of landless peasants ranges from 40–50 million to as high as 120 million (Hornby,
2015). It has been estimated that villagers received as little as 5% of the value of land in
compensation (Bristow, 2011). The economic marginalization of rural communities and the
prevalence of coercive expropriations have precipitated a rising tide of rural protests.
 Under the previous approach of state-led expropriation, village collectives play a largely
passive role in the land development process and are entitled only to a limited sum of
monetary compensation. According to the Land Management Law, villagers are compensated
based on existing land use––that is, agricultural use––rather than the future non-agricultural
use. The compensation consists of three main components, namely a land compensation fee, a
resettlement allowance and expropriated acreage fees for lost crops and demolished
buildings. It is set down in law that the total land compensation and resettlement fees must be
kept to within 30 times the average annual productivity of the land in the three years prior to
expropriation. By calculating compensation and setting a limit based on agricultural output
value, the law essentially excludes villagers from sharing in the appreciation in rent after their
land has been expropriated for development. Furthermore, the local state directly facilitates
rent extraction by linking up village leaders with developers. Because all development
projects require approval from the local state, the government acted as the ‘master of local
go-betweens’ that private developers and village leaders must go through in order to make
deals happen (Hibou, 2004: 17). In the PRNC project, the government exercised enormous
discretionary power in deciding which developers ‘fulfilled the qualifications’ to take part in
redevelopment projects and made the necessary introductions to link up developers with
village shareholding companies. For developers, securing contracts was often a matter of
cultivating personal relations or guanxi with officials (interview, October 2015). Referrals by
government officials helped property developers purchase the use rights of land at lower
prices and obtain favorable terms from village leaders
Lecture 9: Sex, Movement and Space
- Key concepts: demographic transition model, peak population, the principle of population, carrying
capacity, migration
- What is happening with the world human population and why should we care?
 The earth is majority urban, 68% of the world population projected to live urban by 2050
 Most populated city (2020) 19 of the top 30 in Asia, 5 of top 5 in Asia
 Commodification: beginning in the 1980w rapid industrialization and urbanization have created
raising demand for rural land and resulted in the large-scale conversion of farmland to non-
agricultural uses  compensation is insufficient for the encroachment of farmland; It has been
estimated that villagers received as little as 5% of the value of land in compensation  the village
corporation become co-developers and get a share in the land development parcel
 UN believes that the peak population will reach 11.2 billion in 2100
 Population – 19th century: industrial involution (hygiene and sanitation, fertilizers …);
 Country overshoot Days: if the whole world lived like that country, when would the resource of
earth get depleted until … e.g. if the world live like Quarter, the resource will depleted in Feb 9 th
- Carrying Capacity
 Maximum number of a given species that a given environment can support indefinitely; e.g. the
max. human population that the Earth can support; such application frequently neglect more
relevant consideration such as social dynamic of resource, distributive justice and technological
advancement
- Demographic transition model
 Birth rate, death rate and total
population
 No country now is in Stage 1
 Industrialization in Stage 2
(medical advancement, people
start dying)
 Urbanization in Stage 3

- Economic Development Behind population change – 5 children by women in 1950  1.7 children in
2100 – is the children an asset or a burden
- Mental health and known and growing challenge
- Diagnosing drivers of the Youth Mental Health Crisis
- COVID19 made the situation worse

- Migration
 HK is a place of migration – they come back because they make better money
 How do geographer understand and seek to address these issues of migration and populated city
- Cindy Fan
 Research on the unprecedented and massive rural-urban migration in China since the 1980s has
highlighted the role of the hukou ( 户 口 ) system (e.g., Chan, 2015; Fan, 2008), a registration
system that gives urban Chinese entitlements to state subsidies and support while allowing rural
Chinese access to farmland. However, access to farmland alone without other state support has left
rural families perpetually poor. Since the 1980s, China’s rapid industrialization and urbanization
have offered a lifeline, as new job opportunities have attracted hundreds of millions of migrant
workers from rural areas. By 2015, approximately 61% of all rural workers in China had left their
home village or town to seek work elsewhere (Su et al., 2018) (Fan 2022:100)
 The Confucian ideology that has guided social relations in China for over five thousand years
prescribes individuals’ roles according to their positions relative to other members of society. In
particular, the roles of women and girls are relative and subordinate to those of men and boys in
their lives, as described by the “three obediences:” a daughter is subordinate to her father before
marriage (zaijia congfu 在家从父); a wife is subordinate to her husband (chujia congfu 出嫁从夫)
and an elderly mother or a widow is subordinate to her sons (laolai congzi 老 来 从 子 or fusi
congzi 夫 死 从 子 ) (Dorros, 1978; Fan, 2018). (Fan 2022:100-101) – tradition remain strong in
rural areas
 While Mao’s notion of women shouldering “half the sky” has increased their labor force
participation since the 1960s, patriarchy continues to shape the everyday life of women, men and
their households such that it is in essence a determining cultural and contextual factor in Chinese
society (e.g., Hannum, 2005; Ji et al., 2017). For example, China’s high sex ratio at birth, due to
sex-selective abortions, female infanticide and underreporting of female births, reflects the
persistence of male preference. In particular, patriarchal culture is manifested in multiple ways
through marriage (e.g., Fan, 2018). First, under the patrilocal exogamy tradition, the wife leaves
her natal family and moves to join the husband’s family. By extension, her labor and fertility are
then also considered a property of the husband’s family (Croll, 1981). For thousands of years,
China was overwhelmingly agrarian, and the loss of daughters’ agricultural labor through marriage
has undermined girls’ value and discouraged parents’ investment in their education. Patrilocal
exogamy also underlies the prevalence of early marriage, because parents of sons are eager to
recruit a daughter-in-law not only for her labor but also her reproduction, in order to sustain both
lineage and labor supply. Despite the fact that China has urbanized rapidly since the 1980s, the
age-old belief that daughters are less valued than sons persists. For example, although girls now
have greater access to education than their mothers and grandmothers, parents continue to
prioritize the education of sons over that of daughters (e.g., Fan and Chen, 2020).
 Second, the mate-selection process in China tends to be pragmatic and transactional, typically
involving evaluation of a potential spouse’s attributes (tiaojian 条件) (e.g., Fan and Li, 2002). The
gendered hypergamy principle is widely used, stipulating that husbands should be “superior” to
wives in terms of age (older), height (taller), education (higher), occupation (more prestigious),
income (higher) and geographic location (better). Attributes can also be functions of specific
political economic contexts. During the Maoist collective period, for example, landlords connoted
bad class origins for marriage, and Communist Party membership was considered a good attribute.
At the household level, it is strongly and widely believed that marriages that connect households
 with similar socioeconomic statuses (“matching doors” or mendang hudui 门当户对 ) are more
likely to be stable and successful than those that do not (Hu, 2016). While the “matching doors”
principle is prevalent, for women who have few options other than marriage to improve their
economic wellbeing, the socioeconomic status and potential of the prospective husband’s family
are important factors in their marriage decision-making.
 In short, the desired result of the mate-selection process, from the point of view of a rural woman,
is as follows: her natal family and the husband’s family are from similar socioeconomic
backgrounds and origins, but the husband has positive and promising attributes and his family has
demonstratable evidence to offer her economic betterment. From the prospective husband’s point
of view, a wife’s educational attainment is much less important than her health, labor and potential
to produce offspring. The calculus behind marriage decision-making necessitates matchmaking,
largely considered by parents their responsibility. Parents of sons, in particular, are expected to
demonstrate reasonable economic capacity in order to boost the sons’ competitiveness in the
marriage market. What’s more, China’s one-child policy that was enforced between 1980 and 2015
has exacerbated an already skewed sex ratio in favor of boys, further worsening the imbalance
between women and men of marriageable ages, especially in rural areas
 Over the years, marital practices in China have evolved. In particular, the age at first marriage has
been gradually postponed, divorce rates have increased and nonmarital sex and cohabitation have
been on the rise in both rural and urban areas (Song and Ji, 2020). Still, patriarchy – and
accompanying gendered norms and ideology – is far from weakening. In rural areas, not only is
marital formation transactional, but women across generations continue to be designated and
primary caregivers for other household members such that their access to education and off-farm
work, including migrant work, remains much more constrained than that of men (Fan and Chen,
2020; Li et al., 2020). In urban areas, women have greater access to educational and occupational
opportunities, but in the marriage market their economic and professional achievements tend not
to be as valued as their young age and good physical appearance and may in fact disadvantage
them (Fincher, 2014; Gui, 2016)
 Over the years, with the improvement of economic wellbeing in China and intense compensation
for wives due to sex-ratio imbalances, especially in rural areas, weddings are increasingly
accompanied by hefty bride price and large expenses (Jiang et al., 2015). Financing housing
expenditure and bride price is extremely costly to many rural households, necessitating parents
and other household members to pursue migrant work and send back remittances, as described by
this father: Nowadays, making money is mostly to prepare for a son to get married. Bride price has
now risen to about 70,000– 80,000 Yuan (USD 10,249–11,713).1 (Anhui Province, 2009)
 To be sure, remittances also improve rural households’ standard of living, help lift them out of
poverty, and pay for children’s education. For example, interviewees talked about their
expenditures on appliances, agricultural input and school fees. Nonetheless, it is clear that housing
and bride price are the biggest expenditures for parents who have sons. The practice of pursuing
rural-urban migration in order to garner sufficient resources for important life-events like marriage
and to make ends meet is passed down from one generation to the next. Without migrant work,
villagers doubt if their sons would ever get married and if they would ever pay back their debts.
This villager commented on how essential migrant work is: Going out (to do migrant work) is the
 only way to have a future. Some young people are too lazy; they won’t go out, and they don’t even
have enough to eat, not even during the Spring Festival, unless they borrow from others. Those
who don’t go out, no one will lend you money, and you won’t be able to find a wife. To have a
future, you have to go out. (Anhui Province, 2005)
 Over the years, the economic and material livelihoods in rural China have changed. Marital
expenses have become heftier, new houses are bigger and better, rural-urban migration is no
longer a short-term strategy but a long-term way of life, and the younger generation who lacks
farming experience may have a stronger aspiration for urban living, just to name a few.
Nonetheless, it appears that the norms and values that govern gendered and intergenerational roles
and responsibilities related to marriage have persisted. If they do change – which does not seem
likely in the foreseeable future – then that may signal the weakening of one of the major drivers of
rural-urban migration. As long as marriages are transactional, sex-ratio imbalances are significant
and rural-urban inequality continues to be large, it is likely that large volumes of ruralurban

migration will continue in China.

- How population and resource solution? (Population, Resources, and the Ideology of Science
- Author(s): David Harvey)
 Principle of population:
 two postulates: that food is necessary to the existence of man and that the passion between
the sexes is necessary and constant (Harvey 1974:258)
 two forms of growth: arithmetic (amount of farmland) and geometric (population)  cannot
catch up the food demand
 two conclusions: misery and famine
 Armed with these definitions, let us consider a simple sentence: "Overpopulation arises because of
the scarcity of resources available for meeting the subsistence needs of the mass of the
population." If we substitute our definitions into this sentence we get: "There are too many people
in the world because the particular ends we have in view (together with the form of social organi-
zation we have) and the materials avail- able in nature, that we have the will and the way to use,
are not sufficient to pro- vide us with those things to which we are accustomed." Out of such a
sentence all kinds of possibilities can be extracted: (1) we can change the ends we have in mind
and alter the social organization of scarcity; (2) we can change our technical and cultural
appraisals of nature; (3) we can change our views concerning the things to which we are
accustomed; (4) we can seek to alter our numbers
 Somebody, somewhere, is redundant, and there is not enough to go round. Am I redundant? Of
course not. Are you redundant? Of course not. So who is redundant? Of course, it must be them.
And if there is not enough to go round, then it is only right and proper that they, who contribute so
little to society, ought to bear the brunt of the burden. And if we hold ithat there are certain of us
who, by virtue of our skills, abilities, and attainments, are capable of "conferring a signal benefit
upon man- kind" though our contributions to the common good and who, besides, are the
purveyors of peace, freedom, culture, and civilization, then it would appear to be our bound duty
to protect and pre- serve ourselves for the sake of all mankind
Lecture 10: Drugs
- Key concepts: controlled substance, drug, alcohol
- Rethinking the war on drugs could yield important ecological benefits (McSweeney 2014: 490)
- What does geography have to do with drugs
 Socio-spatial dimension
 Topic: Gen Z is making fun of Millennials on TikTok for drinking wine. They’ve got it all
wrong. (culture of drinking is changing rapidly; different place also have very different rules
for drinking or taking drugs …)
 Topic: Geographical aspects of scoring illegal drugs (Alasdair J. M. Forsyth, Richard H.
Hammersley)
 “Young drug users (n = 210) were asked where they would go to obtain eleven
categories of illicit drug. From this information it was possible to draw up spatial
availability networks for each drug. There was little difference in drug use between
persons resident in relatively more or less deprived areas. However, people tended to
gravitate from the less towards the more deprived areas in order to obtain drugs. There
was also a tendency for subjects to travel less far in order to obtain cheaper drugs. These
findings imply that perceived drug problems in deprived areas may become exaggerated
by outsiders and therefore inaccurately reflect prevalence of drug use locally.”
 Timing is everything: Territorial stigmatization immobility policy, and the COVID-boom in
HK’s Shum Shui Po – HK people has a perception of SSP being a poor place, possibly where
you can get drugs
 Socio-economic dimension
 Topic: The Biggest Cocaine Boom in History – more and more exporting cocaine country
become a consuming country e.g. Mexico and Africa
 While cocaine continues to pour into the US, it's also appearing in increasing amounts
elsewhere:
 Seizures in Europe have tripled in just five year
 In Africa, cocaine seizures increased 10-fold from 2015 to 2019
 The amount captured in Asia increased almost 15-fold over 2015-19
Cartels have become increasingly sophisticated at hiding drugs among the millions of
containers heading into ports such as Antwerp and Rotterdam every year. The perishable
nature of cargos such as bananas, blueberries, asparagus, flowers and grapes works to
traffickers' advantage by discouraging police or customs inspections that would delay
shipment.
 Smugglers even infiltrated the world’s biggest shipping line, Lauren Etter and Michael
Riley reported here. As MSC Mediterranean Shipping Co. grew into a dominant force in
global trade, it also became a prime drug-trafficking conduit for Balkan gangs. In the
case of the MSC vessel Gayane, US agents in 2019 found nearly 20 tons of cocaine,
worth $1 billion.
 Topic: Cocaine market is booming as meth trafficking spread, UN report says
 VIENNA, June 25 (Reuters) - Cocaine demand and supply are booming worldwide and
methamphetamine trafficking is expanding beyond established markets, including in
 Afghanistan where the drug is now being produced, a United Nations report said on
Sunday.
 Coca bush cultivation and total cocaine production were at record highs in 2021, the
most recent year for which data is available, and the global number of cocaine users,
estimated at 22 million that same year, is growing steadily, the U.N. Office on Drugs and
Crime said in its annual World Drug Report.
 Geopolitical dimension
 HK started to become a colony because of the opium wars haha]
 Cannabis is illegal in HK
- What are drugs
 Australian Government - Drugs affect your mind and body
 Drugs are substances that change a person's mental or physical state. They can affect the way
your brain works, how you feel and behave, your understanding and your senses. This makes
them unpredictable and dangerous, especially for young people.
 The effects of drugs are different for each person and drug. Learn more about the effects of
drugs and the different types of drugs.
 Why do people use drugs?
 Drugs change the way your body or brain works.
 People take drugs because:
 they are curious and want to see what happens
 they want to fit in or feel pressured by their peers
 they enjoy the effect on their body - for example, feeling excited and energetic, or
relaxed and calm
 they help them cope with situations - for example, reducing pain or relieving stress
 they've have a drug dependency and need to keep taking them to avoid withdrawal
symptoms.
 Controlled Substance
 Narcotic drugs – convention in UN
 Can some drugs be used legally in Hong Kong
 Tequila come from Mexico (southern US states) – Central US Vodka – Northern US Whiskey
(different consumption popularity around the US)
 Production of Wine
 Beer: wheat
 Vodka: potato
 Wine: grape
 Whiskey: corns and grains
 Sake: rice
 Tequila: agave
 Gin: distillated seeds, berries, roots, fruits and herbs and spices
 Baijiu: sorghum
- Whats sort of research that geographer is doing and the implications
 Kendra McSweeney Reading
  Seemingly far from the world of conservation science, drug policy reform could also alleviate
pressures on Central America’s rapidly disappearing forests. Mounting evidence suggests that
the trafficking of drugs (principally cocaine) has become a crucial—and overlooked—
accelerant of forest loss in the isthmus. A better understanding of this process is essential for
anticipating how it might be mitigated by specific drug policy reforms.
 First, forests are cut for clandestine roads and landing strips (15) (see the photo). Second,
drug trafficking intensifies preexisting pressures on forests by infusing already weakly
governed frontiers with unprecedented amounts of cash and weapons. Third, the vast profits
that traffickers earn from moving drugs (8) appear to create powerful new incentives for
DTOs themselves to convert forest to agriculture (usually pasture or oil-palm plantation).
Profits must be laundered. Buying and “improving” remote land (by clearing it) allows
dollars to be untraceably converted into private assets, while simultaneously legitimizing a
DTO’s presence at the frontier (e.g., as a ranching operation).
 Why Narcos invest in rural land
 Business logistics
 Situational legitimacy
 Money laundering
 Land acquisition as path t political power
 land speculation and land rent
 Mark Jayne and Chen Liu Reading
 Public and policy concerns in China have contradictory tendencies towards alcohol practices.
On the one hand, the alcohol industry and late-night alcohol activities have been encouraged
and promoted by the government to boost economic growth in recent decades (Jin &
Whitson, 2014; Lin & Wang, 2011; Zeng, 2009). Now, China is the largest producer of beer
in the world, and over the past 30 years, a proliferation of service-based, cultural and
‘symbolic’ economies and intensification of the consumer culture led by postindustrial and
middle-class consumption (see, Jayne et al., 2021), has ensured that alcohol of diverse prices
is widely available and visible in multiple space/times in contemporary Chinese cities.
Moreover, baijiu – the traditional Chinese grain alcohol – is not only the world’s oldest
alcohol, but also the world’s best-selling spirits category (Sandhaus, 2019)
 In summary, domestic drinking, either social or emotional drinking, is not simply a night-time
experience but a longer-term tactic that makes the atmosphere in the domestic feel ‘right’. As
these narratives have illustrated, domestic drinking is described as an emotional and
embodied way of home-making through creating affective and atmospheric assemblages
which can induce complex feelings and moods in domestic spaces (Shaw, 2015; S.
Wilkinson, 2017). The ongoing process of home-making can be shaped by the materiality’s
(such as the taste and texture) of alcohol and the practice of drinking alcohol. These findings
have highlighted the sophisticated ways that young people’s drinking practices are
relationally constituted through the experiences of formal family banquets and public
drinking, created by historical resonances of the ritualized toasting and familial
responsibilities and expectations, and influenced by the time/space they seek to be free from
the hierarchical social order in both family and public spaces.
- Gentrified neighborhood
 Drinking bar / coffee shops …
 For tourism