On Shifting Foundations presents the Chinese political economy as a dynamic and heterogeneous process that is evolving in geographically uneven ways as it engages with the challenges of global economic integration. This engagement is underpinned by state rescaling, wherein an expanding range of territorially targeted policy experimentation is implemented to achieve one overarching objective: ease connections with the global economy whilst sustaining absolute party-state political control
Book launch: An author-meets-critics session featuring David Featherstone (chair), Wenying Fu, Ashok Kumar, Gordon MacLeod and Amy Yueming Zhang was organised at the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference in London, 2019
Book Review Forum I: Political Geography, 2020
“For me, two features of the book stand out and deserve much praise. The first is the attention given to the notion of “policy experimentation” on a massive scale that has characterized China since the 1949 Revolution and the powerful and original idea that recent reorganization fits into a “palimpsest” of previous rounds of experimentation. I, for one, have never seen this argument made before about the important element of continuity in Chinese spatial-economic policy (most accounts posit a clean break during the Deng administration after Mao’s death). The second is that the Communist Party of China (CPC) has had the central role in all of the policy experimentation to the present day.” — John Agnew (UCLA)
Book Review Forum II: Urban Studies, 2021
“I would like to… [highlight] one main contribution of On Shifting Foundations, which is its construction of an understanding of ‘What is China’ through deconstructing ‘China’, namely through moving away from regarding China as a unitary state. This book shows that both continuities within changes, and the many inconsistencies, uncertainties and spontaneities, exist in and constitute ‘China’. This kind of more nuanced and grounded understanding of ‘What is China’, I argue, is a necessary basis and an important task for future research that concerns China, to which this book can act as a valuable example.” — Dave Featherstone (University of Glasgow)
