2020 - 2021 Back

The Country and the City in Chongqing : Old Markets and New Geographies in Urbanizing Tongliang
Prof. Carolyn Cartier
University of Technology Sydney 

About the talk: Scholarship on central place theory and settlement systems in China by G. William Skinner catalyzed ideas about space and spatial analysis not only in China studies. In three influential articles on rural marketing, published in the Journal of Asian Studies, Skinner presented the distribution of market towns in China and predicted the decline and demise of periodic markets with modernization. Nevertheless, in towns in Chongqing, a heartland of Skinnerian research in historic Sichuan province, the numbers of markets have remained consistent since the 1940s. Why have they endured and in relation to what political-economic rationalities have they transformed? Based on fieldwork in Tongliang, a city district of Chongqing, this paper contextualizes the continuity of periodic markets in the “three rurals” debate since the 1990s and the city-town system of urbanization, evolving through complex state changes to subnational territory. The realities of going to market in county Chongqing suggest not only a reevaluation of modern ideas about the country and the city, but also theoretical revisions of spatial thought for research on the urban process in China and questions of territory in general.


About the speaker: Carolyn Cartier (AB, MA, PhD University of California, Berkeley) is Professor of Human Geography and China studies at the University of Technology Sydney. She is chief investigator of the Australian Research Council Discovery project, “Governing the City in China: The Territorial Imperative,” a collaborative project examining the establishment and expansion of cities through changes to subnational territory in China. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong in 2004–05, and is the author of Globalizing South China (2001, 2011) and co-editor of The Chinese Diaspora: Place, Space, Mobility and Identity (2003) with Laurence J. C. Ma, in addition to over seventy scholarly journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a collaborative book, The Urban Process in China: State Power, Territorial Economy, and the Future of the City.


Time:          12:00-13:30, Friday, 10 January 2020

Venue:        USC, 8/F, Tin Ka Ping Building, CUHK
Language:  English

Lunch Fee: Free Admission, HK$40.00 for Lunch