Colonial legacies and peripheral strategies: Social-spatial logic of China’s communications development since 1840

Abstract

This article describes and makes sense of why and how China’s communications was undeveloped from the late Qing Dynasty through the Civil War. The purpose is to bring into sharp focus the imprint of global capitalism and imperialism on China’s domestic social-spatial relations as well as the well-entrenched underdevelopment dynamics in communications. It argues that communications, shaped successively by historical configurations of relationships, domesticated spatially China’s peripheral position in the world capitalist system. This spatiality, expressing internal underdevelopment and external subordination, had never been effectively overhauled and even remained true of socialist modernity after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which then has informed and deformed communications development since the country’s market reform.