China’s Global Performatives: ‘Better City, Better Life’

Abstract

Historically, much-reproduced ideas of the global city have been largely Western-centric and significantly based on what sociologist Saskia Sassen has described as ‘the topographic moment’ (‘Global City’: 20). It is more than timely, then, to unravel ‘“Western” epistemological and ontological conventions of how to study and represent “the city”’ (Edensor and Jayne: 330) and to take account of places beyond the West in more appropriately diverse terms. Furthermore, Sassen, in an expansion of her own earlier theorizing of the global city, suggests that articulations of built environments are ‘increasingly inadequate when global and digital forces are part of the urban condition’; rather, she argues we need to think about place and materiality as ‘sites in one of several multi-sited circuits or networks’ (‘Global City’: 20). Performance, I argue here, is a crucial component to more processual topographies of the global city and participates in those multi-sited networks endemic to the efficiency of capital markets. George Yúdice has identified ‘the creation of transnational culture industries as complements of supranational integration’ (26) and, I suggest, these industries require the global city as both literal and figurative stage. This chapter looks at performances that traffic between the West and China’s cities and how, in different ways, they elaborate conditions of globalization.