Who talks for Chinese urban studies? Assessing urban theory in a rapidly evolving field

This brief article aims to extend what has become a vibrant debate within Chinese urban studies concerning the subfield’s relation to urban theory. This debate is tied to other, analogous discussions shaping urban studies more broadly in recent years and that address themselves to the global scale of urban change. The purpose of this essay is to make legible and accessible the question of theorizing about and from urban China and how recent interventions have contributed to these debates to create a growing and diversifying subfield. The analysis addresses problems of particularism and generalization in the subfield, questions pertaining to exceptionalism and the uniqueness of China as a site of study, burgeoning conceptual innovations derived from urban Chinese settings, and the prospects of Chinese cities generating theory salient elsewhere.