Despite China's leading role in the construction of infrastructure over the past decades, the most influential paradigms for the study of infrastructure in the social sciences originate from research conducted elsewhere. This introduction to the special section “Chinese Infrastructure: Techno-politics, Materialities, Legacies” seeks to address this apparent gap, and contributes to building an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China studies field. To do so, it pushes forward an understanding of infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions. We draw from two strands of inquiry: recent efforts to rethink the materiality of infrastructures not as an inert or stable basis upon which more dynamic social processes emerge, but rather as unstable assemblages of human and non-human agencies; and scholarship that explores the often hidden (techno-)political dimensions of infrastructures, through which certain intended and unintended outcomes emerge less from the realms of policy and implementation and more from the material dispositions and effects of infrastructural formations. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China's approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than we have seen thus far.

This article investigates the role of foreign technical experts in developing China's aviation infrastructure from the 1980s to the present. Focusing on a series of training and technical aid programmes, it traces the influx of critical know-how from Europe, Japan and North America during the period of reform and opening up. Through fieldwork conducted at airports in Beijing, Hong Kong and Shanghai – and expert interviews with architects, planners and engineers – the article sheds light on the instrumental role played by foreign technical experts. By establishing a leading-edge set of airport planning practices, these aviation professionals accelerated the modernization of China's transport infrastructure and its reintegration into the world economy. Moreover, by positioning China as a global leader in infrastructure development, they laid the technical foundations for Chinese foreign policy endeavours that seek to export an infrastructure-led model of economic development to Africa, Asia and the former Soviet sphere.

This paper proposes an infrastructure analytic for exploring the urbanizing landscapes of China's “national new areas.” In an effort to develop a less city-centred approach to the transformations underway in these spaces, I consider the new area as an “infrastructure space” in which the conventional distinctions between rural and urban have become increasingly meaningless. Such an approach draws our attention to the ways large-scale infrastructures of connectivity are driving a decentred form of urban development in which the livelihoods of residents are shaped by access to networks more than proximity to city centres. Based on case-study research of urbanizing villages and the rapid transformation of rural livelihoods in Gui'an New Area in Guizhou province, I suggest that an infrastructure analytic sheds light on the ways national new areas can be understood as particular events in an unfolding regime of circulation that has come to dominate urban forms worldwide.

China's west has long been framed as an undeveloped frontier, set apart by poverty and a resource-based economy. Since the 2000s, however, utility-scale renewable energy infrastructure has expanded rapidly in western China, promising local economic benefits tied to national low-carbon transition. This paper contends that these benefits have been precarious and unevenly distributed. I argue that utility-scale renewable energy has remade western China as a “low-carbon frontier,” a resource-rich region that generates low-carbon value for the national green economy. I highlight three features of low-carbon frontiers: they are constructed as spaces of exploitable low-carbon resources, creating an investment boom; they are enclosed through new land arrangements and infrastructure construction, rapidly and with little coordination; and they are reliant on external markets and policy decisions, entrenching dependency. These conditions make it difficult for frontier regions to capture sustained economic development benefits from the boom in the absence of persistent central state supports. I analyse these features by comparing two sets of technologies with similar, but ultimately diverging, trajectories: small and large hydropower in China's south-west, and solar and wind in the north-west.

Rapid urbanization in 21st-century China has been fraught with contested demolition, overdevelopment and shoddy infrastructure with short lifespans. By viewing this infrastructure as having “high metabolism” and examining the urban scrap trade that is fuelled by its material outputs, this article challenges a common assumption that such a form of urbanization is merely wasteful and problematic. Crucially, such urbanization also puts rural migrants and scrap into motion in a way that helps to reproduce its form. This occurs by generating socio-material nodes of scrap trading wherein migrants make the most of temporarily stable situations with entrepreneurialism. The nodes are spaces of “suspension” shaped by challenges including cheap rental housing that is often targeted for demolition and frequent harassment from the authorities. However, the challenges do not prevent scrap traders from caring for kin, attending to human sentiments and sometimes achieving social mobility.

This study examines the factors that affect the choice of location for foreign direct investment (FDI) in China. We identify three groups of factors that may affect the location choice by foreign firms: agglomeration economies, infrastructure, and institutional changes resulting from the economic reform. The study utilizes the most recent data from China's industrial census for the empirical testing. The findings show that agglomeration economies, in particular the clustering of foreign firms and domestic firms, exert the strongest effect on FDI location. Higher FDI concentration tends to attract more foreign firms. The clustering of domestic firms exerts a negative effect on FDI locations. Better infrastructure (electricity, telecommunications, and road) and greater institutional change (open policies, privatization, and legal development) also show positive effects on FDI location. The size of the local economy does not seem to affect the choice of location of FDI.