From “scriptedness” to “re-casing”: Rethinking the new turn of Chinese social and cultural geography and global knowledge production

This article examines the future “new turn” of Chinese social and cultural geography within the global configuration of knowledge production and asks how it might become an important force in reshaping that configuration. This turn is not a self-referential cycle of Chinese theory fetishism; rather, it arises from the interaction between two pressures: reflection on the cognitive modes through which global spatial knowledge is produced, and the pressure exerted by China’s complex, plural, and composite realities. The paper argues that the turn worth pursuing lies in a deeper reorganization of knowledge production itself. By advancing a deliberately provocative proposition—that China may never have been truly cased—it reconsiders the mechanism of casing and shifts attention from the identity politics of knowledge to the mechanisms of knowledge production. On the basis of a review of disciplinary development, the article suggests that the new turn of Chinese social and cultural geography is not a move from “the peripheral catching up with the center” to “parallel multicentricity,” but a movement toward a composite field of plural transitions through the processes of de-scripting and re-casing. The paper also discusses the potentially distinctive contributions Chinese social and cultural geography can make to the field globally. Finally, it argues that calling for a new model does not imply the invalidity of Anglo-American theory. China’s re-casing is not about adding more “Chinese cases,” nor about producing “a China that has been well explained”; rather, it is about shaping a field full of emergence. The article sketches a “forest ecology community” vision of theorizing and advocates a mode of knowledge production, that is, plural, polyphonic, interconnected, and coexistent in order to respond to the meta-question of where knowledge production should head after decentering. In this sense, the article offers not only a directional reflection on the future turn of Chinese social and cultural geography, but also epistemic resources from the Chinese field for the structural reconfiguration of global knowledge production.