The book focuses on the urban dimension of global China, especially regarding the impacts of its urbanising dynamics on the (re)imaginings and manifestations of global urban futures. It situates China’s urban question in contemporary global change, and vice versa, by understanding the rise of global China as an urban process that weaves together compressed spaces, variegated times and trans-scalar power dynamics in the making of global capitalism.

The overseas expansion of China’s economic influence has long been foregrounded in media reports and policy debates, especially with the rise of the Belt and Road Initiative that has turned China into one of the key investors in the global South. The term Global China has been widely adopted to depict the geopolitical dimension of this immense flow of capital. This edited volume explores the urban manifestation of “Global China” at different scales and involving diverse actors, discussing the ways in which the urban has been reconfigured by China’s global expansion and uncovering the differentiated modes of speculative and spectacular urban production at present. Observing from Ghana, India, Malaysia and China, chapters in this book collectively make theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions to recognise the dynamics of speculation, articulation and translation in global capitalism, where China plays an increasingly significant role.

Three main themes have guided the book’s interrogation of what global China implies. These include: (a) transplanting models and urbanism; (b) multi-scalar construction of temporality; and (c) situating the urban China model in global capitalism.

These aspects mark the core of the book’s endeavour to extend the critique of our changing urban conditions at present. This book was originally published as a special issue of Urban Geography.