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Abstract

This paper critically evaluates the contemporary remaking of China's area studies and world geography as part of a nationalist project of spatial knowledge production, by examining an emerging landscape of individuals, institutions and ideologies. Two arguments are made. First, China's area studies and world geography are shaped by not only their milieus, but also the ‘milieu of milieus’ as defined and delimited by the state-disciplinary apparatus which impedes a geography–area studies interface. Second, both milieus are underpinned by reductive epistemologies, engendering depolitised discourses that omit critical self-reflections and other geographies of knowing. As well as offering insights for China's ongoing and unfinished ‘world-writing’, this paper draws particular attention to the geographical scales and spatialities of knowledge translation, consumption, circulation and reproduction.