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Despite China's recent emergence as a major global economic and geopolitical power, its association with counterfeit goods and intellectual property piracy has led many in the West to dismiss its urbanization and globalization as suspect or inauthentic. In Underglobalization Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the "fake" and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China. Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Neves shows how piracy and fakes are manifestations of what he calls underglobalization-the ways social actors undermine and refuse to implement the specific procedures and protocols required by globalization at different scales. By tracking the rise of fake politics and transformations in political society, in China and globally, Neves demonstrates that they are alternate outcomes of globalizing processes rather than anathema to them.
List of contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. After Legitimacy 1
1. Rendering the City: Between Ruins and Blueprints 33
2. Digital Urbanism: Piratical Citizenship and the Infrastructure of Dissensus 61
3. Bricks and Media: Cinema's Technologized Spatiality 94
4. Beijing en Abyme: Television and the Unhomely Social 120
5. Videation: Technological Intimacy and the Politics of Global Connection 150
6. People as Media Infrastructure: Illicit Culture and the Pornographics of Globalization 169
Notes 169
Bibliography 227
Index 245
About the author
Joshua Neves
Summary
Focusing on a wide range of media technologies and practices in Beijing, Joshua Neves examines the cultural politics of the “fake” and how frictions between legality and legitimacy propel dominant models of economic development and political life in contemporary China.
