China's Geographical Political Economy of Tizhi: Mirrors, Operating Architecture, and Uneven Exposure

Abstract

This dissertation argues that China’s geographical political economy is best understood by moving from critique of inherited external categories to reconstruction through endogenous concepts and then to tracing the uneven costs of recalibration. It begins from a knowledge problem: China has repeatedly been interpreted through model-seeking vocabularies generated elsewhere, especially around the “China Model.” Article 1 shows that these debates function less as coherent theories than as mirror effects through which external observers project ideological crisis, disciplinary fatigue, and geopolitical desire onto China. It develops a typology of recurrent mirror forms and uses it to clear conceptual ground for a different analytic approach.The dissertation then reconstructs tizhi (体制) as a core category for understanding Chinese governance. Article 2 argues that tizhi is best understood not as a static “system” but as a Party-led operating architecture that preserves programmable reversibility: the capacity to widen, narrow, suspend, and partially reopen permissions without making each adjustment appear as a foundational rupture. Using hukou reform and selective urban incorporation, it introduces the permission corridor as a mid-level concept for bounded, revocable, and territorially differentiated channels of conditional access. A comparison of Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an shows that reversibility is geographically routed through ranked jurisdictions and uneven administrative environments. Article 3 follows the same governing logic into China’s 2020–2023 platform-governance cycle and asks where the costs of recalibration landed. Using a source-linked exposure ledger covering ten corporate groups and thirty-one coded intervention steps, it shows that exposure was patterned rather than random. Burdens clustered through boundary position, functional rank, and governing mode, and were routed through differentiated organizational and territorial interfaces. Taken together, the dissertation contributes to China studies and, significantly, to the political geography of China by challenging model-based misrecognition, to political and economic geography by theorizing tizhi as a state-spatial architecture, and to methodology by combining reflexive critique, endogenous concept work, and trace-based comparison. Its central claim is that China’s political economy is best understood as an architecture of conditional incorporation, programmable reversibility, and uneven exposure.