Where is the bridge?

Abstract

I am one of those who frequently ‘move’ between Chinese economic geography and Anglophone economic geography. Being an economic geographer making a living in China, where economic geography is mainly practice-based, I have to do what the institutional context in the country allows me to do – for example, in terms of research-funding criteria and performance assessment (see Liu and Lu, 2002, for an introduction to economic geography in China). Being trained as a PhD student within the British geographical tradition in the late 1990s and interested in academic exchanges with Anglophone colleagues, I wish – and need – to learn what they are doing and to do academic research that can be understood by them. As such, I have suffered from struggling to understand, and to do, different economic geographies. My intellectual suffering, however, comes not only from the gap between doing practice and being academic, but also from pluralism on the side of academic economic geography. I believe that such suffering is quite common among many economic geographers outside of Anglo-American countries, and even some from these countries. I tend to consider that suffering is good as it forces us to refl ect on what we are doing, although ‘doing it rather than talking about it has been the dominant intellectual culture’ (Barnes et al., 2007). The gap between economic geographies in different countries was not seriously discussed until the First Global Conference on Economic Geography held in 2000 in Singapore. That conference attracted almost 200 participants from 30 countries and was signifi cant in stimulating sustained dialogue among economic geographers worldwide. It not only produced high-quality crosscountry dialogues in various sessions, but also resulted in two special issues in leading geographical journals – Journal of Economic Geography (2001) and Environment and Planning A (2002) – and initiated continuing refl ection on economic geography as a fi eld of global academic inquiry. Such refl ections led directly to the Second Global Conference on Economic Geography held in June 2007 in Beijing, China. The Beijing conference attracted 394 participants from 39 countries/ regions, strong evidence of the interest of scholars from different countries in global dialogues in the fi eld of economic geography. Two sessions among others at the Beijing conference were significant in promoting such cross-country dialogues: ‘What’s economic geography for?’ and ‘Reflexive economic geographies and China studies’. These two sessions again demonstrated the great diversity or ‘pluralism’ of economic geography that exists in different countries, and indicated the necessity to bridge the gaps or to develop ‘trading zones’ (Barnes and Sheppard, 2007) if the discipline is to advance as a fi eld of global academic inquiry. In this short commentary, I will reflect briefl y on this issue, raising questions (perhaps