Foregrounding Infrastructural Capitalism: The Double Logic of High-speed Rail Development and its Class Conflicts in China

Abstract

China’s high-speed rail is an epochal project that marks the advent of infrastructural capitalism in the age of monopoly capital. It posits that China’s infrastructure projects, a distinctive form of geographies of capitalism, play several roles including technological, social, spatial-economic, and geopolitical, aimed at addressing the preceding economic crisis of 2008 and further expanding and consolidating territorial power. To conceptualize the contemporary moment of capitalist dynamics as infrastructural capitalism and its relationship to class conflicts, this paper moves beyond a dichotomy of the logic of capital and the logic of territorial power. This paper underscores the infrastructural projects’ political significance in creating invisible class contradictions, particularly leading to the individual and collective actions of a wide array of affected working-class masses. It contributes to the elucidation of the dialectical relation between the geographies of capitalism and labour geographies.