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Pseudo-public space in Chinese shopping malls: rise, publicness and consequences

As hinted by its subtitle, this book presents Wang’s empirical findings that neoliberal capitalism led to the rise of pseudo-public space in China in recent three decades. The interplay between capital investors, the state, and the customers, within neoliberal capitalism, influences the publicness of those spaces. As a result, the rise of pseudo-public space brings up socio-spatial, economic and environmental consequences for China. Besides, Wang attempts to contribute to the theoretical debates about whether the privatization of urban space would lead to the end of public space. Wang considers two schools of property rights: the conventional school has a pessimistic view that privatization harms public interests, and the natural rights school optimistically suggests privatization helps create new forms of public life. Wang criticizes both sides for considering publicness as a binary concept with a clear public/private distinction. Instead, urban space should be understood as a continuum and relativities space, and thus refreshing the understanding of property rights involved. This theoretical standpoint shapes how Wang develops his ‘scoring’ methodology to assess the publicness of urban space, its ‘more public’ and ‘more private’ features.