The Wealth & Poverty theme presents a research talk by Dr. Max D. Woodworth on “Ghosts in the Shell Game: Informal Finance and Urban Imaginaries in China’s Western Mining Frontier” on Thursday, Oct. 27, from 3-4:30 p.m. in Alden 319.
Dr. Max D. Woodworth
Woodworth is Assistant Professor of Geography at Ohio State University. He is an urban geographer with a research and teaching background in political economy, Chinese land policy, and resource geographies. His research has focused to date on urban development in coal-mining regions of China’s northwest with an emphasis on the local politics of large-scale land-development projects in resource boomtowns. By examining urban transformation in regions constructed as marginal through national polities and economies, his work re-theorizes the frontier in its relation to multi-scalar flows of capital and city-building practices. Two current projects he is currently undertaking examine new geographies of energy in China and comparative boomtown dynamics in Asia and the United States. His work has been published in Professional Geographer, Geoforum, the Journal of Asian Studies, and Inner Asia, among other journals.
Abstract: A resource bonanza in Ordos Municipality, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, in the 2000s fueled broad-based participation in informal lending networks and drove a remarkable, but short-lived, phase of urban expansion and private wealth accumulation. Local non-bank lending networks inflated enormous credit and property bubbles, which ultimately burst in 2011 with severe ramifications for Ordos’ urban expansion and households’ livelihoods. Informal finance is at the heart of Ordos’ current notoriety as a “ghost town.” This talk explores the emergence of informal finance networks in Ordos, and assesses how finance funded the construction of new urban spaces and animated new urban lifestyles in a Chinese resource frontier. In considering the socio-spatial impacts of the financialization of the everyday environment in a frontier setting, the paper questions the nature of informal finance in China and brings attention to the means by which everyday residents of cities participate in urban expansion, rather than merely being the recipients of state-led urbanization.
This lecture is cosponsored by the Asian Studies Program of the Center for International Studies and Wealth and Poverty Theme.
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