contemporary China. Chinese private property
rights exist in a hybridized state of formal and
informal, stable and unstable, that is unique to
China at this particular historical juncture. The
current struggles between China and the United
States over the normalization (American-style)
of these property rights (particularly in the area
of patents and intellectual copyrights) can be
seen as a hegemonic struggle over the meaning
of capitalism between two varied economic
regimes. How this ideological struggle over the
‘nature and norms of capitalism’ plays out will
inevitably and powerfully affect world economic
standards and the capitalist cycle of accumula-
tion in the long term.
Just as a singular understanding of capitalism
remains limited, so too does a homogeneous
vision of information. The idea that new
information technologies will lead to a domina-
tion of local cultural identities relies largely on a
fetishized understanding of information techno-
logy – one in which the actual social relation-
ships necessary for the effective exchange of
information are elided. Information itself is
culturally specific, as it relies on a shared system
of meanings between the sender and the receiver.
As with linear, top-down understandings of
capitalism, the top-down view of information as
a process controlled primarily through access to
technology and by bureaucratic power structures
reduces the social and cultural complexity of its
actual originations and transnational evolutions.
Furthermore, as Smith (1996: 69) has pointed
out, the supposedly placeless ‘spaces of flows’
are always paralleled, albeit sporadically and
unevenly, by a ‘deepening spatial fixity’ – one
that is linked with strategic sites around the
globe. These sites are not irrelevant to the
exchange of information, nor can they be
conceptualized solely as the privileged,
‘switched-on’ areas of the world. Their location
in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo
and London is a location in history as well as in
space; it is that contextual location that impacts
on the message and infects the system with
particular cultural meanings.THE GEOPOLITICS OF THE
TRANSNATIONALTransnational theory, which emphasizes the
limits of homogenizing narratives such as
those that privilege a singular, western-centric
vision of capitalism or information, also forces areconceptualization of formerly static categories
and conceptual ‘power’ containers such as ‘the
nation’. State-centric narratives of containment,
the bread and butter of political science discus-
sions in the past, have given way to more
nuanced studies of the ‘boundary-drawing prac-
tices and performances that characterize the
everyday life of states’ (Ó Tuathail and Dalby,
1998: 3). Through its emphasis on relationships
and interactions rather than static formations and
containment, transnationality encourages new
ways of envisioning the nation, the state and the
hyphenated properties and relations of the
nation-state.
The bulk of geopolitical theory in the past
focused on state autonomy, the borders and ‘out-
sides’ of the state, and interstate relations
(Walker, 1993). Cold War rhetoric employed the
language of power strategies and containment
and the spaces of the nation were described in
terms that suggested both their inevitability and
their naturalness. National landscapes were
depicted as receding nostalgically into the past
and extending indefinitely into the future in a
timeless yet necessary manner. The nationwas
seen as the best scale of analysis for theorizing
both world politics and local politics. Further-
more, the practice of geopolitics itself was per-
ceived to be neutral and objective (Ó Tuathail,
1996; Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998).
Transnational theory that borrows from the
conceptual framework of poststructuralism
forces a continual rethinking of these older cate-
gories and general geopolitical assumptions.
Utilizing scales of analysis other than the nation,
for example, allows the posing of numerous
global, local and regional questions that cannot
be solved or discussed within a national politics
(Beck, 1998: 29). Furthermore, the geopolitics
of transnationality opens up questions of scale
through the emphasis on scale as produced
(rather than given) and on the interrelationship
between scales as of crucial import. As numer-
ous scholars such as Cox (1993), Smith (1995),
Brenner (1998) and Katz, Newstead and Sparke
(Chapter 26 in this volume) have shown, scale is
a central component of capitalist restructuring.
Scales are constantly reworked in conjunction
with territorial organization and the crises
associated with global capitalist restructuring.
Brenner writes, ‘spatial scales constitute a
hierarchical scaffolding of territorial organiza-
tion upon, within, and through which the capital
circulation process is successively territoriali-
zed, deterritorialized and reterritorialized’
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