This thesis examines the role of internet use in migrants’ participation in, and articulation of, rising Chinese modernity. It explores the ways in which transnational subjectivity is produced through this process. It investigates how migrants’ various uses of the internet construct and make sense of their connections with China. It demonstrates a new generation of subjectivity among Chinese transnationals that is tech-savvy, modern and triumphal – a subjectivity embedded in the exchange between the (macro) political economy of China’s rise and the (micro) everyday practices surrounding the internet. This is an ethnographic study focusing on an emerging population within the broader Chinese diaspora; that is, mainland Chinese professionals who migrated for higher education and professional training in recent years as a result of China’s reform and economic power. This study locates its enquiries in three offline-grounded institutions – ethnic organisations, states and families. These institutions pre-date the internet but increasingly turn to the technology for transnational and local connections. Regarding Chinese organisations, utilising the internet to build co-ethnic sociality is read as a symbolic practice that signals the users’ belonging to a technologically-advanced, mobile and wealthy sector within the broader idea of the Chinese community. On the role of the state, internet use provides new modes of migrants’ access to China’s state-led development projects, thus opening up new spaces for the state’s disciplinary power to be exercised. This digital governance is enabled by a discourse of Chinese triumphalism constructed by both the state and the migrants. Regarding families, the digitalisation of the gendered division of labour in transnational families provides evidence of the segmented nature of China’s digital modernity and disrupts the triumphal portrait of transnational modernity constructed among the elite-stratum migrants. Overall, this study develops a dialogue between two literatures. On the one hand, it adds to diasporic internet studies by introducing an offline-grounded, geographically-informed approach and by bringing transnational modernity into its research agenda. On the other hand, it draws on Nonini and Ong’s (1997) theorisation of Chinese transnationalism as alternative modernity and further adds to this theorisation with a focus on internet technology and a discussion of the impacts of China’s rise. It contributes to human geography by revisiting a key concept in this discipline – transnationalism – with a discussion of the interweaving impacts of information technology and the geopolitical shift of China’s rising modernity.

The topic of infrastructure investment has emerged as a critical public policy issue over the last thirty years as governments grapple with an infrastructure deficit that has become one of the great global challenges of our time. Through the simultaneous processes of neo-liberalisation and globalisation, the urban infrastructure landscape has emerged as an attractive investment area for large financial institutions. With the recent Global Financial Crisis further exacerbating both the funding and growth lifting needs of nations, the urgency of linking institutional investors with urban infrastructure assets is more apparent than ever. This thesis looks at the evolving dynamics associated with the growing involvement of the financial industry in the provision of urban infrastructure assets. This is achieved by using a relational perspective, studying the interactions of financial actors, while simultaneously being aware that these decisions are made within a larger political economic context. It is argued that the complex, heterogeneous and long-term nature of institutional infrastructure investing requires a multi-disciplinary relational economic geography framework. Specifically, relational theory is used to explore the informational content and geographical structure of the infrastructure financial product, the influence of government decision-making, the corporate governance of infrastructure investments and the investment relationship between investors and financial intermediaries. Despite exponential growth in the field over the last decade, the infrastructure financial product has a level of sophistication and obscurity that prohibits it from being classed a transparent investment area, highlighting the importance of a relational approach to investments. From the case study on Auckland International Airport Ltd., it is shown that through a relational form of light-handed regulatory contract, the government plays a central role in affecting the favourable performance of an economically significant asset. The explication of the Spanish-led ADI consortium acquisition of UK airport operating company BAA illustrates the need for ‘glocal’ infrastructure governance to incorporate a wider stakeholder perspective as well as an appropriate shareholder wealth maximisation strategy. And finally, through analysing the relationships between investment partners for the infrastructure investment process, investment consultants are playing a crucial role to help align interests and promote the long-term relational approach to investing for the infrastructure asset class. In an age where infrastructure investment has been recognised by many nations around the world as the most important growth lifting strategy, this thesis provides a deeper understanding of how a relational approach can facilitate successful private institutional infrastructure investment.

Thesis (M.S.)--Indiana University, 2009. / Department of Geography, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Owen J. Dwyer, Jeffrey S. Wilson, Scott M. Pegg. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-168).

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Global human regionalization often depends heavily on conventions, especially the country model. Standardized “countries” are used as default regions, and influence other regionalizations as well. Proposed here is the preference for multiple independent systems of regions based on empirical criteria specific to each field of inquiry. These regions, defined by attributes of the landscape, would subsume formal and functional regions alike, as well as the very similar “trait geographies” and “process geographies”. Two specific inquiries are studied, politics and language; in both cases, existing data tend towards the conventional. A primary empirical regionalization for politics can be based on effective government control. A primary empirical regionalization for language can be based on mutual intelligibility of vernacular dialects. Examined in political geography are concepts of juridical and empirical statehood and the question of state territoriality; examined in linguistic geography are the question of language versus dialect and the standard reference ‘Ethnologue’.