Publication: “Village In the City” In China as Product of Population Tratification and Social Relationship Reproduction-Case of Jiangdong Village in Nanjing and Xibali Village in Xi’an
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Date
2017
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AESOP
Abstract
According to Marx’s definition, capital is a value in motion, and value is decided by social labor time necessarily put in the production of commodities. The capital’s motion can be divided into four phases: production, realization, allocation and value proliferation. The four phases form a cyclic process. Through this process, capitals go through infinite reproductions. It is an upward spiral course, but this cycle won’t continue perfectly forever. David Harvey says, when consumption is weak, in order to mitigate the overcapacity crisis caused by excess capital accumulation in production field, productive consumption is needed to stimulate economic growth. Current large scale infrastructure construction and urbanization construction in China is this process. These constructions consume a large amount of means of production like steel and cement, so values of steel and cement are realized, and excess capacity is used. Also, the Cold War after the Second World War and the large-scale urbanization of suburbs in America were effective measures of using productive consumption to mitigate excess capacity in production field. But the scale of Chinese urbanization is much larger. Within three years from 2011 to 2013, China consumed 6.5 billion tons of cement, which was even more than the total volume 4.5 billion tons consumed in the 20th century in America. The construction activities alone absorbed 25% global steel production. But Harvey believed that capitals transforming from production field to urban built environment just transferred and postponed the problem of excess accumulation of capitals but didn’t eliminate the problem. He also views the initial stage of current global economic crisis as ‘urbanization’s financial crisis’. Urban investments normally take a very long time, and it takes even longer time to get mature. So usually it’s very hard to judge when capitals are over accumulated or when over-accumulation will occur on investing in built environment.
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Book of proceedings: Annual AESOP Congress, Spaces of Dialog for Places of Dignity, Lisbon, 11-14th July, 2017
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