Xuanyi Nie: Statecraft, Speculation, and the Territorialized Healthcare Infrastructures

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Abstract

This lecture explores the political economy of healthcare infrastructures in China. Drawing on three case studies, this lecture discusses how healthcare has been instrumentalized through the interplay of statecraft and private-sector speculative pursuits, which were contested and negotiated in spatial production and territorial governance. Driven by the aging population's medical needs and aspirations for technological independence in a shifting geopolitical landscape, China's central government has prioritized the healthcare industry and life-science research. Under these directives, entrepreneurial local governments have granted legitimacy to business actors to profit from territorialized healthcare consumption in "mega medical centers," leveraging their financial contributions for state-led healthcare reforms. Yet these actors often collaborate with hospitals and universities within the "university-healthcare nexus," aligning with state priorities while embedding healthcare businesses in profit-driven urban projects, thereby redirecting public initiatives toward speculative pursuits. Amid such interplays, state power, capital, and entrepreneurial hospitals have orchestrated "medical reterritorialization" as a spatial strategy that transcended cities' administrative boundaries and reshaped regional economic and healthcare orders. This lecture argues that healthcare infrastructures in China have transformed from social service providers to political and economic instruments deeply embedded in the broader tensions between state, market, and territorial logic.

Biography

Xuanyi Nie is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University at Buffalo. He is broadly interested in the dynamics of power and agency in shaping equitable and healthy urban futures, with a transnational focus encompassing China, Southeast Asia, and North America. His scholarship explores the political economy of healthcare and social infrastructures and examines their transformative roles in urban and community development. Xuanyi holds a Doctor of Design and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He has held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and has taught at the National University of Singapore, Roger Williams University, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

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