Abstract:

Efforts at urban e-mobility transition in China are of crucial global significance. Exploring these developments, however, demands significant reframing of dominant theories of socio-technical system transition to accommodate the strikingly different socio-political context of China to that of the global North where these theories have been developed. In particular, greater attention must be paid to issues of power, conceptualized as dynamic power/knowledge relations constitutive of social formations and evolving in interactive parallel with specific innovation trajectories. The authors have presented an analysis of the crucial global case study of urban mobility transition in China from a perspective that explores dynamic evolving power/knowledge relations of mobility systems. The authors illustrate such a productive reframing focusing on complex processes of empowerment and highlight that there remains relative stasis in the grand plan of a rapid transition to electric cars (EVs) in China's growing cities. In short, the power relational perspective on mobility systems transition opens the possibility that the dynamism and power momentum of innovation in China may be much more than just another case study of a struggling EV niche.