Following the adoption of a socialist market economy in 1978, the Chinese city has accommodated radical changes in its urban industrial landscapes. In contrast with the large-scale reuse of industrial landscapes in the eastern Chinese cities, inland China has been witnessing the rapid disappearance of industrial heritage. The disparity of heritage conservation outcomes across urban China raises questions about why some leading cities conserve their heritage better or more readily than others, and why the same planning ideas, policies, and practice borrowed from elsewhere cannot be easily transferred or copied in the western cities. This paper applies the relational and territorial approach developed in the literature of urban policy transfer and mobilities to heritage studies. By conducting a case study in Chongqing, this paper examines how industrial heritage reuse has travelled as a global concept with its Chinese precedents to Chongqing, and why the idea has been diluted in the local context. The Chongqing case reveals that the heritage idea has travelled globally and nationally from eastern China and has mutated in respond to local circumstances. It is thus argued that the consequence of industrial heritage reuse can best be understood through a combined approach of relationality and territoriality.

Following the transnational flow of industrial heritage conservation, urban China has adopted a cultural strategy – adaptive reuse of industrial heritage – for the transformation of the inner-city industrial landscape. However, a wide gap exists between the concepts and outcomes of conservation practices in most urban regeneration projects. Taking Shanghai and Chongqing as cases, this study traces the origin, process, and outcomes of industrial heritage reuse ideas. The analysis unravels the rationale for the making of discourse on heritage in local urban policies or projects. The territorialization of an idea of adaptively reusing heritage for urban regeneration merely commenced on a poetic imagination but closed on a real estate dimension, which responds to local institutional contextual constraints. This study relates the relationality – territoriality approach to heritage studies, reveals industrial heritage reuse ideas on the move in China, and argues that the reshaping of industrial heritage reuse ideas entails territoriality and relationality.