While ‘neoliberalization’ is increasingly used to conceptualize concrete realities of China’s economic development, it is not employed in dialectical relation with China’s prevailing developmental ideology – ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’. This paper offers a fresh framework and research agenda from which to examine this relation. It argues that neoliberalization across China is a variegated process, formed and fractured by actually existing uneven state spatiality and the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) ostensibly contradictory historicization of a Marxian socialist end-state. How neoliberalization works simultaneously in/through multiple sites in China and consequently reproduces the CPC’s ideological legitimacy has become a theoretically significant question for research on geographical political economy.