Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China’s Contemporary Borderlands is a fascinating dive into China’s historical and contemporary contestations of its 64 “category 1” Inner Asian borders, analysed through the lens of the materiality of transport infrastructure. The author, Xiaoxuan Lu, was educated as an architect and landscape architect, and is currently a professor at the University of Hong Kong. In her book, Lu conceptually frames the plethora of projects, plans, and policies of China’s expansive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in relation to broader landscape concepts, history, and continuous nation-building. She underscores the deliberate and unintended consequences of the territorial transformation of China’s Inner Asian borders in relation to the longue durée and immediate history. The insightful case-based texts and collection of materials – from archives to fieldwork on through carefully constructed cartographies – offer a novel perspective to understandi...
]]>Björn Alpermann’s book is a translation into French of a first version published in German in 2021 by the same publishing house under the title Xinjiang – China und die Uiguren. The author justifies this duplication in the preface to the French edition, noting that the crisis experienced in Xinjiang is ongoing, and that in his opinion, “there does not seem to be a study in French that examines the conflict within its historical context” (p. vii). In the general preface, Alpermann explains that his keen interest in the Xinjiang region dates from his first trip there in the mid-1990s, the second having been cancelled following the interethnic troubles of July 2009. Alpermann also states that from a scientific angle, his interest in Xinjiang and the Uyghurs forms part of his teaching of China’s policies on minorities, and he writes that “[his] analysis is based on secondary sources and not on a field study [that he himself would have] carried out” (p. IX).
Notably academic in tone, Alp...
]]>Princeton anthropologist Jerry Zee has published a groundbreaking book on the management of dust storm and air quality in China. Borrowing from innovative works in the anthropology of globalisation and environmental humanities (Hugh Raffles, Anna Tsing), Zee follows scientists and engineers with the method of science and technology studies, avoiding the opposition between subject and object, to ask: what kind of being is a “continent in dust”? Resisting the tropes of the “Yellow Peril,” which depicts China as an environmental threat, he shows that in the monitoring and modelling practices implemented by these scientists and engineers, a new form emerges that doubles the earth of China by the atmosphere of China, as a series of dust storms troubling air quality in China and beyond. This double entity, which he calls a weather system, goes beyond the opposition between earth and sky, or between geology and meteorology, to become a new entity at stake in global environmental debates. Z...
]]>This fascinating collection of essays, edited by Charlie Qiuli Xue and Guanghui Ding, focuses on the history and development of China’s cross-border practice of designing and constructing buildings in other countries, especially in the developing world such as Africa, a topic that has been long overlooked. Drawing on the editors’ historical survey of China’s state-owned design institutes spanning seven decades, this volume provides a focused examination of Chinese architects’ overseas work. These interdisciplinary studies, contributed by scholars and design practitioners with diverse backgrounds, reveal the dynamics and complexity of China’s architectural diplomacy in the Global South. They help international communities gain a better understanding of the contexts, processes, and implications of this transnational, material, aesthetic, technological, and ideological engagement.
Transnational architectural practice is an important and visible part of our globalised world. American, B...
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