Shifting Sands

Description

China’s land borders, shared with fourteen other nations, are the world’s longest. Like all borders, they are not just lines on a map but also spaces whose histories and futures are defined by their frontier status. An ambitious appraisal of China’s borderlands, Shifting Sands addresses the full scope and importance of these regions, illustrating their transformation from imperial backwaters to hotbeds of resource exploitation and human development in the age of neoliberal globalization.

Xiaoxuan Lu brings to bear an original combination of archival research, fieldwork, cartography, and landscape analysis, broadening our understanding of the political economy and cultural changes in China’s borderlands in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. While conventional wisdom looks to the era of Deng Xiaoping for China’s “opening,” Lu shows the integration of China’s borderlands into national and international networks from Sun Yat-sen onward. Yet, while the state has left a firm imprint on the borderlands, they were hardly created by China alone. As the Chinese case demonstrates, all borderlands are transnational, their physical and socioeconomic landscapes shaped by multidirectional flows of materials, ideas, and people.

How China’s borderlands transformed politically and culturally throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Xiaoxuan Lu is an assistant professor in the Division of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. She is the coauthor of From Crisis to Crisis, Interstitial Hong Kong, and Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative.

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction. Stratigraphy of China’s Borderlands

Part I. Exchanges and Flows

The International Development of China

Infrastructure: China Ocean Shipping Company (COSCO)

Logistics: China Railway Container Transport Corporation (CRCT)

Expertise: China National Machinery Industry Corporation (SINOMACH)

Resources: China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO)

Part II. Corridors and Concessions

China and the Transborder Subregions in Asia

Silk Road Urbanism: New Town Development in the China-Laos Borderlands

The Xinjiang Model: Road Construction in the Kyrgyzstan-China Borderlands

Shan-shui Memory: Water Commodification in the China-Korea Borderlands

Part III. Settlements and Memories

Characteristics of China’s Border Settlements

Southwestern Borderlands

Northwestern Borderlands

Northeastern Borderlands

Epilogue

Index

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 1 × 1 in