Continent in Dust: Experiments in a Chinese Weather System (Volume 10) (Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics)

In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. __Continent in Dust__ offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air? In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?

  Continent in Dust explores material permutations of sand and wind--the life and course of a Chinese dust storm, though successive phases of matter--as sites of political, anthropological, and scientific experiment. It moves from science stations, forestry and social management schemes, and sand-threatened cities in China's desertified interior, to the particulate politics of air-spacing in a dust-shocked Beijing, to the technical and political challenges of international meteorological exposures in Korea and the US, China's downwind. The manuscript offers an intervention into the political anthropology of Reform China and a new approach to studying environmental crisis as a site of social, economic, and geophysical conflict"-- Provided by publisher Apparatus A : nightwind -- Introduction : earthly interphases -- Apparatus B : the wind tunnel -- Machine sky -- Apparatus C : a sheet of loose sand -- Groundwork -- Apparatus D : five thousand years -- Holding patterns -- Particulate exposures -- Apparatus E : wildfires -- City of chambers -- Apparatus F : a sinocene -- Downwinds -- Apparatus G : monsters