UC Berkeley

On New Year’s Day, 2001, Beijing was struck by a massive dust storm, coursing through and glutting the city on the eve of a long-awaited Chinese century. On the backs of coursing winds and in the long, sandy wake of massive desertification afflicting inner, upwind China, dust storms portended a multi-faceted and multi-scaled environmental crisis in the coming, a shade on the glowing economic futures to which the Chinese party-state had yoked its post-Mao, post-ideological legitimacy. Combating dust storms in Beijing – and then, protecting places as far downwind as Seoul, Tokyo, and even the western US – introduced new political problems and actors into an emerging field of environmental governance, with the central government, through forestry agencies especially, scrambling to devise ways of holding the earth to the ground, against its dangerous tendency to lift into the air. In the course of this, geological, ecological, and meteorological things and processes came to the fore as problems of government.

My dissertation explores how dust and wind, in the first decades of the 2000s, were consequential in the elaboration of various emerging topologies of power. It explores how, in the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of ecological governance, how ecology, sociology, and economy are re-assembled into elements in a shifting governmental topology, aimed at the stabilization of a shifty, desertified environment as well as the maintenance of ‘social stability’ against the economic and ecological ravages of desertification. In particular, I argue that in the ecological governance of sand and storms, new deployments of an infrastructural political logic are reorganizing both sandy landscapes and the peoples on them – each is figured as structurally unsound and in need of stabilizing state intervention. In this, environmental interventions at many scales think the country, its land, and its people, as elements in a variegated infrastructural program aimed at the control and stabilization of shifty things. It explores tree-walls, sand barriers, and sand ecology and engineering on one hand as polytechnic and scientific interventions into intervening into shifting landscapes. In tandem, it explores how ‘environment’ as a historically situated and multiple concept in China inspires new ways of ordering a populace that is also taken to be shifty and chaotic. Through multi-sited ethnography, it explores, along a dust storm’s path, the emergent topologies of power that arise to confront dust and sand. This is a contribution to political and environmental anthropology, political ecology, China studies, and science and technology studies.