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

Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics

by Jerry C. Zee

In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological 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 what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?

 

Genres: China

332 pages, Paperback

Published January 11, 2022

Reviews

[Tuck Rodi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was unlike any ethnography of the environment I had ever read before. It asks the question, what happens when china rises into the air? And the answer is an open ended, experimental interdigitation of politics, science, and dust that makes it wonderfully impossible to see any one of these figures outside of their contingent relations with the others. It links present meteorology to climate to climate politics without falling into the trap of man vs nature or nation-state vs natural disaster. The world doesn’t end in this book, people don’t appear as scrambling heroes struggling to forestall climate change, even as china rises into the air.