Frontier Boomtown Urbanism in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

Ordos Municipality, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has emerged as one of China’s wealthiest places, with an economy driven by massive expansion of the local coal industry. This essay examines how this formerly poor region has experienced breakneck urban growth, becoming a resource-driven frontier boomtown. The frontier boomtown urbanism of Ordos highlights the impulse toward urban construction of the periphery that aspires to catch up with the metropolitan center and to articulate its own centrality through such urbanity

Frontier Boomtown Urbanism in Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region

Ordos Municipality, in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, has emerged as one of China’s wealthiest places, with an economy driven by massive expansion of the local coal industry. This essay examines how this formerly poor region has experienced breakneck urban growth, becoming a resource-driven frontier boomtown. The frontier boomtown urbanism of Ordos highlights the impulse toward urban construction of the periphery that aspires to catch up with the metropolitan center and to articulate its own centrality through such urbanity

Where Is the City? Excavating Modern Beijing and Shanghai in Textual and Visual Cultures

William Schaefer. Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925-1937. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. 304 pp. $95 (cloth);$27 (paper/e-book). Weijie Song. Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 320 pp. $74 (cloth). Two new books have recently contributed to the body of research focused on Chinese urbanism in the early twentieth century: William Schaefer’s Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–1937 and Weijie Song’s Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography. As their titles suggest, both books are directly concerned with one of China’s great cities, each of which has received lavish attention from scholars in the past. But the approaches of these books do not fit in the genre of urban biographies; instead, Schaefer and Song treat their subject cities as social-spatial artifacts generated through a host of material and symbolic presences articulated in an array of visual and literary cultural productions, a fair portion of which has been overlooked in the existing literature. As such, each author’s respective city takes shape as a space through which to advance intricate and highly original arguments about images, representation, text, culture, space, history, and, of course, the city..

Irrigation Society in China’s Northern Frontier, 1860s-1920s

In this article, the authors examine the social and spacial organization of irrigation systems in the Hetao region (in current-day western Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region) during the late Qing and early Republican periods. Counter to Karl Wittfogel’s thesis on the inevitability of centralized state bureaucracy in the formation and management of a “hydraulic civilization,” the authors suggest that non-state actors played a decisive role in the construction of irrigation systems in this region on the northern periphery of the Chinese empire and the frontier of agricultural expansion. Their findings are more closely in line with Clifford Geertz’s work in Bali and other more recent studies of irrigation societies, in that they demonstrate that the land-owning Mongol aristocracy, Han Chinese immigrant cultivators and traders, as well as the Catholic Church formed a network of land conversion agents, labor supply, construction management, and finance. These networks of non-state actors were decisive in building extensive hydraulic projects and shaping a multinucleated territorial politics in the northern frontier of the empire

Exploring China’s borderlands in an era of BRI-induced change

China’s borderlands have received increased investment and policy attention since Beijing formally launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. This special issue, comprised of four research articles and a photo essay, is designed to provide a timely intervention into the growing literature seeking to situate and assess this important policy campaign. Drawing on extended ethnographic fieldwork in China’s southwestern, northwestern, and northern borderlands, the contributing authors analyze recent borderland transformations against the backdrop of the BRI. However, by shifting the analytical focus to prioritize voices and events in borderlands, the papers de-center Beijing-centric discourse on the BRI, and provide urgent reminders of region-specific geographies and histories. Taken together, the papers underscore the persistent social complexity of borderland situations, revealing intricate processes of resistance, adaptation, and muddling through, while highlighting continuities and ruptures associated with the present moment