Across the Chinese borderlands, investments in large-scale transnational infrastructure such as roads and special economic zones have increased exponentially over the past two decades. Based on long-term ethnographic research, Borderland Infrastructures addresses a major contradiction at the heart of this fast-paced development: small-scale traders have lost their historic strategic advantages under the growth of massive Chinese state investment and are now struggling to keep their businesses afloat. Concurrently, local ethnic minorities have become the target of radical resettlement projects, securitization, and tourism initiatives, and have in many cases grown increasingly dependent on state subsidies. At the juncture of anthropological explorations of the state, border studies, and research on transnational trade and infrastructure development, Borderland Infrastructures provides new analytical tools to understand how state power is experienced, mediated, and enacted in Xinjiang and Yunnan. In the process, Rippa offers a rich and nuanced ethnography of life across China's peripheries.

About the Author
Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University and "freigeist" Fellow (2020-2025) at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich. Willem van Schendel, Professor of History, University of Amsterdam and International Institute of Social History, the Netherlands. He works with the history, anthropology and sociology of Asia. Recent works include A History of Bangladesh (2020), Embedding Agricultural Commodities (2017, ed.), The Camera as Witness (2015, with J. L. K. Pachuau). See uva.academia.edu/WillemVanSchendel.

Reviews
Winner of the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG) Book Award (2021-2022)

"Carefully contextualized in the literature on Inner Asian borderlands and masterfully weaving in vivid ethnographic evidence, Rippa's book provides a compelling account of how the BRI is worked "on the ground" by traders and state officials, by local histories of exchange, and by grand narratives of frictionless connectivity. It surely will become an inspiring source of information for scholars of western China's borders, historians, social anthropologists, and human geographers alike."
- Henryk Alff, Journal of Borderlands Studies (2022)

"Borderland Infrastructures is a tour de force, and it should be required reading not only for researchers of contemporary China or the BRI, but also for anyone interested in the anthropology and geography of infrastructure, development, heritage, borders, and mobility"
- Emily T. Yeh, The Journal of Asian Studies, Volume 80, Issue 4, November 2021

"Rippa's analysis is a refreshing view from the ground, starkly positing the imageries of infrastructure development and social, cultural, political and ecological control used by the state with local worldviews about their transboundary connections spread over time, space and memory."
- Mirza Zulfiqur Rahman, Asian Studies Review, August 2021

"Borderland Infrastructures is essential reading for anyone interested in BRI, infrastructure. [...] Ethnographically rich and theoretically engaging, the book will be particularly useful to anthropologists, geographers, and other social scientists invested in better understanding the uneven contours of China's contemporary regional ambitions."
- Geoffrey Aung, Eurasian Geography and Economics, April 2021

"Providing a rich and original conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between development processes and state power in China, Borderland Infrastructures is a highly recommended read for students and scholars across disciplines, including political and economic anthropology, borderland studies, development studies and Asian studies."
-Henrik Kloppenborg Moller, The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, 41(1), 2023



Book Information
ISBN 9789463725606
Author Alessandro Rippa
Format Hardback
Page Count 282
Imprint Amsterdam University Press
Publisher Amsterdam University Press