Shifting Sands is a truly beautiful object. Printed on high gloss paper, in full colour and including over a hundred illustrations and maps, the book offers a visual palimpsest of China's borders with its 14 neighbours. It is also a highly unusual book, straddling different formats and styles, and weaving personal observations into historical accounts, political events and more recent economic transformations. Its claim, on page 4, that no other book has attempted the task of analysing China's international borders in their entirety is somewhat overblown (I can think, for one, of Saxer and Zhang's 2016 book, The Art of Neighboring, Amsterdam University Press), but in its melding of archival and ethnographic data and in its comprehensive nature, it is certainly unique. Xiaoxuan Lu's focus on the transnational nature of borderlands, and in particular on the ways in which the physical and socioeconomic environment has been shaped by “multidirectional flows of materials and ideas” (p. 3), engages with and extends well beyond the BRI literature to argue that current sociopolitical and landscape formations are the direct outcome of a host of historical factors from both within and outside China.
The book consists of three separate sections, bookended by an introduction and a short epilogue. The Introduction is especially strong. It argues not only that China's contemporary borders have been largely inherited from the Qing dynasty, but also that BRI cartography is the heir of most rail, land and maritime connections originally established by colonial empires, often contrary to Chinese state interests. The infrastructure created by Western colonial powers for their political, military and economic aims – specifically to integrate border regions into their own spheres of influence – ended up getting repurposed and expanded into what would later become the BRI. This sets the stage for the rest of the book and explains the multiple temporal scales mobilized within it, as well as the novel and analytically valuable concatenation of different scales of analysis.
The first section of the book apprehends China's borders through the lens of “exchanges and flows,” with chapters on infrastructure, logistics, expertise and resources – each one a particular case study tracking China's rapid integration into the world market system. The “Infrastructure” chapter focuses on the development of COSTCO (China Ocean Shipping Company); “Logistics” is a study of CRCT (China Railway Container Transport Corporation); “Expertise” is on SINOMACH (China National Machinery Industry Corporation); and “Resources” looks at the China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation (COFCO). Each of these chapters retraces the evolution of these technologies and resources, from their humble beginnings in the 1950s to their contemporary global footprint, while drawing attention to their much earlier antecedents harking back to the colonial period. In sketching the planning and construction of these development projects as vehicles for China's nation-building through the circulation of ideology, expertise and technology, and its ultimate emergence as a global player, this section of the book, while important to include, occasionally reads like promotional material, and is, to my mind, the least interesting of the three.
By contrast, section two of the book, with its three case studies weaving in history, cultural and social memory, and personal ethnographic observations is a fascinating read. The first chapter in this section focuses on urbanization as an engine of economic growth and agent of poverty relief through the case study of the China–Laos borderland. The development of infrastructure in one of the poorest, but also one of the most ethnically diverse, counties on that border has brought some specific challenges, such as the commodification of nature and culture. In this chapter, Lu draws important insights both about the genealogy of such territorialization projects and about their transformative effects.
The second chapter, on road construction at the Kyrgyzstan–China border, makes similar points about the role of infrastructure and cross-border connectivity in transforming borderlands and, in this case, in addressing challenges specific to a “restive” region. The conversations between the author and Kyrgyz individuals speak to the very real economic and cultural impact China is having on a neighbouring country formerly within the Soviet/Russian sphere of influence. An important piece of the puzzle is unfortunately missing. Lu writes that China has been actively promoting collaborative partnerships “to combat terrorism and Islamic activism throughout the region” (p. 109), yet the repressive policies currently enacted in Xinjiang are never mentioned – an absence likely due to the author's own institutional constraints.
The third chapter of this section spotlights the China–Korea border, specifically the political, economic, historical and cultural significance of Mount Changbai/Baekdu for both Chinese and Koreans. In this insightful piece, the author discusses the commodification of water in the context of a culturally loaded environment, from the use of hot-spring spas as a tactic to redirect Korean “obtrusive acts of worship” (p. 200) to the muting of national origin in the marketing efforts of Korean and Chinese water-bottling companies. Cultural sensitivities, she concludes, remain potent beneath the ostensibly “open and porous borders enabled by consumerism and the globalization of culture” (p. 202) and retain the capacity to erupt into open discord.
As Lu herself notes (pp. 30–31) the third section of the book is akin to an atlas or cartographic encyclopaedia of China's 36 border entry points. Each location is illustrated with one map and accompanied by a one-page description providing a brief history of the site as a border crossing, as well as its current role and levels of infrastructural development. Given the atlas format, each entry is inevitably succinct. But the large maps include very useful information about checkpoints – information that is often difficult to obtain reliably. Through their inclusion of roads, infrastructure and topography, the maps also show at a glance the disparity and disequilibrium between the two sides in terms of urbanization levels and land use.
In her concluding remarks, Lu writes that the book is more closely aligned with her imagined geography than with the reality of China's borderlands (p. 301). While it is true that any book attempting a study of all of China's borders will necessarily only offer a partial view, Shifting Sands does a truly impressive job. In its inclusion of history, cultural meanings and economic developments, the book describes a complex, emerging and truly transformative geography. With the author writing across temporal scales, Shifting Sands is also able to anchor contemporary developments within a broader historical trajectory and as such offers more than a mere snapshot. It is a book that is likely to remain relevant for many years and that will serve as a valuable introduction to studies of Chinese nation-building and territorialization. Its unique approach will also make it a useful reference for scholars in border studies.
