Continent in Dust is an ambitious and intriguing book. A delightful read which should be widely utilized in teaching and discussions on contemporary China and planetary health and change. Jerry Zee presents us with, one could argue, entirely new ways of thinking about nature, the planet and the contemporary Chinese state, without any large presuppositions from earlier works or perspectives. He simultaneously engages with such works to build out his own uniquely complex perspective on the entanglements between global weather, ecosystems, and the Chinese state and continent. These musings and arguments are enhanced by in-depth ethnographic engagements with people, places, plants and animals from Inner Mongolia to Beijing, South Korea and the Pacific coast of California. Perhaps one minor critique is that Zee's ethnographic depth slips a bit in later chapters and sections in favour of larger macro-level analyses compared to the first several chapters where it is at its finest.

The book's title metaphorically represents Zee's primary arguments and suppositions in two distinct ways. China and East Asia are both a continent shrouded in dust, and the dust from China's inland desert shores – as Zee refers to them, that is, suspended above China, Korea, Japan, the Pacific and the United States – can itself be thought of as a continent of weather patterns and changes. Zee builds the book around three questions: 1) “How the problem of materiality in ethnography can be brought to bear on questions of governance, politics, and the state” (p. 12); 2) “How can the dynamism and open-endedness of weather systems in wind-sand stoke open-ended transformative modes of governance?” (p. 12); 3) “How might ethnography be reconfigured and extended to attend to questions of planetary and political emergence where they crosshatch with one another?” (p. 13). Of particular interest to readers of The China Quarterly and to myself, as an ethnographer of environmental issues in contemporary China, is Zee's suggestion to step away from the often-bifurcated approaches to understanding contemporary political economy in China as being either purely socialist or liberal and market driven. In his introduction, Zee, building upon the work of Lisa Rofel on the unplanned and spontaneous but seemingly planned nature of contemporary China's political economy states that with respect to understanding environmental politics and issues, he “proposes tracking late socialism as an experimental formation that offers a view of Chinese environmental politics that does not simply follow out a fixed plan…” (p. 13).

To move through addressing the book's overriding questions and concerns, Zee breaks his chapters into three distinct sections separated by short interludes he calls apparatuses, meant to hold up and support the ethnographic chapters. Part one, “Wind-Sand,” includes three ethnographically rich chapters on sand control and deserts in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, examining a variety of state interventions such as tree-planting programmes and economic incentives to relocate pastoralists to towns and cities. These chapters provide rich personal stories from local villagers, government officials and other actors geographically located at the upwind source of China's continent in dust. Part two, “Fine Particulate Matter,” includes two chapters set in Beijing analysing the controversies of PM2.5 monitoring that arose when the US embassy released their monitoring data to the public against the will of the Chinese state, with a second chapter focusing on a variety of interesting interactions between citizen activists, scientists and artists with the particulate air and dust found in Beijing. Part three, “Continent in Dust,” concludes the book by examining different downwind nations and their interventions with Chinese particulate air, including South Korean work to plant trees in inner China's deserts, and the ways in which US scientists analyse Chinese particulates and pollution as air arrives across the Pacific to California. As mentioned, some chapters in parts two and three, in particular chapter four, “Particulate exposures” on PM2.5 in Beijing and chapter six, “Downwinds,” lose some of the fine-grained ethnography found earlier in the book. Chapter six is then greatly enhanced and boosted though by the final “Apparatus G,” which includes several interesting stories such as that about mercury mixing with Chinese particulate air on the California coast and other musings on living with monsters in a Sinocene world.

A common thread or novel suggestion throughout the book, which the apparatuses work to support, is that our current era of a planetary connection and perhaps one could even say collapse could very well be termed a Sinocene era just as much as an Anthropocene. Zee does not argue for the use of one of these terminologies over the other, but provides several vignettes highlighting how China's dust, weather systems and political posturing affect the global environment, political economy, and individual ecosystems and beings far beyond its national borders. Two of many such examples include Xi Jinping's major speech about China becoming a leader against global climate change as introduced in “Apparatus F. A Sinocene,” and an incredibly fascinating story about scientists tracking chemical accumulation in trophic levels on the California coast, where Chinese chemical particulates from the air have mixed with once-benign mercury left over from the California gold rush to create new heavily toxic inorganic pollutants.

Continent in Dust makes many very important and novel contributions to the study of contemporary China's political economy and how this plays out in global environmental politics and planetary health. The idea presented of the possibility of living in a Sinocene era is novel and should be lauded and widely acknowledged and read for discussion among scholars, graduate students and advanced undergraduates. Whether or not one agrees with this concept, Zee provides excellent fodder for discussion over China's role in the configuration of global environmental change. Within anthropology, and environmental anthropology in particular, it is my sincere hope that this book will gain wide readership and traction beyond merely those working in and studying China. For a long time the canon of environmental anthropology has tended to ignore incredible ethnographic works from China. Zee excellently makes the case that today's environmental anthropology should not only pay attention to China but begin to centre China as a mode and locale of analysis in the potential era of the Sinocene, with China's continent in dust existing far beyond national borders.