In Borderland Infrastructures, Alessandro Rippa examines how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), touted by the Chinese government as lifting poor areas out of poverty into modernity and “investing in its border regions, fostering cross-border exchanges” (p. 38), in fact erases local cross-border histories, marginalizes and impoverishes minority traders, and in the case of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, incarcerates and effectively “disappears” them.
Rippa used what he calls “itinerant ethnography” to follow itinerant local traders to discover their histories, relations and networks. He focusses on border nodes along the China/Burma border and on the China/Pakistan border, sites that reveal the coherence of Chinese state strategies as well as differences related to local histories, products, networks and the degree of perceived national security concerns.
The book is divided into three parts: proximity, curation and corridor. Rippa defines traders’ proximity as ““informal’ practices [that] are embedded in institutional and infrastructural landscapes that they contribute to re-making and legitimizing through specific encounters with state authorities” (p. 64). These practices are enacted through historical links, kinship and local and regional geographies, and are reconfigured by changing connections, bad weather, new goods, appearing and disappearing markets and other markers of the practical world. As an example, Rippa describes Ali, a Shia from Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, who shuttles between Kashgar (China), Rawalpindi, Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi in Pakistan. Ali is constantly on WeChat to assess the changing “players, commodities, regulations, and technologies” (p. 69) in various sites and at border crossings.
In Yunnan, Rippa focuses on three trading sites, including Tengchong, formerly famous for trade in Burmese jade and amber. As China's relations with Burma fluctuated from support for the Communist Party of Burma (CPB) to support for the government in Yangon, trade in jade, timber and narcotics waxed and waned through practices of proximity. In 1992 the Chinese government made Tengchong a provincial level port as part of the Tengchong–Myitkyina Road to “open up” trade to Southeast Asia. Following the 1998 Yangtze River flood and restrictions on logging in China, an explosion of timber imports flowed in from Burma, a lucrative trade that lasted for ten years until forests in Burma were nearly exhausted. As Rippa explains, the timber trade made the border, complete with border markers, customs houses and immigration services. Local middlemen continued to make the trade possible, but state plans for roads and regulations marginalized long-time minority traders while Han investors in timber became rich.
To exemplify his notion of curation, Rippa focusses on the Drung in the Dulong Valley of Yunnan. The Drung used to rely on shifting cultivation and timber for their livelihoods but following state prohibitions on these activities, the state engaged in projects to lift the Drung out of poverty and into modernity. By curation, Rippa means the effort to describe the Drung as “primitive and the Dulong Valley as a wasteland” (p. 113). The people and their landscape need to be curated to heal the disease of backwardness, a political project to impose state control in the guise of the state “as a giving entity” (p. 134), providing new “Drung-style” houses, welfare, education, subsidized TVs and smart phones. As Rippa notes, these provisions made the Drung more dependent on the state without improving their livelihoods. Instead, the Dulong Valley became a tourist spectacle, erasing Drung culture even while promoting Drung “heritage.”
Similarly, the state remade Kashgar into a tourist site by reconstructing Kashgar's old town, promoting “cultural prosperity” through imitation Islamic architecture while eliminating Islam (p. 145). The purpose was “to redefine Uyghur-ness [as] integral to the reconstruction of Kashgar's old town and lay bare the material and ideological foundations for producing new Uyghur subjects” (p. 145). In the process, many Uyghurs had to move to the outskirts as marginalized and impoverished residents (p. 146). Again, as in the Drung case, “processes of heritage-making, development, and control are closely intertwined” (p. 153).
The theme of corridor is illustrated by the role of the BRI in Xinjiang and into Pakistan. The alleged purpose of the BRI was “to foster cross-border ties and generate economic opportunities for local ethnic minorities” (p. 146). In practice, the road is an instrument of control, allowing certain people and goods to pass and others to be impeded or disallowed. With China's wars on terror beginning in November 2001, Uyghurs were designated as terrorists and in ensuing years Kashgar has been transformed by surveillance. At the same time as the New Old Town was being constructed and Xinjiang designated as a “hub” in the BRI, surveillance cameras, check points, police stations at major intersections, and barbed wire were being erected around public buildings. Prison camps were set up in Xinjiang that by 2018 were reputed to hold over one million Uyghurs.
The book's conclusion links the concepts of proximity, curation and corridor, showing how as proximity was erased, practices of curation and the development of corridors involved surveillance, control and the reconfiguration of minority peoples, spaces and livelihoods. Borderland minorities in all cases have been marginalized, impoverished and held in place as China promotes its development projects and the BRI as linking China and Pakistan as well as China and Burma in grand economic corridors producing unending wealth for all.
The book is elegantly organized and well written. My quibbles are that the Press failed to catch non-sentences and unnecessary words and that the title fails to capture the originality of this work.
