For a decade, the Chinese government has been upgrading roads in the Tibet Autonomous Region at a breakneck pace. Narrow, once-potholed lanes have been transformed into wide, smooth expanses of asphalt, promising frictionless speed, safety, and connectedness. But satellite monitoring enforces impossibly slow speed limits on these new thoroughfares. Drivers frustrated that it now takes longer than ever to get from point A to point B try to reroute to smaller, more dangerous roads, which have not yet been upgraded to the surveillance of a state-mandated crawl.

Alessandro Rippa's Borderland Infrastructures: Trade, Development, and Control in Western China shows that this seeming paradox between flow and constriction is not just an oddity, but rather is inherent in the dynamics of infrastructure development across China's western borderlands. Contradictions proliferate because, as Rippa argues, the development of transborder infrastructure is inseparable from the party-state's aim of controlling borderland territories and their ethnic minority peoples. Corridors purport to bring things together, but in practice, they actually separate them: “in projecting ideas of connectivities, [they] prevent contiguities” (p. 239). Development projects ostensibly aimed at creating self-sufficient entrepreneurial subjects instead create ever-greater dependency on state generosity.

Rippa's eye-opening and persuasive account of how transborder infrastructure development has shaped livelihoods and subjectivities is based on “itinerant” ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a decade across many sites: Kashgar, Tashkurgan, and the Karakoram Highway in Xinjiang; the Dulong Valley, Tengchong, and Houqiao in Yunnan; and several cities in Burma and Pakistan. The structure of the book is as creative as its methodology. Each of its three parts—“Proximity,” “Curation,” and “Corridor” —consists of two chapters presenting one case each from the Xinjiang and Yunnan borderlands, as well as an interlude and coda that flesh out a key concept.

Part one revolves around proximity, which Rippa conceptualizes as a set of skills and practices historically developed by small-scale cross-border traders, who deploy cultural familiarity, kinship relations, and a shared history to navigate constantly shifting situations. However, Rippa argues that the large-scale infrastructure privileged by future-oriented statist ideologies imposes stricter regulations and threatens the ability of small-scale traders from north Pakistan to operate. In Tengchong, a more porous and less sensitive borderland than Tashkargan, private businessmen first funded motorable roads to several border crossings in order to facilitate the boom in illicit imports of timber from Burma in the early 2000s. Here, Rippa shows that it was the presence of private infrastructure that prompted state territorialization through customs houses, army posts, border gates, and border passes, thus demonstrating how the state, too, is embedded in the processes that he names “proximity.”

Part two argues that development projects in China's borderlands are curational interventions, where “to curate” means to heal, but also to select and preserve and to make sure something does not infect its surroundings (p. 139). For example, through state curation, the Drung are defined as primitive and deficient and the Dulong Valley as a wasteland. Both people and place are thus in need of curing by the “benevolent state's” largesse through the building of new roads, bridges, and resettlement houses and villages after Drung traditional livelihoods are banned. Through this process, they are made into grateful subjects. Indeed, Rippa quotes several Drung residents who seem to ventriloquize the party-state, particularly its insistence on the aesthetic beauty of the valley as a showcase for successful conservation as well as development (p. 129.).

In Kashgar, the state deploys heritage as a violent mode of curation that seeks to discipline Uyghurs into becoming similarly loyal subjects. Chapter 4 shows how the reconstruction of Kashgar's old town as a heritage preservation project displaced many residents and reduced Uyghur culture to only those aesthetic elements deemed allowable by the party-state and suitable for tourist consumption. Others, such as Islam, are characterized as having “infected” Uyghurs, who must thus be cleansed of them. In this curational mode, Uyghur culture, like the old city itself, must “be destroyed in order to be preserved” (p. 167). In both Dulong and Kashgar, Rippa argues, economic development is not what is actually at stake; rather, the point is discipline and control, and success is about the creation of docile minority subjects.

Part three returns to Tashkargan and Tengchong to discuss two trade corridors retroactively incorporated into the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI): the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Economic Corridor. These Silk Road corridors ignore and undo preexisting forms of mobility and exchange, materializing forms of development that actively erase history. Rippa discusses how the securitization of Xinjiang, with its ubiquitous checkpoints and, later, prison camps, accompanies the CPEC as a form of “channeled control” (p. 207).

Chapter 5 traces how Chinese authorities in Islamabad have successfully co-opted Kashgari elites living in Pakistan, and how securitization has made Kashgar an exceedingly difficult place to do business, even as BRI rhetoric about connectivity and investment soars to new heights. Finally, the last chapter revisits Tengchong, following the rise of the illegal amber trade that grew with the corridor-ization of the borderlands, after the demise of the timber trade. The state, Rippa shows, does not stop illicit trade, but rather institutionalizes it, benefitting those proximate to the state and marginalizing others.

This short review can only scratch the surface of this rich and delightful study. It is chock-full of brilliant observations, ranging from the argument that borderlands are ideal locations from which to ethnographically approach “the state,” to a discussion of lacunae in James Ferguson's account of distributive politics,Footnote ¹ all the while highlighting the texture of everyday lives in the Xinjiang-Pakistan and Yunnan-Burma borderlands. If I have any minor quibbles, they are that the hard distinction drawn between economic development versus discipline and control seems at times overplayed, and that the publisher appears to have forgotten to copyedit the last chapter. Nevertheless, 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.