States of the Wind: Dust Storms and a Political Meteorology of Contemporary China

States of the Wind: Dust Storms and a Political Meteorology of Contemporary China By Jerry Chuang-Hwa Zee A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in change: Professor Aihwa Ong, Chair Associate Professor Corinne P. Hayden Associate Professor Jake G. Kosek Summer 2015 Copyright (2015) By Jerry Chuang-Hwa Zee Abstract States of the Wind: Dust Storms and a Political Meteorology of Contemporary China by Jerry Chuang-Hwa Zee Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Professor Aihwa Ong, Chair On New Year’s Day, 2001, Beijing was struck by a massive dust storm, coursing through and glutting the city on the eve of a long-awaited Chinese century. On the backs of coursing winds and in the long, sandy wake of massive desertification afflicting inner, upwind China, dust storms portended a multi-faceted and multi-scaled environmental crisis in the coming, a shade on the glowing economic futures to which the Chinese party-state had yoked its post-Mao, post- ideological legitimacy. Combating dust storms in Beijing – and then, protecting places as far downwind as Seoul, Tokyo, and even the western US – introduced new political problems and actors into an emerging field of environmental governance, with the central government, through forestry agencies especially, scrambling to devise ways of holding the earth to the ground, against its dangerous tendency to lift into the air. In the course of this, geological, ecological, and meteorological things and processes came to the fore as problems of government. My dissertation explores how dust and wind, in the first decades of the 2000s, were consequential in the elaboration of various emerging topologies of power. It explores how, in the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of ecological governance, how ecology, sociology, and economy are re-assembled into elements in a shifting governmental topology, aimed at the stabilization of a shifty, desertified environment as well as the maintenance of ‘social stability’ against the economic and ecological ravages of desertification. In particular, I argue that in the ecological governance of sand and storms, new deployments of an infrastructural political logic are reorganizing both sandy landscapes and the peoples on them – each is figured as structurally unsound and in need of stabilizing state intervention. In this, environmental interventions at many scales think the country, its land, and its people, as elements in a variegated infrastructural program aimed at the control and stabilization of shifty things. It explores tree-walls, sand barriers, and sand ecology and engineering on one hand as polytechnic and scientific interventions into intervening into shifting landscapes. In tandem, it explores how ‘environment’ as a historically situated and multiple concept in China inspires new ways of ordering a populace that is also taken to be shifty and chaotic. Through multi-sited ethnography, it explores, along a dust storm’s path, the emergent topologies of power that arise to confront dust and sand. This is a contribution to political and environmental anthropology, political ecology, China studies, and science and technology studies. 1 List of Figures Figure 1 Satellite view of a dust storm 15 Figure 2 Field sites and a map of desertification 16 Figure 3 Surface windspeed and spatial relations in Northern China 22 Figure 4 Lanzhou wind tunnel 32 Figure 5 Stabilization system demonstration with artificial vegetation 35 Figure 6 Stabilization system demonstration with nylon netting 36 Figure 7 Anti-sand slogans in straw 37 Figure 8 Sand-eroded anti-sand slogans 38 Figure 9 Water trucks for suosuo planting 41 Figure 10 A suosuo stabilization forest 42 Figure 11 Suosuo and roucongrong symbiosis I 56 Figure 12 Suosuo and roucongrong symbiosis II 56 Figure 13 Minqin by satellite 68 Figure 14 “Minqin must not become a second Lop Nur!” 70 Figure 15 Ecologists measure ground cover and dune mobility 76 Figure 16 “Blue Sky Days” 85 Figure 17 Comparative AQI 86 Figure 18 Future Forest sandstorm maps 100 Figure 19 Elapsed storm-print 103 Figure 20 Dust sources and destinations 105 Figure 21 A floating continent 106 Figure 22 Particulate distances and vectoral relation at 15 m/s 107 i Acknowledgements I spent much of the process of writing this document in the attempt at finding my voice, and realized, finally, that I knew all along: that each sentence of this dissertation, every thought I’ve ever experienced as my own, everything that I’ve held on to long enough for it to find its way onto the page or on the editing floor came from someone, someone else. Conservations in hallways or on Google chat while the seminar went somewhere else, the way in which the sun fell through a window to draw my eye to a mote of dust, the way my eyes scanned messages piling up in my inbox. So gratitude in the writing is not enough, and is not precise enough when I read myself and find myself suddenly hearing other people. It is as if life were always already a vicarious prospect, lived in the parallax of things that is an I. So thank you, then, not simply for listening and arguing with me. But rather, the deepest gratitude for the encounter and shifting of positions that found your voice in my own, the coincidence of time and life that found us in each other’s proximity. It is the relations and environment that act through me that disperse authorship into a network that I will never be able to finally account for, and for which gratitude is only ever a gesture at an impossibility. First, I thank my family who, for years has not fully understood what I’ve been doing, carrying these books everywhere or heading overseas, but has never stopped me because they knew there was something in it for me that I needed to discover. To my parents, TJ and Renee, and my siblings, Oliver and Kelly, who have always showed me that in the winds and rains of the world there is always a place to return to and a future that can be cobbled from pieces. To my grandmother, Kay Chow, who is the only one with the courage to keep asking when my dissertation would be done, and my grandfather Ching-Teh Chow, whose laughter, kindness, and, in these last years, smiles and struggles, have been a soundtrack for this writing, some of it in hospital rooms. To my paternal grandparents, whose care for me in Shanghai was the springboard for a confused college graduate to a decade fascinated by China. My grandmother who doted on me as her “smallest son,” and for my grandfather whom we lost before the dissertation could be finished. And of course, Micah, who entered like a surprise into my life and into my substance, who humored me when the words wouldn’t come out in the right order, and who will recognize much of himself in the worlds of this text. I have had the joy of being surrounded by people who have made the world of ideas and anthropology’s world a space of wonder for me. It has been care, challenge, and friendship that have opened worlds to me. Stanford’s now-transformed Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology and its department of Linguistics were home for me. Rachael Miyung Joo, who taught the first anthropology class I ever took and changed my life. Miyako Inoue, James Ferguson, Sylvia Yanagisako, Penny Eckert, and Paulla Ebron were the ones who cracked the universe open for me, teaching me to see and to read, and especially Miyako who will always be my first mentor. Arnold Zwicky, who taught me about linguistic structure and coached me through coming out to my parents. Hannah Appel, Robert Samet, Aisha Ghani, Austin Zeiderman, Nikhil Anand, my TA’s who are now my interlocutors. And my friends who made me know that thinking is an environmental effect, and who convinced me that being a PhD student was the cool thing to do: Natasha Dar, Sophia Powers, Bharat Venkat, Huma Dar, Jessica Ruffin, Molly Cunningham, Sam Dubal. I first arrived in China when I was 21, and I am now 29. This project has tremendous personal significance for me, and its turns and twists are also a catalogue of this third decade in ii my life. I used to joke that the PhD might well be called ‘my twenties’ – twisted. I’ve gotten older and weirder with the project, I hope, and much of this has to do with Berkeley. I’m eternally grateful to those people who listened with me, who destabilized my intellectual foundations, and who humored me when my papers were 20 pages too long, again. Lawrence Cohen, Stefania Pandolfo, Charles Hirschkind, Anne-Lise Francois, Pheng Cheah, Mariane Ferme, Alexei Yurchak – each left an indelible mark in the way that ideas assemble in my mind and the way they assemble on the pages that follow. You taught me magic, rigor, and ethics, and to feel the world as well as observe it. The more general community of scholars at and around Berkeley has provided the intellectual environment in which it felt continually that ideas mattered, and that beauty did, too: Mel Chen, Liu Xin, James Holston, Nancy Peluso, Kate Chandler, Tim Choy, and scholars farther afield: Anne Allison, Andy Lakoff, Jerome Whitington, Dan Guttman, Janelle Lamoreaux, Ruth Goldstein, Mike Fortun, Amelia Moore, Anthony Fontes. Thank you You-Tien Hsing in Geography for reminding me to stay close to the ground. Her guidance and encouragement in thinking in and with China, as well as early opportunities to think through my fieldwork.

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