Desert/Storm: Experiments on a Chinese Dust-Stream

Jerry Zee
Anthropology
UC Santa Cruz

Based on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, “Desert/Storm: Experiments on a Chinese Dust-Stream” explores atmospheric politics in China and downwind. It moves along the path of dust storms from China’s desertified interior, through Beijing, where airborne land appears as staggering air pollution, and across the Pacific where Chinese land falls as a light rain of particulate matter. It diagnoses “China’s meteorological contemporary” through the reorganization of late socialist worlds into projects that aim to re-engineer China’s weather while also refiguring “Reform” as a meteorological event. It argues that strange weather is driving infrastructural, social, and ecological experiments aimed at re-engineering land and life as part of a national weather-system. Ex-herders, performance artists, and environmental engineers are part of an emergent geo-atmospheric scene in which state “socialism with Chinese characteristics” can increasingly be figured as attempts at managing relations between broken land and bad air. Additionally, “Desert/Storm” explores how dusts are reconfiguring Pacific relations not only as economic and political but as palpably meteorological, scaffolded in dusts.