Emily T. Yeh - Böcker

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295805023In 2001 the Chinese government announced that the precise location of Shangrila—a place that previously had existed only in fiction—had been identified in Zhongdian County, Yunnan. Since then, Sino-Tibetan borderlands in Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu, Qinghai, and the Tibet Autonomous Region have been the sites of numerous state projects of tourism development and nature conservation, which have in turn attracted throngs of backpackers, environmentalists, and entrepreneurs who seek to experience, protect, and profit from the region’s landscapes.Mapping Shangrila advances a view of landscapes as media of governance, representation, and resistance, examining how they are reshaping cultural economies, political ecologies of resource use, subjectivities, and interethnic relations. Chapters illuminate topics such as the role of Han and Tibetan literary representations of border landscapes in the formation of ethnic identities; the remaking of Chinese national geographic imaginaries through tourism in the Yading Nature Reserve; the role of The Nature Conservancy and other transnational environmental organizations in struggles over culture and environmental governance; the way in which matsutake mushroom and caterpillar fungus commodity chains are reshaping montane landscapes; and contestations over the changing roles of mountain deities and their mediums as both interact with increasingly intensive nature conservation and state-sponsored capitalism.

The recent launching of China’s high profile Belt and Road Initiative and its founding of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have underscored China’s rapidly growing importance as a global player in development, diplomacy, and economic governance. To date, scholarship on "China abroad" has focused primarily on Africa and Latin America. In comparison, China’s investment and development assistance among its neighbors in Asia have been understudied, despite the fact that China’s aid and overseas investment remain concentrated in Asia, the countries of which have had complex and often fraught cultural and political relationships with China for more than a millennia. Through case studies from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, this volume provides a targeted examination of the intertwined geoeconomics and geopolitics of China’s investment and development in Asia. It provides in-depth and grounded analyses of nationalisms and state-making projects, as well as the material effects of China’s "going out" strategy on livelihoods, economies, and politics. The volume contributes to understandings of what characterizes Chinese development, and pays attention to questions of elite agency, capitalist dynamics, state sovereignty, the politics of identity, and the reconfiguration of the Chinese state. The chapters in this article originally appeared in a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

The recent launching of China’s high profile Belt and Road Initiative and its founding of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank have underscored China’s rapidly growing importance as a global player in development, diplomacy, and economic governance. To date, scholarship on "China abroad" has focused primarily on Africa and Latin America. In comparison, China’s investment and development assistance among its neighbors in Asia have been understudied, despite the fact that China’s aid and overseas investment remain concentrated in Asia, the countries of which have had complex and often fraught cultural and political relationships with China for more than a millennia. Through case studies from Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia, this volume provides a targeted examination of the intertwined geoeconomics and geopolitics of China’s investment and development in Asia. It provides in-depth and grounded analyses of nationalisms and state-making projects, as well as the material effects of China’s "going out" strategy on livelihoods, economies, and politics. The volume contributes to understandings of what characterizes Chinese development, and pays attention to questions of elite agency, capitalist dynamics, state sovereignty, the politics of identity, and the reconfiguration of the Chinese state. The chapters in this article originally appeared in a special issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics.

This collection provides an overview of China’s rural politics, bringing scholarship on agrarian politics from various social science disciplines together in one place. The twelve contributions, spanning history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, political science, and geography, address enduring questions in peasant studies, including the relationship between states and peasants, taxation, social movements, rural-urban linkages, land rights and struggles, gender relations, and environmental politics. Taking rural politics as the power-inflected processes and struggles that shape access and control over resources in the countryside, as well as the values, ideologies and discourses that shape those processes, the volume brings research on China into conversation with the traditions and concerns of peasant studies scholarship. It provides both an introduction to those unfamiliar with Chinese politics, as well as in-depth, new research for experts in the field.This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Peasant Studies.