Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. US$48.00, cloth. ISBN 9781477327555.
Xiaoxuan Lu’s Shifting Sands is an ambitious and engaging research that brings a fresh interdisciplinary perspective to the burgeoning literature of China’s borderland studies. The book, structured into three parts, investigates different dimensions of cross-border exchanges and state-building endeavours in the China-Laos borderlands in the southwest, the China-Kyrgyzstan corridor in the northwest, and the China-North Korea frontier in the northeast. By connecting three case studies while maintaining a coherent analytical framework, this book offers an innovative understanding of infrastructure, borderland urbanism, and resource commodification in China’s peripheries.
Lu’s book, situated at the intersection of landscape studies, historical geography, memory studies, and more essentially, borderland studies, weaves a compelling story of how infrastructure development, transnational exchanges, and memories reshape the material and symbolic transformation of China’s borderlands. Given the renewed global focus on China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its impact on frontier regions, Lu’s work is particularly timely. Lu employs historical analysis, ethnographic approaches, and spatial analysis to examine how infrastructure projects in China’s borderlands have revamped economic relations and local identities.
The book’s emphasis on spatial reconfigurations and the politics of infrastructure makes it a significant contribution to the field, which extends beyond the conventional political-economic approaches that usually dominate discussions on China’s borderland development (Alessandro Rippa, Borderland Infrastructure: Trade, Development and Control in Western China, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). Instead, Lu sees infrastructure as a historically layered and politically charged process in which roads, railways, and urban settlements function as material expressions of geopolitical aspirations, economic strategies, and embattled memories. This approach complements the mainstream scholarship that views China’s peripheries primarily through the lens of economic expansion or national security, providing a more dynamic and historically embedded account of regional transformation.
The historical depth of this book, particularly the tracing of pre-BRI infrastructural initiatives and their impact on regional economies, is commendable. This book places China’s contemporary geopolitical strategy—the BRI—in a historical and interactive context. Rather than treating this strategy as novel interventions, Lu carefully traces its antecedents in earlier imperial and modern state-building efforts. Her analysis reminds us that today’s border-making practices are deeply entangled with past struggles over sovereignty, commerce, and territorial control. Lu continuously calls attention to historical echoes: whether in Manchuria’s Qing-era vulnerability to the encroachments from Western colonial powers; in the realization of Sun Yat-sen’s once overambitious blueprint for China’s modernization; or in a newly paved road following the ancient Horse-Tea trade route that connected Yunnan to the mainland Southeast Asia for centuries. This historiographical layering gives Shifting Sands a unique texture that allows the reader to see borderland infrastructures as more than a singular state-led project, but as a palimpsest of competing visions of multiple state actors from various eras.
This book’s emphasis on historical continuity highlights how China’s present-day borderland development is deeply rooted in unresolved legacies of empire, revolutions, colonial ambition, and state formation. This view, coincidentally, echoes my arguments in a recent issue of China Perspective, where I call for moving beyond Western-derived frontier-making theories and instead engage with the intellectual traditions, historical experiences, and geopolitical logics that have shaped China’s evolving vision of its own borders (Tianlong You, “Global China’s Borderlands: Contemporary Characteristics in a Historical Trajectory,” China Perspectives, 138 [2024]). By doing so, Shifting Sands contributes to a more nuanced and self-reflexive approach to China’s borderland studies—one that examines both spatial and infrastructural transformations and the epistemological foundations upon which these shifts are interpreted and enacted. In this sense, the book closely aligns with a growing body of scholarship that situates China’s rise within a longue durée framework, which emphasizes continuity as much as rupture. This is this book’s most significant advance in the study of Chinese borderlands.
Despite these strengths, the book would have benefited from a deeper engagement with migration and labour dynamics in the borderlands. While Lu provides a compelling analysis of infrastructure and economic flows, much less attention is given to the people who move through these spaces—traders, workers, and the displaced—whose mobility and precarity are central to the transformations of China’s borderlands. A closer look at cross-border labour migrations would have enriched the discussion of border economies by highlighting how infrastructure both enables and constrains movement. Additionally, while Lu’s landscape perspective is refreshing, at times it risks prioritizing spatial and material transformations over the agency of local communities and their social relations in shaping borderland development trajectories, rendering them, often ethnic minorities, passive recipients rather than active negotiators of change. Building upon Lu’s insights, future research should offer a more grounded understanding of the lived experiences of those who navigate the landscapes.
Overall, Lu’s Shifting Sands will be an invaluable addition to the syllabus I use for border studies at Yunnan University, a pioneering institution in this field. This book’s solid historical grounding, innovative use of landscape studies, and insightful analysis of China’s peripheries make it essential reading for anyone serious about border studies. Whether you approach borders from the vantage point of political economy, migration, infrastructure, or memory, Lu offers something to challenge, inspire, and provoke new questions. I highly recommend that border scholars around the world follow my suit—assign it, debate it, and perhaps, appreciate the irony that in studying borders, we often find ourselves pushing against the boundaries of our own disciplines. In a world where walls are built, doors shut, conflicts escalated, even the smallest remedies matter dearly.
Tianlong You
Yunnan University, Kunming