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The Express Railway Link (XRL) offers unprecedented mobility within the Pearl River Delta and connects Hong Kong to mainland China’s high-speed rail network. As reflected in the pages of regional and national newspapers, the XRL figures prominently in the re-imagining of scales of community and governance in the Pearl River Delta. These ‘infrastructural imaginaries’ are shaped not just by the transportation infrastructure of trains and stations, but also by the migration infrastructure of travel permits and identification cards. Drawing on infrastructure studies and the politics of scale to shed light on the multi-scalar politics of infrastructure in contemporary China, this article traces how understandings of infrastructure and scale changed as the XRL went from regional project to one component of China’s national high-speed rail grid.
Dylan Brady (Thu,) studied this question.