Review: Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China’s Contemporary Borderlands

Book Review| June 01 2024 Review: Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands Xiaoxuan Lu. Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023, 344 pp. , 65 color and 49 b/w illus. 50 (cloth), ISBN 9781477327555 Yishi Liu Yishi Liu Tsinghua University Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2024) 83 (2): 250–251. https: //doi. org/10. 1525/jsah. 2024. 83. 2. 250 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures Review: Shifting Sands: Landscape, Memory, and Commodities in China's Contemporary Borderlands. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 1 June 2024; 83 (2): 250–251. doi: https: //doi. org/10. 1525/jsah. 2024. 83. 2. 250 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of the Society of Architectural Historians Search As the title Shifting Sands suggests, borders, like sands, are always malleable and permeable, owing to the inevitable exchanges of goods, ideas, technologies, and persons that take place across them. In this book, Xiaoxuan Lu ambitiously uses a wide-angle lens to include China's frontier areas as her research topic, much as Owen Lattimore approached his study of Inner Asian frontiers eight decades ago. With a similar theoretical and methodological ambition, Lu examines China's borderlands in the northeast, southwest, and northwest regions, going beyond a China-centric narrative to connect the recent infrastructure construction boom under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to many previous proposals and practices, thus complicating the common understandings of contemporary China's borderland urbanization. She presents a critical view of the interrelationships among the state, society, institutions, individuals, and China's borderland landscapes as manifested in the many transnational case studies and nonlinear processes driven by multifaceted influences, both. . . You do not currently have access to this content.