Between nation and state: Boundary infrastructures, communities of practice and everyday nation-ness in the Chinese rail system

Abstract

This paper draws on thinking within political geography and science and technology studies to examine how the infrastructure of the Chinese rail system situates the practices of individual passengers within the national community. Specifically, I employ Star’s boundary object framework to trace how hot water taps and their associated objects integrate multiple communities of practice into rail space while also producing fractures within the ridership. The practice of hot water drinking, like rail infrastructure, is the product of Chinese state-making. In contemporary China, however, thermoses and instant noodles have become markers not just of Chinese nation-ness but of particular sub-national communities of practice. I argue recent conflicts over their use and even presence in rail space reflect and realize fractures within broader society. This paper’s analysis of the Chinese rail system contributes to a clearer understanding of how top-down and bottom-up forces interact within China’s domestic infrastructural development. Incorporating the materiality of infrastructure allows political geographers to better understand how the nation-ness of certain bodies and practices are entangled with the built environment, moving from imagined communities to communities of practice.

The geographies of colonial infrastructures: Mobility, im/materiality, and politics on walking trails in the Middle East

“…A rich literature draws our attention to the mobilities and temporalities of colonialism (Carby, 2019; Cowen, 2020; Khalili, 2020; Lowe, 2015; Sheller, 2018). This literature is complemented by increasingly nuanced work on infrastructure in geography and related disciplines (Arefin, 2019; Brady, 2021; Curley, 2021; Gergan & McCreary, 2022; Hope, 2022; Manchanda & Plonski, 2022; Millington, 2018; Simone, 2004, 2021; Solomon, 2021). A focus on walking trails as infrastructure provides a means to bring together literatures on infrastructures, colonialism, and mobilities in nuanced ways.…”

“…Through infrastructure, temporalities and mobilities become embodied and im/materialised in ways important to understanding the geographies of colonialism. The past 10 years have seen an ‘infrastructure turn’ with an intensification of research on infrastructure across geography and related fields (Arefin, 2019; Brady, 2021; Curley, 2021; Gergan & McCreary, 2022; Hope, 2022; Manchanda & Plonski, 2022; Millington, 2018; Simone, 2004, 2021; Solomon, 2021). Included within this work are explorations of alternative forms of citizenship and politics created and contested by infrastructure (Alderman & Goodwin, 2022; Brady, 2021; Hope, 2022; Lemanski, 2020) and the relationship between infrastructure and nationalist politics.…”

“…The past 10 years have seen an ‘infrastructure turn’ with an intensification of research on infrastructure across geography and related fields (Arefin, 2019; Brady, 2021; Curley, 2021; Gergan & McCreary, 2022; Hope, 2022; Manchanda & Plonski, 2022; Millington, 2018; Simone, 2004, 2021; Solomon, 2021). Included within this work are explorations of alternative forms of citizenship and politics created and contested by infrastructure (Alderman & Goodwin, 2022; Brady, 2021; Hope, 2022; Lemanski, 2020) and the relationship between infrastructure and nationalist politics. For instance, Curley argues that, in the case of colonial infrastructural expansion on indigenous land, national infrastructures ‘arrive[d] in some places while denied in others’ so that ‘colonial difference is the story of national infrastructure’ (2021, p. 1).…”

Theorizing nation-building through high-speed rail development: Hegemony and space in the Basque Country, Spain

“…Geographical, historical and anthropological scholarship has highlighted the specific meaning-making processes and modalities through which these infrastructures help create and reproduce feelings of nationhood. The everyday presence and mass communication of signifiers of the nation (Jones and Merriman, 2009; Verstraete, 2002); the affective relations that the materiality of infrastructures may generate (Merriman and Jones, 2017); the everyday practices when using the infrastructure (Brady, 2021); the social relationships created by the materiality of the infrastructure and its associated institutions (Bear, 2007) – they all enable relating localized and embodied experiences and practices to a larger – imaginable, in Kezer's (2009) terms – national community. However, this literature invariably shows how these modalities are not unproblematic but instead may reflect, create and reproduce class-related, racial, gendered, cultural and geographical divisions within society.…”

“…Existing literature on the relationship between rail infrastructures and nation-building, often historical but in some cases addressing recent cases in Europe and East Asia, does generally not address these questions convincingly. Firstly, while it has tended to focus on the relationship between nation-building and technological development (Chang, 2015; Schueler, 2008; Verstraete, 2002), material culture (Kezer, 2009) and everyday practices (Brady, 2021), the relationship with processes of economic and political restructuring has generally been either weak or missing. The few exceptions to these (Calvo Mendizabal, 2015; Goswami, 2004; Prytherch, 2010) show how nation-building, rather than being rendered less relevant by global economic and political processes or being reduced to linguistic, cultural or ethnic dimensions, is still mobilized in state strategies responding to such wider processes (see also Goswami, 2002).…”