Continent in Dust

In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?

Jerry C. Zee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.