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?