Rise into dust: Governing land and weather systems in contemporary China

Since a season of successive massive dust storms in Beijing in the early 2000s, broad political experiments in mitigating dust events have, across the capital's airshed, reconfigured the problem of land degradation as one of large-scale weather intervention. Dust storms revealed the potential of large tracts of the continental interior to become airborne. Downwind of China, they have also sparked scientific, political, and technical attempts to make sense of China's rise as a story of both political economic ascendance and the literal rise of land into the sky. This essay examines the interface of terrestrial and atmospheric processes as it conditions experiments in governing weather systems and phenomena associated with Reform and Opening.