Infrastructure and counter-infrastructure : spatial modernity, cultural narratives, and visual aesthetics in China, 1949 - contemporary

Abstract

This dissertation explores the concept, practice, and discourse of infrastructure space in contemporary China through the lenses of spatial modernity, visual culture, and aesthetics. China's infrastructure age, if there is one, demonstrates how the power of infrastructure is reshaping socialist China's spatial modernity and global influence through spectacular transformations, impacts, and controversies. This is evident in multifaceted infrastructural forms such as high-speed railways, dams, new zones, land reclamation, big data centers, and radio telescopes, among others. Material infrastructures in China not only shape national modernity through industrialization and urbanization but also embody dynamics of historical legacy and cultural experiences in their representations, symbolic meanings, and visual aesthetics. From the basic capital construction in Mao's China since 1949, through the Open Door Policy for rapid urbanization, to the Belt and Road Initiative in the 2000s, China's modern development through infrastructural push has become a central topic in scholarly work. However, how infrastructure space fabricates, mediates, and complicates contemporary China's cultural identity behind national power and spatial modernity remains understudied and demands further questioning. This research investigates the infrastructure landscape of contemporary China from a "counter-infrastructure" perspective. This concept serves as a counterpoint to the progressive, linear, and nationalistic narratives surrounding infrastructure development in socialist China, focusing on suspensions, deconstructions, demolitions, and unrealized speculations. In contrast to the dominant narratives of Chinese infrastructural progress, counter-infrastructure perspectives reveal an unspoken cultural identity within the nation's infrastructure space. By exploring the subjectivity of infrastructural memory across urban and rural areas, and "infrastructurescapes" across islands and karst landforms, and the aesthetics of ruins and future possibilities through contemporary art and science fiction, this research argues that infrastructure is not merely a mechanism for achieving national spatial modernity, representing top-down desires, grand narratives, and ideologically imposed state discourses. More importantly, it embodies individual affective experiences and spatial memories that can challenge, erode, and redefine these desires, imaginaries, and narratives.