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Accepted Paper:
No Man’s Land from Hoh Xil to Tarim: Images and Discourse of Subimperialism
Peng Hai
(University of Pittsburgh)
National provinces are governed, and their indigenous inhabitants are multigenerational permanent residents who have hukou – registered households who have an inalienable obligation and right to feed the mouths of their current household members and their future offspring. This is how Chinese territorial governmentality is generally understood. However, certain territories require to be ruled because their geosocial space is unruly. Certain people have no claim to permanent residency because their crude homeland make their settlement transient. These exceptions are vestiges of imperial governmentality, but they gain a new lease of life in modern China’s rule of its Turco-Tibetan frontier. This paper illustrates this subimperial governmentality with two wildly popular early 2000s movies that were purportedly China’s response to Hollywood “Westerns.” By retrieving this crucial image of China’s national geographic imaginary in recent memory, the paper offers insights on how the rhetoric and practice of subimperialism are sustained and proliferated in contemporary China with regard to its two massive Central Eurasian territorial holdings. The paper argues that despite the state’s desire to regulate centrifugal regionalism by solidifying inter-regional geosocial boundaries in its western periphery, resorting to a panacea frontier methodology may eat away the efficacy of its divide-and-rule construct.