Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Infrastructure of Coral

2020; University of Minnesota Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5749/vergstudglobasia.6.2.0029

2373-5066

Byrnes,

Economic Zones and Regional Development

Field Trip 29 The Infrastructure of Coral Corey Byrnes If America was the model of infrastructural modernity for much of the twentieth century, China has far surpassed it in the twenty-­first. In just a few decades, China has built the world’s longest high-­speed rail network, highest railway line, largest hydroelectric dam, and longest bridge, among countless other megaprojects. Local governments and private investors have even constructed monumental “ghost cities” with “anticipatory” urban infrastructures serving nonexistent residents (Woodworth 2017).1 Infrastructure has become one of the most potent expressions of China’s belated but dizzyingly rapid modernization, creating a “new national culture premised on infrastructural prowess” (Bach 2017, 36). While domestic projects such as the Three Gorges Dam or the Qinghai-­ Tibet Railway helped establish this “new national culture,” they also paved the way for an even more ambitious program of international projects, including the Belt and Road Initiative and the Maritime Silk Road.2 What concerns me in this essay is how the infrastructural prowess that has reshaped China at home is now being deployed abroad, in some cases to extend that country’s physical borders. While China’s infrastructural expansion has profound implications for the balance of world power, I am primarily interested in the “political aesthetics”—­ how “aesthetics . . . establishes a political force enabling and contesting various kinds of authority”—­and the environmental impact of this process as it unfolds in one of the world’s most geopolitically sensitive and ecologically rich areas, the South China Sea (Larkin 2018, 175). It is there, within the so-­ called nine-­dash line (jiuduan xian 九段線), that the Chinese government has recently constructed a fortified national infrastructure atop a scattering of contested rocks, sandbars, coral reefs, and atolls. The strategic importance of these artificial islands is well known. What has attracted far less attention are the visual and spatial forms through which they were once prefigured as national space and are now being re-­ presented to the world as contested territory. This essay lingers with those forms in order to reframe China’s island building as an aesthetic enterprise with deeply political and material stakes. My ultimate goal is to offer an aesthetically informed ecological critique of infrastructural expansionism in the South China Sea. It is time to look past the concretized borders of China’s island fortresses to focus our attention on the imperiled coral reefs that serve as the natural infrastructure for the expanded nation. 30 Field Trip 6 Dot, Dash, Line Though the South China Sea has long been a site of contested sovereignty, tensions in the region were dramatically heightened in 2009 when the Chinese government (in response to territorial claims made by Vietnam and Malaysia) submitted a brief diplomatic note to the UN secretary-­ general, declaring “indisputable sovereignty over the islands in the South China Sea and the adjacent waters,” in addition to “sovereign rights and jurisdiction over the relevant waters as well as the seabed and subsoil thereof (see attached map).”3 On this now famous “attached map,” China’s purple-­highlighted dot-­and-­dash borderline extends from the northwest and appears to end at the Gulf of Tonkin. It reappears, however, as a solid dash midway off the coast of central Vietnam. Eight additional segments form a tongue-­ like outline that demarcates a border almost coextensive with the South China Sea.4 Inside this line are four groups of scattered islands, reefs, and other marine features, some visible as small dots, others outlined by dotted lines. Neither the map nor the accompanying note indicates whether the dashes simply enclose islands owned by China or mark its possession of the entirety of the South China Sea and its seabed. Nor do they indicate common alternative names for the marked island groups, names that reflect both recent competing claims and longer histories of imperialism in the region (Damrosch and Oxman 2013, 97). In staking a bold albeit ambiguous claim to the South China Sea, the Chinese government and its proxies have increasingly relied on an argument that looks past the shifting sovereignties of modern history to an alternative one grounded in ancient Chinese texts that prove “the Chinese people have, without challenge, enjoyed and exercised...