Timothy Oakes
(Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Asian Studies
University of Colorado Boulder),

Alessandro Rippa
(Associate Professor of Chinese Studies
Tallinn University),

Darren Byler
(Postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Asian Studies
University of Colorado Boulder),

Dorothy Tang
(Landscape architect and Doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning)

The China Made project seeks to build an innovative research agenda for an infrastructural approach in the China Studies field. We approach infrastructure as both an empirically rich material object of research and an analytical strategy for framing research questions and approaches that help us explore more nuanced realms of techno-politics, everyday life, and spatio-temporal change in contemporary and historical China. In this panel, we focus on four key arenas of inquiry: the infrastructural state, infrastructure space, temporalities of infrastructure, and the everyday. These strands of inquiry are brought together as part of our effort to recognize that the infrastructural basis of China’s approach to development and statecraft deserves a more concerted theorizing of infrastructure than what we have seen in the China Studies field thus far.