Conserving China's Northwest Frontier Nature, Culture, and Future

China's immense northwest holds the key to the country's internal geopolitical and socioeconomic restructuring and global soft power today. In addition to hosting mega investments in energy, mining, infrastructure, and urban development, this resource-rich and ethnically diverse, yet under-studied, territory of 3.7 million square kilometres is leading China's rising developmental ethos of conserving nature and culture.

Conserving China's Northwest Frontier offers nuanced accounts of the under-studied and often misunderstood region with fresh perspectives from the ground up. Derived from decade-long ethnography in three sites in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region and Gansu province of the northwest from 2011 to 2022, this book also offers an unusually expansive coverage on three counts. Topically, it integrates both environmental and heritage conservation. Temporarily, it situates the contemporary conservation politics within geopolitical, ethnoterritorial, and environmental histories of the frontier region. Spatially, it connects multiple territorial scales from the global, national, regional, to the grassroots.

You-Tien Hsing, Professor of Geography, University of California at Berkeley

You-tien Hsing is Professor of Geography at University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Making Capitalism in China: The Taiwan Connection (Oxford University Press,1998).

PART I Pastoral Possibilities1. A Miracle Shrub of the Desert2. Herders Surviving ConservationPART II Agricultural Futures3. A Swamp on the Front Page4. Opportunity in ScarcityPART III Agropastoral Entanglements5. Mongols: China's Triple Minority6. Land Commodification7. Hydro Turfdoms8. Mongol FarmersPART IV Frontier Aspirations9. Mongol Students in the College Race10. Wild Great Walls