The Age of Explorations

The conference and the resulting edited volume examine how, in the early twentieth century, Chinese administrators, engineers, and scientists rediscovered China in their efforts to build modern infrastructure and exploit natural resources. Their projects not only helped to define the extent of Chinese territory, but also created new institutionalized knowledge about China’s geobody itself. With their projects, they not only covered and conquered China’s internal and external peripheries, but also redefined centrality and created new peripheries, namely those less connected to national plans. This respatialization of China in the early twentieth century is the focal point of this conference.

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