ABSTRACT
In China, as elsewhere in the world, new roads and railways are advertised in state and corporate language as harbingers of development, modernity and prosperity. Technologies such as roads are discursively represented as ‘clean’ objects, separate from the politics of the everyday. If agentive, they are thought of as having effects that can be clearly defined and delineated: they bring wealth and education, and develop the local economy. In this chapter, my aim is to complicate this understanding of the effects of infrastructure. I approach infrastructure as sites in which specific social relations intersect and accumulate over time. These place- and time-specific accumulations affect the perception of infrastructure, and manifest in sometimes unexpected ways, for example, in the ascription of quasi-ethnic identities to it. This is one of the unplanned resonances created by the merging of transport technologies with the specific social-political-economic terrain of southern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
