Breathless in Beijing: Aerial Attunements and China’s New Respiratory Publics
Abstract
For all of its protean and ephemeral qualities, air exerts a remarkably muscular influence on urban form and contemporary life in China. In recent years, as the breakneck speed of China’s development has altered the very chemistry of the atmosphere, the boundaries between breathing subjects and their toxic environments have become increasingly blurred. In this climate, Beijing inhabitants have sought out various modes of respiratory refuge, reorganizing the city into new spaces of atmospheric fortification. As deadly air divides Beijing into a series of protected insides and precarious outsides, life is increasingly being reoriented toward the dangers and imperatives of breathing in the Chinese city. Yet alongside the growing stratification of breathing experiences in the capital, shared exposure is also reconfiguring public life and landscapes through new solidarities and entwined fates. Engaging Beijing’s emergent respiratory publics online, behind face masks, and inside conditioned air spaces, I explore how collective exposure is galvanizing new modes of atmospheric recognition in China. Specifically, I suggest that respiratory publics make invisible threats visible by mobilizing everyday objects, practices, and social life to render air both an object of concern and a site of intervention. Ultimately, by attending to how attunements to air pollution emerge through everyday practices and quotidian habits, this article expands upon a growing body of STS scholarship investigating how social life is increasingly constituted in and through atmospheric entanglements.
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.
Braun, Kathrin, and Susanne Shultz. 2010. “... A Certain Amount of Engineering Involved’: Constructing the Public in Participatory Governance.” Public Understanding of Science 19 (4): 403–19.
Callon, Michel, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe. 2009. Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Calvillo, Nerea. 2018. “Political Airs: From Monitoring to Attuned Sensing Air Pollution.” Social Studies of Science 48 (3): 372–88. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312718784656.
Canetti, Elias. 1979. The Conscience of Words. New York: Seabury Press.
Chen, Mel. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press.
Chen, Yashu, and Pauline Cheong. 2019. “‘Airpocalypse’ and the China Smog Crisis: Examining Online and Offline Civic Engagement Motives, Attention, and Actions.” International Journal of Communication 13: 693–714.
Choy, Timothy. 2011a. “Atmospherics: On Substances and Subjects in Suspension.” Paper presented at the “Fact/Value” workshop, University of Chicago, June 3–4.
———. 2011b. Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong. Durham: Duke University Press. https://catalog.lib.uchicago.edu/vufind/Record/8532942.
Choy, Timothy, and Jerry Zee. 2015. “Condition—Suspension.” Cultural Anthropology 30 (2): 210–23.
Dewey, John. 1976. The Public and Its Problems. Chicago: Swallow Press.
Felt, Ulrike, and Maximilian Fochler. 2010. “Machineries for Making Publics: Inscribing and De-Scribing Publics in Public Engagement.” Minerva 48 (3): 219–38.
Fortun, Kim. 2001. Advocacy After Bhopal : Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2012. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” Cultural Anthropology 27 (3): 446–64.
———. 2014. “From Latour to Late Industrialism.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 309–29. https://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.1.017.
Fortun, Kim, Mike Fortun, Erik Bigras, Tahereh Saheb, Brandon Costelloe-Kuehn, Jerome Crowder, Daniel Price, and Alison Kenner. 2014. “Experimental Ethnography Online: The Asthma Files.” Cultural Studies 28 (4): 632–42. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.888923.
Goel, R. K., Bhawani. Singh, and Jian Zhao. 2012. Underground Infrastructures: Planning, Design, and Construction. Waltham, M.A.: Elsevier.
Greenstone, Michael, and Patrick Schwarz. 2018. “Air Quality Life Index: Is China Winning Its War on Pollution?” Chicago.
Gugliotta, A. 2003. “How, When, and for Whom Was Smoke a Problem in Pittsburgh and Its Region.” In Devastation and Renewal: An Environmental History of Pittsburgh and Its Region, 110–25. Pittsbug, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Han, Lijian, Weiqi Zhou, Steward T.A. Pickett, Weifeng Li, and Yuguo Qian. 2018. “Multicontaminant Air Pollution in Chinese Cities.” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 96 (4): 233-242E. https://doi.org/10.2471/BLT.17.195560.
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press.
Hart, Melanie, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson. 2017. “Everything You Think You Know About Coal in China Is Wrong.” Washington, D.C.
Horst, Maja, and Alan Irwin. 2010. “Nations at Ease with Radical Knowledge: On Consensus, Consensusing and False Consensusness.” Social Studies of Science 40 (1): 106–26.
Iqbal, Mansoor. 2019. “WeChat Revenue and Usage Statistics (2019).” Business of Apps. 2019. https://www.businessofapps.com/data/wechat-statistics/.
Jia, Heping, and Ling Wang. 2017. “Peering into China’s Thick Haze of Air Pollution.” Chemical and Engineering News 95(1): 19–22. https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i4/Peering-Chinas-thick-haze-air.html.
Kantar. 2015. “China Social Media Impact Report 2015.” 2015. https://us.kantar.com/tech/social/2015/kantar-china-social-media-impact-report-2015/.
Kenner, Alison. 2018. Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Kulmala, Markku. 2015. “Atmospheric Chemistry: China’s Choking Cocktail.” Nature. Nature Publishing Group. https://doi.org/10.1038/526497a.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. 1994. “The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the Chinese Conception of the Body.” In Body, Subject, and Power in China, edited by Angela Zito and Tani Barlow, 23–41. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
la Bellacasa, Maria Puig de. 2011. “Matters of Care in Technoscience: Assembling Neglected Things.” Social Studies of Science 41(1): 85–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301.
Lang, Jianlei, Yanyun Zhang, Ying Zhou, Shuiyuan Cheng, Dongsheng Chen, Xiurui Guo, Sha Chen, Xiaoxin Li, Xiaofan Xing, and Haiyan Wang.
“Trends of PM 2.5 and Chemical Composition in Beijing, 2000-
” Aerosol and Air Quality Research 17: 412–25. https://doi.org/10.4209/aaqr.2016.07.0307.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. “Air-Condition.” In Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, 104–8. Cambridge, MA.
Liboiron, Max. 2016. “Redefining Pollution and Action: The Matter of Plastics.” Journal of Material Culture 21(1): 87–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183515622966.
Makri, Anna, and Nikolaos I. Stilianakis. 2008. “Vulnerability to Air Pollution Health Effects.” International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health 211 (3–4): 326–36. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijheh.2007.06.005.
Marres, Noortje. 2012. Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Marres, Noortje, and Javier Lezaun. 2011. “Materials and Devices of the Public: An Introduction.” Economy and Society 40 (4): 489–508. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.602293.
Masco, Joseph. 2006. The Nuclear Borderlands : The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
———. 2009. “Bad Weather.” Social Studies of Science 40 (1): 7–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312709341598.
Mina, An Xiao. 2019. Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mitman, Gregg. 2007. Breathing Space : How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham N.C.: Duke University Press.
Murphy, Michelle. 2013. “Chemical Infrastructures of the St. Clair River.” In Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, edited by Nathalie Jas and Soraya Boudia, 103–15. London: Pickering and Chato.
———. 2017. “What Can’t a Body Do?” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 3 (1): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v3i1.28791.
Nieuwenhuis, M. 2015. “On One Breath All Depend.” Journal of Narrative Politics 1 (12): 167–79.
Nixon, Rob. 2006. “Slow Violence, Gender, and the Environmentalism of the Poor.” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 13 (2).
———. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
Petryna, Adriana. 2013. Life Exposed: Biological Citizens after Chernobyl. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China : Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Rogaski, Ruth. 2019. “Air/"Qi" Connections and China’s Smog Crisis: Notes from the History of Science.” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review (e-Journal) 30: 55–77. https://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-30/rogaski.
Sivin, Nathan. 1987. Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China: A Partial Translation of Revised Outline of Chinese Medicine (1972): With an Introductory Study on Change in Present Day and Early Medicine. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan.
Sloterdijk, Peter. 2009. Terror from the Air. Edited by Steve Corcoran. Semiotext(e) Foreign Agents Series. Los Angeles : Cambridge, Mass.: Semiotext(e) ; Distributed by the MIT Press.
Stengers, Isabelle. 2000. The Invention of Modern Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stewart, Kathleen. 2011. “Atmospheric Attunements.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (3): 445–53.
Svarverud, Rune. 2014. “The Terminological Battle for Air in Modern China.” Wakemon 26: 23–44.
TallBear, Kim. 2011. “Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints | Society for Cultural Anthropology.” Cultural Anthropology Online. Fieldsights, Theorizing the Contemporary. 2011. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints.
Taylor, Peter J., and Frederick H. Buttel. 1992. “How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Science and the Globalization of Environmental Discourse.” Geoforum 23 (3): 405–16.
Tironi, Manuel. 2015. “Disastrous Publics: Counter-Enactments in Participatory Experiments.” Science, Technology & Human Values 40 (4): 564–87.
Todd, Zoe. 2017. “Fish, Kin and Hope: Tending to Water Violations in Amiskwaciwâskahikan and Treaty Six Territory.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry 43: 102–7. https://doi.org/10.1086/692559.
Tronto, Joan. 1987. “Beyond Gender Difference to a Theory of Care.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 12 (4): 644–63.
Wang, Shiliang, Michael J. Paul, and Mark Dredze. 2015. “Social Media as a Sensor of Air Quality and Public Response in China.” Journal of Medical Internet Research 17 (3). https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3875.
Warner, Michael. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Weston, Kath. 2012. “Political Ecologies of the Precarious.” Anthropological Quarterly 85 (2): 429–55. https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2012.0017.
Xu, Janice. 2019. “Communicating the Right to Know: Social Media in the Do-It-Yourself Air Quality Testing Campaign in Chinese Cities.” Nternational Journal of Communication [Online] 8 (20).
Zee, Jerry. 2015. “Breathing in the City: Beijing and the Architecture of Air.” Scapegoat 8: 46–56. http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/08/ZEE_6.pdf.
———. 2017. “Holding Patterns: Sand and Political Time at China’s Desert Shores.” Cultural Anthropology 32 (2): 215–41. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca32.2.06.
Zhan, Mei. 2005. “Civet Cats, Fried Grasshoppers, and David Beckham’s Pajamas: Unruly Bodies after SARS.” American Anthropologist 107 (1): 31–42. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.2005.107.1.031.
Zhou, Zhihua. 2014. “China Launches New Urbanisation Plan (2014-2020).” East Asian Policy 06 (02): 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1142/s1793930514000129.
Copyright (c) 2020 Victoria Nguyen
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors of all content published in ESTS retain the copyright to their work, and agree to license them under one of the following Creative Commons licenses CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, and refer to the individual article footer for specific licensing data. Please read our open access policy for more information.
