China’s entangled borders: citizenship, infectious diseases, and invasive species

Abstract

Technology has intensified long-standing transgressions of our national borders through the self-replication and mobility of non-human life. This chapter argues for the need to go beyond transnationalism as a necessary analytic corrective to methodological nationalism, by considering how borders are entangled with the complex mobilities and interactions of human practices of border management with non-human life forms. The general issues are explored through three extended sets of examples concerning China’s borders: citizenship, infectious diseases and invasive species. A detailed consideration of one current infectious disease causing massive problems in China, African Swine Fever, will allow a more intensive analysis compared to the wider surveys of the other three sections. We offer a few brief comments on the parallels of our cases with the Covid-19 crisis.