holding pattern actively poised against sand’s futures. A slowed landscape equals a future deferred. Minqin has become a showcase for the anti-desertification engineering techniques that, under the implementation of the forestry bureau, have sought to protect the city by a set of practices of zhisha, sand control, or more colloquially, yasha, pressing sand. Around Minqin, there is an engineered landscape at and beyond the sand’s edge, 330 km of barriers positioned to cut sharp edges back into a dry liquid landscape. Further in, there are rolling dunes engineered into tentative stability, part of a spectacular infrastructuralized landscape where the encounter between sand and state is staged. At Laohukou, where the Tiger’s Mouth mountain pass funnels air currents into sand-blasting jet streams, Liao, a veteran sand engineer, wends his truck off the road into the curves between dunes, where we see construction in progress. Trucks pile high with bales of straw, collected after the corn harvest in other parts of the region. A corps of men, mostly ex-farmers who now work the dunes that have buried their fields, dig the straw stalks into the ground, tracing out an undulating grid of low windbreaks. These grids are one of a number of techniques that environmental engineers employ to slow sand drift by breaking the wind at the dune’s surface. These and other techniques recall historical landscape engineering techniques in China, for instance in the management of the nearby Yellow River (Zhang 2016). Here, they are used across the landscape rather than in a tight line that hugs the edges of infrastructures. Such physical barriers are replicated in a number of materials, from other kinds of farm waste to burlap or nylon fashioned into sandbags or low walls. ‘Biological methods’ like tree-planting or aerial seeding are prohibitive this far into the desert for the low water content and general shiftiness of the soil substrate, and in emergency situations, chemical methods, mostly involving the spraying of petrochemicals directly onto sand, laminates loose sand into a self-adhesive sheet. They turn the dunes into a rolling barrier against themselves, and as time
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