Lauren Hansen Restrepo

The Revanchist Center: Toward a Totalitarian Politics of Land in Xinjiang traces the shift in spatial development strategies from liberal to ethnocratic and finally to totalitarian in the two decades since the announcement of the Great Western Development project. It finds that, at multiple spatial scales, there has been a distinct re-alignment of power away from the units of the state tasked typically with urban and economic development – that is, district and municipal governments – and toward first Han-dominated institutions and then to the central state itself. While local residents have been silenced by the state, historical and contemporary maps, satellite imagery, and documentary data tell the story of the end of the brief liberal experiment in Xinjiang.