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If the past decades have been told through tropes of China’s rise, the exponential increase in dust and aerosol events like dust storms have seen China itself, as a terrestrial thing, lift off. This talk situates its inquiry to China’s meteorological contemporary–the time of strange weather that has largely coincided with the headiest days of social and economic change–through social, political, ecological, and ethnographic experiment. It approaches political and meteorological emergence through the aerosol phase shifts that have swept extant political formations and logics into a kaleidoscopic reconfiguration of environmental materialities, in China and downwind. By tracking dust storm formation and mitigation
strategies, cultural experiments that manipulate atmospheric concentrations of fine particulate matter, and the long-travelled aerosol fallouts of China’s rise, the talk reflects ethnographically on Chinese weather systems to consider the problem of planetarity in anthropology.