Lines of Control: Railroads, Resistance, and the Reordering of Semi-Colonial Space, 1898–1905

This book traces how railroads became a contested symbol of modernity in late Qing China. Through the 1898 Hankow–Canton Railroad Contract between the Qing government and the American China Development Company, this project examines the intersection of imperial capitalism, fiscal reform, and provincial resistance. Drawing from archival contracts, engineering surveys, and historical writings, it reinterprets infrastructure as both a physical system and an ideological apparatus that reshaped colonial space. The visual design—restrained, archival, cartographic—mirrors the bureaucratic logic of control while revealing the tensions between modernization and subjugation embedded in these historical documents.