A road to the ‘hidden place’

Abstract

Medog County, located in the southeast of Tibet, was the last county inaccessible by road in China and was widely described as ‘a lotus in the hidden place’. The Medog Highway, linking Medog with the rest of the country, was constructed first in 1994 and, following years of landslides and natural disasters, completed for the second time in 2013. Utilizing ethnographic insights into the usage and non-usage of the Medog Highway, this chapter reveals how the road was constructed and used in specific political, social and cultural contexts. In terms of state formation, the road was not only used as a material infrastructure to integrate the Medog people and a strategic investment of international politics, but also as a discursive symbol to enhance the state’s legitimacy to the whole nation. This chapter argues that, besides connection and integration, two other techniques – channelling and filtering – are also constitutive of state formation via road construction. With this road, goods and ideas connected to broader processes of globalization were also channelled into the area, producing both asymmetric connectivity and one-way integration. Furthermore, control and surveillance have also increased after the completion of the road, resulting in both proactive and reactive state efforts to evict unwelcome activities. Producing not only connectivity but also new disconnectivity and social exclusion, I therefore describe the Medog Highway as ‘a punctuated road’.