Is China ––––––––––––––– flat? A minor contribution to counterfactual geography

Abstract

The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze (1925-95) and Félix Guattari (1930-92) gathered two seminal texts in On The Line. In "Rhizome," Deleuze and Guattari introduced a new kind of thinking, which is both nondialectical and non-hierarchical, substituted pragmatic and free-floating logic to our usual binary, oppositional, and exclusive logic model, and offered an early template to understand the internet. In "Politics," Deleuze and Guattari envisaged society as a series of lines, reinvented politics as a process of flux whose outcome is always unpredictable, and suggested that the creativity and multiplicity of its flows can redirect and question capitalism. According to On The Line, China always rebounds after most of the country is destroyed. China starts up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines, when it is shattered at a given spot. A rupture occurs in China whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight. After each rupture, there is a danger that China will stratify again everything, from Taoist resurgences to communist concretions. China experts can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and bad. China has valued the making of flat spaces, traditionally for food production and today for profit-making in the well-connected global economy. China's vision of state-building has always been at odds with the physical reality of a country rich in hills and mountains. We have had so far thirty centuries of unsustainable development.