The Chinese railway journey: Sensory ethnography and the political aesthetics of speed
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The article examines the political aesthetics of railway infrastructures in China through J.P. Sniadecki’s documentary The Iron Ministry (2014) and Chinese public responses to the 2011 Wenzhou high-speed rail accident. Analyzing the film’s sensorial portrayal of the train compartment, I argue that its vibrant, chaotic viewing experience produces a sensorium of slowness whose frictions and discomfort are the very material out of which a railway commons is built. The railway commons is a mode of collective life that, following Lauren Berlant, coheres through proximity rather than presumed belonging, disrupting the homogenized and sanitized experience of high-speed rail. Extending this analysis to the Wenzhou accident’s afterlife on Weibo in 2011, I challenge Susan Leigh Star’s classic claim that infrastructure becomes visible only upon breakdown: China’s high-speed rail is hyper-visible by design, so breakdown does not produce visibility but shifts its register from state-sanctioned spectacle to site of crisis, exposing the opaque bureaucratic apparatus whose contradictions become legible only when its smooth operation is interrupted. Attending to affects of grief, frustration, and hope across documentary and social media, I show how these sensory aesthetics unsettle the linear teleology of techno-modernity and gesture toward political socialities that sanitized infrastructure otherwise forecloses. The article thereby intervenes in infrastructure studies and film and media studies by theorizing a sensory aesthetic regime of contemporary China.
Source: Journal of Chinese Cinemas
Author: Ziwei Chen
Language: English
Topic: Cinema History and Criticism
Subfield: Visual Arts and Performing Arts
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7204264142