Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
rank and fi le to famous admirals in the Chinese navy. My grandfather was a
merchant who transported goods between Chongming and the Shanghai
waterfront, keeping houses in both places, and who served as a steward in
the 1950s after he left China. My father improved upon his father's station at
sea, becoming a navigator based out of Hong Kong in the 1960s.
To combat the perceived island isolation, powerful economic forces and
technological changes emanating from the mainland have propelled an orgy
of bridge and tunnel building around the world, nowhere with greater
enthusiasm than in China. h e past thirty years have seen more islands con-
nected by bridges, tunnels, and high-speed ferries than in all of previous
recorded human history.
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Gillis suggests that “remoteness is the product of
a relationship between two places but these places are unequal to one
another. Today, powerful mainlands bestow remoteness on relatively
powerless islands.”
44
What was a fi ve-hour boat ride for my dad in the
1930s became a forty-fi ve-minute car ride over one of the world's largest
bridge-tunnel spans. h is change is a perfect illustration of the geographer
David Harvey's “time-space compression.”
45
He defi nes time-space com-
pression as a key feature of postmodernity and of late capitalist development
through which technologies accelerate or demolish spatial and temporal
distance.
In other words, bridges and tunnels are
not
neutral technological or
transportation infrastructure, benevolent gifts bestowed upon a grateful
populace. Rather, bridges and tunnels reinforce and reinscribe geographical
and political hierarchies that have mainland cultures and economies
increasing their control and power over islands. And although bridges and
tunnels may alter the status and accessibility of an island, islands remain
islands, thus reinforcing the German sociologist and critical theorist Georg
Simmel's observation that “in connecting two things we simultaneously
underline what separates them. . . . [I]nsularity and connectedness are but
two sides of the same coin, their meaning forever entangled.”
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