Introduction: Vast land of borders: empire, state, and territory in China.

This Special Issue focuses on historical and contemporary transformations of territory in China's "vast land of borders". While the idea of China and borders typically indicates a contested national boundary, a biopolitical geobody, or transnational borderlands, critical insights of geographical debate have yet to grasp the extent of bordering within the state including the reactivation of frontiers and the implementation of new territorial arrangements with historical elements to support future interests. This Introduction to the Special Issue conceptualizes dynamic bordering and territory within the state and its emergence from the historical geography of governing, settling, enfolding, and controlling contingent lands and peoples within the centralizing state's ecumene. The contributions of the Special Issue analyze the vast land of borders through combinations of six themes: frontier peripheralization, geopolitical imagination, territorialization and the administrative divisions, variability of space and time, uneven development, and dynamic toponymy. Together they contribute to identifying and defining new questions about historical and contemporary state formation in China and yield new understandings for the study of territory in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]