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Borders and mobilities have played key roles in the transformations of capitalism that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic. We attempt to distinguish novel developments in the control of movements of bodies, labour, and capital from processes of renationalisation, financialisation, and platformisation that were in train before the outbreak. Focusing on logistical techniques and technologies that govern the global circulation of people and things, this article explores the spatial shifts and ruptures that have marked the capitalist crisis occasioned by the pandemic. We give empirical attention to movements and struggles of migration in China, India, the Americas, and the Mediterranean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A special kind of freight train connects China to Europe: the YuXinOu express. Contrasting blockchain technologies with the YuXinOu block train, this article examines how the concept and technolegal operation of the block intersects with the geopolitics of China's Belt and Road Initiative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes. We approach copper as a material element that due to its capacity to conduct electricity provides conditions of possibility for contemporary digital capitalism. At the same time, we consider the elements that constitute logistics as a political force by asking how logistics operates in parallel, partnership, and rivalry to forms of state and international order themselves in uncertain transformation. Empirically, the article stems from research conducted in Chile, specifically in the port of Valparaíso, the Andina mine run by the country's state owned copper mining company CODELCO, and the copper smelter run by the same company on the coast at Ventanas. On this basis, we ask how the production and circulation of copper has mutated with shifting logistical arrangements that respond to the geopolitical position of China, the financialization of trade in base metals, the rise of business models based in data extraction, and workers' struggles in times of labor precarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO's subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity's intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the geopolitical situation surrounding the Chinese occupation of Tibet in the context of the myth of Shangri-La. Historical construction of Shangri-La myth in popular culture; Scope of the politics surrounding the Free Tibet movement; Significance of Shangri-La in excess of its Orientalist construction.