China's leaders are "largely insulated" from the everyday air breathed in the country's notoriously polluted urban environments. "As it turns out," the New York Times reports, "the homes and offices of many top leaders are filtered by high-end devices, at least according to a Chinese company, the Broad Group, which has been promoting its air-purifying machines in advertisements that highlight their ubiquity in places where many officials work and live.""Creating clean, healthy air for our national leaders is a blessing to the people," the Broad Group claims.
Here, though, we clearly see the value of also adding literature on the politics of this atmospheric phenomenon--the spatial politics of governmentally regulated and maintained spaces of filtered air--as if, again, we might someday recognize a space of Chinese state sovereignty not through such things as armed security teams or surveillance cameras, but through the quality of the air being breathed there. In fact, the spatial relationship between governmentality and the atmosphere only becomes more extraordinary when we put this in the context of Chinese attempts at weather control during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Perhaps the future of state sovereignty, then, is no longer about the terrestrial control of territory--i.e. land--but about, in a very literal sense, who controls the air. The notion of air power takes on a whole new meaning here.