Dream Labor Press is a self-publishing collective founded by a group of Chinese female graphic designer-authors who are based in the United States and China. Our work focuses on storytelling and fiction-making in the liminal space between places and identities.
By means of zines, artist books and other small publications, we play with objects, symbols and memories. We endeavor to communicate layered narratives that resonate with different walks of audiences and to push the boundaries of design.
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Doris Liu
Zia Qian
Lexi Xu
Lihao Zhu
Zhenyu Zhou
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Lines of Control:
Railroads, Resistance, and the Reordering of Semi-Colonial Space, 1898–1905
Zia Qian
2025
6.25 x 9.25 inch
Naked binding with semi-attached jacket
124 pages
Co-authored with historian and writer Baiyi Du, the project examines the 1898 Hankow-Canton Railroad contract between the Qing government and the American China Development Company—a moment when infrastructure became a contested site among imperial capitalism, state modernization, and local resistance.
For the ACDC and its backers, railroads represented "economic invasion," a way to access China's coal and other resources while extracting profit. Parsons's engineering reports, which the book analyzes closely, are frank about this: the railroad's value lay not just in transportation but in the mining rights that came with it. American capital saw China as a source of "free" resources waiting to be developed—and dominated.
For the Qing government, weakened by wars and internal rebellion, railroads offered a path to fiscal modernization and centralized control. Building modern infrastructure became a way to assert sovereignty and rebuild state power.
But provincial gentry, particularly in Hunan and Sichuan, saw railroads as threats to local autonomy. They organized resistance movements, arguing that foreign-built railroads would enable foreign control of Chinese territory. The ensuing conflicts reveal the railroad not as a simple tool of progress but as a contested political technology.
The book's aesthetic contrasts sharply with the violence it documents: economic violence, spatial violence, the violence of imposed modernity.