China’s gun-free society is maintained through a paradox—while the state’s disciplinary apparatus unmakes any exceptions to the norm by continuously disarming the wayward, it simultaneously perpetuates exaggerated narratives of threats posed by clandestine gun makers in the ethnic frontier regions. This article investigates the state’s construction of Hualong, in Northwest China’s Qinghai, as ‘the capital of China’s ghost guns’. By debunking the quasi-historical claim that Hualong was a major firearms manufacturing hub in the early twentieth century, the article reveals how the modern Chinese state uses this narrative to reinforce an ethnopolitical reset—placing the Han in exclusive control of both firearms’ regulation and the sovereign right to punish violators. Drawing on multiple archival sources, the article argues that monoethnic control of arms was a central tenet of twentieth-century ethnic nationalism. Furthermore, this article demonstrates that early twentieth-century Qinghai was adept in taking advantage of the mobility and fluidity of arms afforded by a trans-imperial infrastructure in its state-making enterprise. That infrastructure included Western missionary networks, treaty ports and foreign concessions inherited from the late Qing, a revitalized maritime hajj route, Japanese imperialism, as well as an expansionist Chinese nationalism struggling to find a foothold in the former empire’s legacy frontiers.

Using the unique and historic Islamic cemetery of Mamillah in Jerusalem as a primary example, this essay discusses the ethno-necrocratic order that led to the 2008 Israeli High Court of Justice's codification of the supremacy of Jewish bodies and afterlives over non-Jewish ones, on the basis of advancing Israel's values. Hundreds of Palestinian burial grounds, starting with village cemeteries, have been destroyed since 1948. Indeed, funerary sites have testified to the omnipresence and millenarian existence of a population that the state has sought to erase from memory. In a few decades, the deathscape was radically altered, in cities as in the countryside. Although real estate corruption plagues Israeli politics, land use planning and real estate capitalism are inseparable from the ethno-racial politics of exclusion, which affect both the dead and the living.