| Sumario: | This article analyzes the emergence and circulation of affects in technological projects, with a focus on China's national land survey, the Land Right Authorization. Rural residents, whose livelihoods and identification are intertwined with their familial land, expressed frustration over survey 'errors', such as mistaken placenames. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research in rural Meixian, southeast China, this article shows that these 'native names' (tuming) were legally recognized across multiple regimes as valid references for identifying land property. During the Land Right Authorization, however, rural placenames documented in the survey reports often differed from those locally recognized and historically embedded toponyms. Rural landholders' affective responses to such semiotic discrepancies show their competing ways of understanding the rural and the urban, the conventional and the technical. I introduce the concept of 'chronotopic affects' to capture social sentiments linked to time and space. Chronotopic affects are emotive moments – both public and personal – that arise when time-space references are aligned or misaligned. The state's land survey provides an example of such cross-time-space communication. This article argues for greater attention to the affective dimensions in science and technology, suggesting that social affects do not merely accompany technical practices, but shape the trajectories of projects that might otherwise seem neutral and impersonal.
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