Jesse Rodenbiker

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey | Rutgers · Department of Geography

Although the science of ecology is often understood in antimodernizing terms, this article shows how ecology in China has become a means to articulate green modernization and sustainable development. As scholars predominantly focus on the policy rhetoric surrounding China’s national modernization and sustainable development program called “ecologic...

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is reorienting global development. Few scholars, however, query relationships between green silk road discourse, BRI infrastructure, partner state development goals, and environmental governance. This article details the roots of green silk road discourse in efforts to environmentally engineer China's desert l...

Ecological States critically examines ecological policies in the People's Republic of China to show how campaigns of scientifically based environmental protection transform nature and society. While many point to China's ecological civilization programs as a new paradigm for global environmental governance, Jesse Rodenbiker argues that ecological r...

A specter is haunting the American heartland-the specter of global China. As US-China geopolitical tensions rise, China-related investments in US land have become ground zero for anti-China populist expressions. This article analyzes the role of Chinese land investment in the reconfiguration of local, interregional , and national politics. It exami...

Hong Kong has historically been the epicenter of the global shark fin trade. Despite this legacy, recent public outreach campaigns highlighting the effects of consumption on marine ecosystems have precipitated shifts in the market. Fish maw and sea cucumber have emerged as substitutes in wildlife markets, marking an understudied phenomenon from urb...

This study employs a multidisciplinary methodology across natural and social sciences to examine relationships between biodiversity loss at sea and urban consumption with a focus on sea cucumber and dried seafood markets in New York City (NYC). The study identified 34 dried seafood retailers across three NYC Chinatown boroughs: Manhattan, Brooklyn,...

This chapter demonstrates how urban-rural conservation planning facilitates the territorialization of peri-urban land by municipal governments. I draw on a political ecology framework to detail what I call ‘ecological territorialization’. Ecological territorialization, in municipal regions, entails urban-rural conservation planning practices, multi...

China’s involvement in Global South environmental and development issues is reshaping 21st century environmental governance. This report examines China’s green soft power through multilateral and bilateral environmental initiatives and exchanges. It draws on interviews and fieldwork conducted during the COP-15 UN Convention on Biological Diversity...

We analyze multi-scalar social, economic, and policy dynamics of shark fin production and consumption through Hong Kong, the world's leading shark fin entrepôt, and U.S. Mid-Atlantic artisanal fisheries in New Jersey (NJ), a U.S. state that enacted a shark-fin retail ban in 2021. Trade statistics point to a rise in shark fin circulation to Hong Kon...

Ecological militarization in the South China Sea is transforming ecosystems and geopolitics. By ecological militarization, I am referring to mechanistic transformations of nature in pursuit of military aims. Mechanistic approaches to nature hold that if appropriate applications of science and technology are applied, then a desired outcome will resu...

Geoengineering for aesthetic and utilitarian ends, this essay argues, is part and parcel of the banal operation of state power in contemporary China. In contrast with Kantian articulations of the sublime, turn-of-the-century thinkers like Zhang Jingsheng and contemporary Chinese politicians and scientists espouse an ecological sublime undergirded b...

For scholars based in North America who study various topics in China, the global spread of COVID-19 and resulting travel restrictions imposed by governments and research institutions have erected new barriers to field sites and local contacts. New disease-related travel restrictions are overlaid upon constrained political conditions for some resea...

Research on China’s urban planning sector has largely focused on its role in delivering economic growth and state objectives. Yet China’s urban planning practices are producing new forms of social injustice, which few studies explicitly examine. The paper details three types of social injustice stemming from urban planning and urbanization processe...

This paper argues that the urban and the ocean are co-constituted through relations that are unevenly classed, gendered, and racialized. This argument is empirically anchored in high-value fish maw markets in Hong Kong, New York City, and the oceanic spaces and lives therein. The global inter-urban trade in Totoaba, an endangered fish endemic to th...

This article discusses methodological adaptations to participatory methods for reflexive environmental management. Reflexive approaches to research methods as process, this article contends, can elucidate social dynamics that standard sampling frames and rote procedures may elide. This argument is supported through a discussion of key insights from...

The withdrawal from rural homesteads (WRH) refers to a mechanism to encourage villagers to withdraw from their vacant homesteads or give up their occupied homesteads (including the houses built on them) voluntarily and move into high-rise buildings with compensation. WRH aims to address inefficient utilization of rural land in China. However, the e...

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Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri‐urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri‐urban ‘ecological mig...

The genesis and spread of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 have transformed urban social life across the world. In this essay, I show how COVID-19 epitomizes but does not exclusively define global reach of China's cities, which is weaving new interconnections between humans and non-humans, including viruses and endangered wildlife. Through exploring...

A central feature of China's “green” development plan has been the creation of conservation zones across the peri-urban fringes of major cities. In these conservation zones, rural land and housing are being unevenly incorporated into urban space, leading to a diverse set of experiences for dislocated villagers. In this paper, I develop a volumetric...

I am co-organizing this conference in Berkeley, CA. The description is as follows: What is Asia? Since the evolution of Asian Studies out of its singular post-war focus on defining and understanding alterity, the field has grappled with this central question through an array of analytical frames: the nation-state, identity, culture, belief systems...

This paper analyzes the linkages between urban waterscapes, nature aesthetics, and sustainability by delineating the re-emergence of shan-shui, translatable as ‘mountain-water,’ or ‘landscape,’ within contemporary urban China. I show how this aesthetic concept, originally emerging in third century Chinese landscape poetry, is used to reconfigure an...