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ECOLOGICAL STATES
ECOLOGICAL
STATES
Politics of Science and Nature
in Urbanizing China
Jesse Rodenbiker
Foreword by Albert L. Park
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
Thanks to generous funding from the Luce Foundation and the Institute for
Chinese Language and Culture, Renmin University of China, the ebook editions of
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First published 2023 by Cornell University Press
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rodenbiker, Jesse, 1983– author.
Title: Ecological states : politics of science and nature in urbanizing China /
Jesse Rodenbiker, foreword by Albert L. Park.
Description: Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2023. | Series: Environments
of East Asia | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022038029 (print) | LCCN 2022038030 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781501768996 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501769009 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781501769023 (pdf) | ISBN 9781501769016 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Ecology—Political aspects—China. | Human ecology—China. |
Power (Social sciences)—China.
Classification: LCC JA75.8 .R64 2023 (print) | LCC JA75.8 (ebook) |
DDC 304.20951—dc23/eng/20221101
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038029
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022038030
Cover image: Kunming Waterfall Park. Photo by Jesse Rodenbiker.
For Akira
Contents
Foreword by Albert L. Park ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: Ecological States 1
Part I ECOLOGY AND STATE POWER
1. Making Ecology Developmental 25
2. Botany, Beauty, Purification 54
3. Ecological Territorialization 76
Part II ECOLOGY AND SOCIAL TRAJECTORIES
4. Ecological Migrations, Volumetric Aspirations 103
5. Rural Redux 130
6. Infrastructural Diffusion 160
Epilogue: Global Ecological Futures 186
Appendix: Research Methods 195
Notes 201
References 219
Index 239
Foreword
In the face of climate change and environmental crises in the twenty-first century,
“ecology” has become a popular stand-in for laying out a new pathway for sus-
tainable living. Ecology, as a scientific term, focuses on the relationship between
living organisms, and as such, it has been deployed as a tool to rethink the ways
humans should approach and treat nature. Governments talk about ecology as a
panacea for national and global environmental issues—something to reverse the
destructive pathways of modern civilization by promoting environmental pro-
tection and a more harmonious relationship with nature. Since 2012, ecology
has figured prominently in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) campaign “to
build a new ecological civilization.” This campaign has been a top-down drive to
reconstruct landscapes, built environments, and people’s habits and culture in
the pursuit of developing a more green society. Green development for ecological
civilization has been imagined and articulated by the CCP as a vehicle for over-
coming environmental degradation without compromising or sacrificing mate-
rial prosperity for the citizens of China, but it has given way to dispossession,
displacement, and rupture in both human and nonhuman worlds.
In Ecological States, Jesse Rodenbiker points out that the pursuit of ecological
civilization has been a way to construct right relationships with nature. In this
quest for building a new relationship with nature, who gets to define “right” rela-
tionships? That is, who has the power to determine the definition of ecology, how
that definition plays out between humans and nonhumans, and the appearance
and shape of ecological civilization? Ecological States carefully interrogates these
questions. In so doing, it becomes a platform to shine light on the politicization of
the process to build an ecological civilization in China. It draws attention to the
ways in which the Chinese state has turned ecological civilization into a vehicle
for governing, exercising and reinforcing state authority in people’s daily lives
through techno-scientific knowledge and practices. As such, Ecological States
powerfully reminds readers that there is nothing “depoliticized” in ecology and
that building an ecological civilization is far from a simple neutral process to save
the environment.
Any top-down, state-led campaign is not a monolithic process in which peo-
ple are simply bystanders. Ecological States makes this quite clear by carefully
laying out how the CCP’s policies have shaped and influenced the lives of its
citizens. Through ethnographic research, it highlights how people on the ground
ix
x FOREWORD
have navigated these policies and demonstrates the indeterminacy of any policy
regardless of the power of the state. In studying how ecological civilization as
a state policy was formed and the impact this has had on the public, Ecologi-
cal States is a valuable tool to historically and materially ground the meaning
of ecology and its connection to state power. It makes visible the dynamics and
infrastructure of authority behind drives to build ecological civilizations in order
to show that it is never, and will never be, a simple process to protect the environ-
ment without domination and control.
—Albert L. Park
Acknowledgments
Making a book is a collective endeavor. My debts and gratitude for all involved in
the making of this one run deep. First and foremost, I thank the people of China
for sharing their insights and experiences with me. Without the generosity of
those who opened doors to their homes, government offices, and research facili-
ties, this project would not have materialized. From environmental scientists,
government officials, and urban planners to everyday citizens and ecological
migrants, all who participated in this project have my utmost gratitude.
Along the way, I have been fortunate to have some of the best colleagues one
could wish for. At University of California, Berkeley, where this project began,
mentors and colleagues provided inspiration and support. You-tien Hsing has
always been a model of intellectual rigor for me. She fostered my work in
geography along with generous support from Jake Kosek, Nancy Peluso, and
Michael Watts. While at UC Berkeley, I benefited from writing groups and
workshops, including those organized through the Center for Chinese Studies,
Global Metropolitan Studies, Left Coast Political Ecology, and the Institute of
East Asian Studies. I appreciate support from UC Berkeley colleagues including
Alexander Arroyo, Teresa Caldeira, Phillip Campanile, Sharad Chari, Ying-fen
Chen, Renee Elias, Greg Fayard, Thomas Gold, Paul Groth, Gillian Hart, Camilla
Hawthorne, Adam Jadhav, Laurel Larsen, Chris Lesser, Peiting Li, Kan Liu, Yan
Long, Juliet Lu, Annie Malcolm, Bridget Martin, Jeff Martin, Tim McLellan,
Chris Mizes, Kevin O’Brien, Meredith Palmer, Will Payne, Nicole Rosner, Lana
Salman, Ettore Santi, Kristin Sangren, Nathan Sayre, Tobias Smith, David Thomp-
son, Alessandro Tiberio, Erin Torkelson, Shu-wei Tsai, Mollie Van Gordon, Alex
Werth, Jenny Zhang, and Leonora Zoninsein, many of whom provided feedback
on chapters or otherwise fueled intellectual conversations. Adam Liebman, Kris-
ten Looney, Jean Oi, Lisa Rofel, and Tomo Sugimoto provided helpful comments
and questions on chapters in progress. Geospatial librarian, Susan Powell, and
Chinese collection librarian, Jianye He, helped locate archival material through
means only they know. Before I arrived in Berkeley, Ina Asim, Daniel Buck, Bryna
Goodman, Lionel Jensen, John Kronen, and Yizhao Yang provided guidance and
encouragement.
Support for conducting fieldwork in China and concentrated writing time
were instrumental to this project. At Sichuan University Department of Land
Resource Management and School of Public Administration, Liu Runqiu
xi
xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
provided key support, as did Yu Chao, Cao Qian, and Dong Huan. For their
support, I thank Hu Zhiding formerly of Yunnan Normal University School of
Geography and Tourism, Yang Shuo at the Yunnan Institute of Environmental
Science, Peter Edward Mortimer at the Kunming Institute of Botany, and col-
leagues at Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute. Du Yiran assisted with
transcribing interviews. Numerous institutions provided indispensable grant
and fellowship support for fieldwork, including the Social Science Research
Council, Fulbright-Hays Program, Confucius China Studies Program, as well as
UC Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies and Institute of International Stud-
ies. A grant from the Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly
Exchange supported the early writing stage. A Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
with the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and Department of Natu-
ral Resources and the Environment at Cornell University provided time and
resources for further developing the manuscript. The Institute for Chinese Lan-
guage and Culture at Renmin University supported the illustration program and
Open Access publication. Portions of the book previously appeared in research
articles with the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum,
and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. I am grateful to the
managing editors of these journals Kendra Strauss, Harvey Neo, and Fulong
Wu, as well as anonymous reviewers, for their feedback. The American Coun-
cil of Learned Societies and Henry Luce Foundation Program in China Studies,
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Princeton University’s
Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China provided fellowship
support for the completion of the book manuscript.
Over the years, I have presented parts of this book at conferences, universi-
ties, and research centers. I am grateful to conference participants at annual
meetings of the American Association of Geographers, Association of Asian
Studies, Dimensions of Political Ecology, International Association of China
Planning, Nordic Geographers Meeting, and the Royal Geographical Society–
Institute of British Geographers. The arguments presented here benefited from
critical and encouraging audiences at Barnard College and Columbia University
(Architecture and Urban Studies), Chulalongkorn University (Cultural Studies),
Cornell University (Natural Resources and the Environment), Guangzhou Uni-
versity (Geographical Sciences), Hohai University (National Centre for Reset-
tlement), National University of Singapore (Geography), National University of
Taiwan (Geography), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Geog-
raphy), Princeton University (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Public and
International Affairs), Rutgers University (Geography and Human Ecology),
Sichuan University (Public Administration and Land Resource Management),
South China Normal University (Geography), Southwest Forestry University
(Geography and Ecotourism), Stanford University (Shorenstein Asia-Pacific
xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research Center), State University of New York at Buffalo (Environment and
Sustainability), University College London (Bartlett School of Planning), Uni-
versity of Pittsburgh (Institute for Chinese Studies), and University of Sydney
(China Studies Centre).
I found vibrant intellectual communities at Cornell University, Princeton Uni-
versity, and Rutgers University. Yan Bennett, Raymond Craib, Priscilla Ferreira,
Nate Gabriel, Aaron Glasserman, Jenny Goldstein, Qian He, Junming Huang,
Qing Huang, David Hughes, Mazen Labban, Preetha Mani, Pamela McElwee,
Robin Leichenko, Melanie McDermott, Paul O’Keefe, Victoria Ramenzoni, Åsa
Rennermalm, Kevon Rhiney, Louisa Schein, Laura Schneider, Mi Shih, Kevin
St. Martin, Julia Teebken, David Wilcove, Willie Wright, Yu Xie, and Jerry Zee
have been gracious and convivial interlocutors. I thank cartographer Mike Siegel
for producing the maps and figures for the book. My deep appreciation goes to
Yue Du, Clifford Kraft, D. Asher Ghertner, Paul Nadasdy, Wendy Wolford, Emily
Yeh, and John Zinda, who provided critical feedback on the full manuscript dur-
ing a book workshop at Cornell University.
Cornell University Press Environments of East Asia series editors Albert Park
and Ann Sherif believed in this project from the beginning. They provided enthu-
siastic support and valuable feedback. Editor Emily Andrew saw the importance
of the work and welcomed the manuscript to the press. Editor Alexis Siemon
shepherded the book through production alongside Karen Laun. Scott Levine
designed the cover illustration. Special thanks go to these editors and the staff at
Cornell University Press, as well as Anna Ahlers and Tim Oakes who provided
incisive comments on the manuscript.
Heartfelt acknowledgements are due for my family. My parents, Harold and
Bonnie, offered unyielding moral support. Jake, Jordan, and Josh provided fra-
ternal camaraderie and frequent reminders of other meaningful activities. Rain
interrupted writing whenever she pleased with dog kisses.
My daughter Akira grew and changed alongside this project. She accompa-
nied her single father for long-term fieldwork abroad—no easy task. Not only did
she learn a new language during kindergarten and first grade in China, but she
proved to be an indispensable research partner. Her presence kept me grounded.
Her strength and creativity continue to inspire me. I dedicate this work to her,
with love.
Finally, for support in all matters, from the intellectual to the mundane,
I thank Andrea Marston. During fieldwork, her visits from antipodes were
sources of renewal. During writing, she volunteered countless hours to read
drafts, discuss the ideas that fill these pages, and offer encouragement. I am grate-
ful for her brilliance, support, and enduring love without which this book would
not have come to fruition.
ECOLOGICAL STATES
Introduction
ECOLOGICAL STATES
Ecology has become a means through which to express and constitute state
power in China. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wrote “eco-
logical civilization building” into the party constitution. In 2018, it was writ-
ten into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China with amendments
that emphasized conservation and a “scientific outlook on development.” These
amendments included ideological messages that building a beautiful China,
maintaining the purity of the ruling communist party, and creating an “eco-
logical society” were crucial to sustainable development. A nationwide envi-
ronmental campaign organized around strategic policies to build an ecological
civilization ( shengtai wenming jianshe zhanlüe zhengce) became a key pillar of
China’s party-state. Alongside the reorganization of party-state ideology and
national policy over the last decade, the state introduced myriad techniques
aimed at optimizing green governance and urbanization, such as ecological
redlines and New-Type Urbanization planning, which initiated a new phase of
urban-rural coordination.
Contrary to news media and scholarly accounts, the ecological civilization
building paradigm did not originate from President Xi Jinping who came to
power in 2012. Even though the scientific knowledge and techniques guiding
ecological civilization building emerged through the work of China’s scientists
and state planners engaged in global ecological and socialist thought, Xi is the
figure most closely associated with the ecological turn. Xi Jinping Thought
1
2 INTRODUCTION
(Xi Jinping sixiang) was enshrined in the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017 dur-
ing a three-hour speech in which Xi articulated a vision for sustainable devel-
opment. In the speech, Xi emphasized nature aesthetics and nation-building
through the theme of “beautiful China.” A beautiful China, Xi claimed, is a
nation that is “ecological and civilized” and “ensures global ecological security.”1
To become a “fully modernized socialist country by 2035,” Xi vowed to develop
“ecological goods to meet people’s growing demand for a beautiful environment,”
promote green development, protect the environment, and improve society.2 The
scope of ecological civilization building is vast, crossing an array of governmental
policies. It epitomizes a socio-technical imaginary aimed at balancing economy
and environment by optimizing biophysical nature, urbanizing rural society, and
improving the aesthetic character of China’s landscapes.3
From forest restoration to nationwide projects aimed at urbanizing millions
of rural citizens,
4 there are significant tensions between the multiple aims of a
vision that directs environmental protection, social transformation, green devel-
opment, and national beautification. How did ecology come to take on such
an all-compassing role in China’s environmental governance? How did socio-
environmental improvement, civilizational progress, urbanization, and a national
aesthetic come be articulated in relation to ecology? What logics undergird the
state’s vision for sustainable development? How do these logics shape techniques
of socio-environmental governance? How are China’s citizens affected by a state
that wields ecology for governmental ends? How do everyday people act under
state programs, which routinely displace and resettle millions in the name of
social and environmental optimization?
Expressions and constitutions of state power in relation to ecology are at the
heart of the present work—as are their effects in shaping society and space. Ecol-
ogy is not merely the study of relations between living organisms and physical
environments, but also a multimodal signifier within and through which nested
relations between the state, society, and nature articulate. This book details how
the state wields ecology to govern and within this context how society encounters
and counters state power. The early chapters focus on relationships between ecol-
ogy and state power. They engage environmental scientists, urban planners, and
government officials as they define logics underlying the state’s vision of green
governance and deploy techniques to bring it to fruition. The latter chapters
focus on how relationships between ecology and power shape domains of social
conduct and uneven social trajectories. They follow everyday people, villagers,
and resettlement migrants—often referred to as “ecological migrants”—as they
struggle to survive and thrive among transformations introduced by the state in
the name of sustainable development.
3 ECOLOGICAL STATES
My central argument is that the Chinese state wields ecology to shape nature,
society, and space. As such, ecology mediates power relations, fields of social
action, and unequal subject positionalities within China’s citizenry. The chapters
are grounded in extensive fieldwork with scientists, state planners, and everyday
people. The following section provides context through a rural citizen’s experi-
ences of two state environmental campaigns.
Zhang’s Tale of Two Environmental Campaigns
“First the government told us to fill in the lake to make farmland, now they are
taking our farmland and turning it into wetlands,” exclaimed Zhang Jian, a vil-
lager living on the outskirts of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan Prov-
ince. The municipal government had recently zoned Zhang’s village land within
an ecological protection area as part of their urban-rural comprehensive plan.
Afterward, the buildings and the village houses that surrounded Zhang’s land
were on a timeline for demolition. Zhang lost access to his farmland, which was
transformed into an aestheticized ecological protection area that attracts hun-
dreds of urban tourists daily. He was concerned about the rapid transformations
underway and his future. But this was not the first time Zhang experienced rapid
socio-environmental transformation as the fulcrum of state-led modernization.
The first was during the Maoist period (1949–76) when rural land productivity
became central to socialist modernization. Zhang’s reflections on two state envi-
ronmental campaigns elucidate continuities and ruptures in how the Chinese
state governs nature, society, and space.
In the summer of 2014, we spoke in an abandoned courtyard in the shade of
a willow tree where, before the Maoist period, a Buddhist temple stood. Once
central to social life, the temple was targeted during the Cultural Revolution
(1966–76) campaign to “destroy the four olds” ( posijiu), which changed the sig-
nificance of the building. Old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas of the
precommunist era were to be replaced. The temple came to represent something
anachronistic—out of sync with a new form of modernity—and therefore in need
of transformation. It was torn down. Villagers converted the space into a school
with a concrete courtyard, formed by four rectangular two-story barrack-styled
buildings. Now under state efforts to build an ecological civilization, beautify
China, and urbanize millions of rural people, this rural infrastructure once again
became out of sync with the state’s vision of modernity.
Zhang likened Xi’s campaign to build an ecological civilization with Mao
Zedong’s campaign to transform the countryside. In 1965, Mao initiated a state
4 INTRODUCTION
campaign to “study agriculture from Dazhai” ( nongye xue dazhai). Dazhai is a
village in eastern Shanxi province that produced an abundance of agricultural
goods in the early 1960s. Dazhai became a national model for how diligent labor
and social mobilization can transform the environment and increase agricultural
yields. Mao exhorted peasants to study Dazhai’s example in their efforts to turn
unproductive land into agricultural land. He famously referred to the modernist
enterprise as “conquering all under the sky” ( rending shengtian). This adaptation
of a Confucian phrase has often been translated for Western audiences simply as
conquering or warring against nature.
5 But for Mao the phrase meant overcom-
ing a historically specific form of subjugation, both feudal and colonial, symboli-
cally embodied within the process of cultivating collective agency to shape the
natural world and achieve utopian communism.
6 Regardless of interpretation,
the project of increasing the sum total amount of agricultural land was undoubt-
edly as much about modernist state building and the performance of proper poli-
tics as it was about overcoming environmental limitations through harnessing
social powers.
During Mao’s campaign, Zhang was a laborer and a performer in his village’s
performing arts troupe called the Fill in the Lake Brigade. His work unit was
stationed in south Kunming, alongside hundreds of others. They were assigned
the massive environmental engineering project of transforming portions of Lake
Dian, the largest high plateau lake in the province, into farmland. The project
was Kunming’s local interpretation of the nationwide campaign to study agricul-
ture from Dazhai. Achieving this feat of human-induced environmental change
entailed backbreaking manual labor with minimal mechanized machinery to
enclose parts of the lake with agricultural fields ( weihaizaotian).
As part of the propaganda performance troupe in the Fill in the Lake Brigade,
Zhang’s tasks were twofold. During the day he pulverized rock with handheld
tools and piled them into the lake. If Zhang transported enough fill, he obtained
ration cards for his labor exchangeable for lunch and dinner. If he failed to move
enough rocks, he would go without food for the day. At night, regardless of
whether he ate or not, Zhang performed song and dance alongside the propa-
ganda troupe. Their nightly performances to labor units communicated party-
state ideology and campaign maxims. Zhang referred to his efforts to entertain
and raise morale through performing state-sanctioned messages as spreading
Maoist Thought ( Mao Zedong sixiang). Zhang remembered his role in this cam-
paign with great pride.
Smiling, and donning the face of a performer, he rose from his seat in the
open courtyard and began singing a song from his days in the performance
troupe. Involuntarily, it seemed, his limbs recognized the rhythm and swayed
5 ECOLOGICAL STATES
along. His body followed suit. He began to sing and dance as if performing for
an audience. Zhang’s voice retained a youthful vibrato as he sang a slogan from
the campaign:
Dazhai’s sorghum is tall.
Dazhai’s rice is long.
Their children are all so strong.
Move the mountains to make farmland.
Change the sky to alter the land.
The song lyrics echoed maxims from Mao’s environmental campaign to mobi-
lize social powers and human capacities to transform the earth in an effort to
increase agricultural output. Performances such as this reveal how the campaign
doubled as a theater to advance state interests and communicate ideology.7 Even
though this time was challenging for many Chinese citizens, including Zhang,
he relished memories of his youthful exploits in song and dance. He felt assured
that his labor, his artistic expression, and his sacrifices helped strengthen his
country.
Resting from his performance, Zhang talked about how proud he was to
remember ( huixiang) his role in the campaign, which resulted in more than
thirty-three square kilometers of new land formations in the 1960s. I was
intrigued to hear this, as none of the reclaimed land grew crops well; agricultural
gains on the reclamation site were minimal. Moreover, the process of reclaim-
ing land drastically degraded the aquatic conditions effecting plant life in the
inner part of Lake Dian ( caohai). Over the decades following Deng Xiaoping’s
reform-era modernization drive, often referred to as the “long 1980s” (more or
less from 1978 to 1992), the reclaimed land became the site of urban develop-
ment. Environmental conditions worsened after decades of urbanization dur-
ing which industrial and urban wastewater were dumped directly into the lake.
Urban sprawl came to encompass the filled-in land. This reclaimed land now
houses the Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Museum, Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Vil-
lage, and several ecological protection sites that portray the natural world and
romantic images of rural life side by side. Urbanization coupled with aesthetic
representations of rural life spatially overlay this former site of agricultural
modernization.
As Zhang spoke with me, he and his fellow villagers were again at the forefront
of an environmental campaign as momentous on a national scale as Mao’s. They
now encountered state efforts, under Xi, to build ecological civilization. Building
ecological civilization, or what is sometimes translated as “ecological civiliza-
tion construction” ( shengtai wenming jianshe), is a key contradiction in terms.
6 INTRODUCTION
The Chinese word jianshe means to build, construct, or to develop. Ecology, on
the other hand, is generally considered the study of relations between organ-
isms and their physical environments—less something to be built than a relation
existing in nature. In popular terms, however, ecological civilization building is
often used to reference state conservation projects. The state issued a number of
ecological protection land designations, deemed as crucial to building ecological
civilization, in the early to mid-2000s. There are now more than thirty different
types of ecological protection land designations that span national, provincial,
and municipal levels.
In 2012, ecological protection land designations covered more than 15 percent
of national territory.8 Given subsequent state efforts to expand protected areas,
ecological protection zones cover at least 20 percent of China’s national territory.
9
The state claims 25 precent of land has already been zoned for ecological protec-
tion.
10 The number of types and total areal coverage keep rising annually, which
makes tabulating the number of ecological protected areas and the percentage of
the national territory they occupy an exercise in chasing the Red Queen.
11
Each protected area, to varying degrees, is enrolled in political economies
of ecological construction.
12 Political-economic activities related to ecological
construction are mechanisms not only of shaping biophysical relations in nature
but also for governing people. As land is incorporated into ecological protection
projects, the state endeavors to relocate people living in newly made protected
areas into resettlement housing ( anzhifang). Government officials and plan-
ners refer to this as “ecological migration” ( shengtai yimin)—the uneven process
of displacement and resettlement experienced by those whose land and hous-
ing are incorporated into state conservation projects. The political economy of
ecological construction revolves around displacement, resettlement, and
conservation-oriented development. These are state techniques aimed at opti-
mizing relationships between nature, society, and space.
For Zhang, the confluence of state conservation efforts at the municipal gov-
ernment level and the state drive for urbanizing the rural population brought
significant changes. Zhang had participated in agricultural production and rural
industry throughout his life. Although his labor and social life changed over
time, he nonetheless remained intimately tied to rural land and community. In
the socialist period, he worked the land with his rural commune and acted in
the village performance troupe. During the 1980s, with the decollectivization of
farmland, Zhang began to sell surplus products on the market. With the growth
of rural industry, he worked in the local township-village enterprise (TVE), a
shift commonly referred to as “leaving the soil but not the countryside” ( litu
bulixiang). Many other rural citizens at that time began working in city facto-
ries. Their rural land, housing, and communities, however, remained crucial
7 ECOLOGICAL STATES
social safety nets. Migrant laborers could return from cities to a rural house
with access to farmland. After the closure of his local TVE in the 2000s, Zhang
returned to agricultural work. He grew seasonal vegetables and flowers, which
he sold on the market. Like many rural citizens, Zhang’s relations to rural land
and community were central to his life. With the establishment of an ecologi-
cal protection area and municipal government plans to resettle village residents
into high-rise apartments, however, Zhang and his village comrades were set on
a new trajectory.
Urbanization, Environmental Science,
and State Power
In 2011, at least insofar as most citizens came to live in urban areas and were
designated urban residential status, China became predominantly urban. Urban-
ization did not happen spontaneously. China’s urbanization is the product of
ongoing state efforts, including municipal territorial extension,
13 rural-to-urban
migration, and agricultural industrialization, which prompted movement of
(predominantly rural) flexible labor to factories in major cities. Urbanization
in China is as much about controlling mobility and marketization as it is about
economic migration. In the current moment, the state portrays urbanization of
rural people as necessary to optimizing socio-natural relations and fostering a
more equitable society.
14
The historical roots of economic disparity between urban and rural people
can be traced back to feudal relations, the urban-biased socialist pricing sys-
tem,
15 and household registration policies called hukou that kept people geo-
graphically bound to either rural or urban locales.
16 The hukou system is a
geographical control mechanism that defines citizens’ access to space—either
“urban” (nonagricultural) or “rural” (agricultural)—as well as place-based
social welfare benefits. Urban hukou holders have historically received dispro-
portionately high benefits, which contribute to stark inequalities. Xi’s urbaniza-
tion efforts aim to reclassify millions of rural hukou holders as urban citizens
and resettle them in urban spaces. Changing hukou status, depending on local
context, can come with benefits, such as health care and educational services.
But as rural people officially take on urban residential status, the social fabric
of rural communities transform and individuals forfeit rural housing and use
rights to rural land.
Land is one of the last remnants of postsocialist China’s great capitalist transi-
tion. It is not only many rural people’s most valuable asset, but also embodies
material possibilities for land-based production and economic security. While
8 INTRODUCTION
all land in China is socialized, urban land is controlled by municipal government
hierarchies and other state institutions. Use rights to rural land are distributed
to villagers for building homes, farming, and developing collective enterprises.
Rural land in close proximity to cities is of high value, which makes the politics
of land control in municipal regions contentious.
17 State efforts to urbanize rural
people are equally fraught.
When Xi became president, he outlined a plan to urbanize 100 million rural
people, which he called the “100 million people” issue.
18 It is the first part of a
long-term green modernization plan, which aims to urbanize 250 million citi-
zens by 2025.
19 According to the plan, one of the primary mechanisms through
which urbanization should occur is through the resettlement of rural citizens,
especially in three types of cities within China’s central and western regions: pro-
vincial capitals, prefectural cities, and county-level towns.
I conducted the fieldwork and research for this book in three southwestern
cities, which correspond to each of these urban categories: Kunming (provin-
cial capital of Yunnan Province and prefectural-level city), Chengdu (provincial
capital of Sichuan Province and prefectural-level city), and Dali (county-level
town in Yunnan Province) (figure 1). I also conducted interviews in Beijing.
During fieldwork, from 2014 to 2018, I utilized multiple research methods,
including interviews, archival work, field observations, and photovoice focus
group discussions. For a discussion of research methods in this study see the
appendix.
To direct this new phase of urbanization, Xi called for coordinating planning
and development of urban and rural areas.
20 The National New-Type Urbaniza-
tion Plan (2014–20) marked a new phase in urban-rural coordination by incor-
porating rural planning within the municipal government’s planning processes,
which government officials referred to as “comprehensive urban-rural plan-
ning.”21 The state’s New-Type Urbanization Plan stipulates that 20 percent of all
municipal regions ( shiqu) be zoned for ecological protection.
At this point, it is crucial to clarify key geographical facets related to China’s
municipalities and ecological protection zoning. First, municipal regions are sub-
provincial territories corresponding to areal units that contain multiple urban
districts and extensive rural areas. Municipal governments have come to exert
hierarchical control over townships within their jurisdiction. Townships over-
see administrative villages within which there are any number of “natural” vil-
lages.22 Second, when I use the term ecological protection areas, I am referring to
“ecological redlines” ( shengtai hongxian), “ecological protection areas” ( shengtai
baohuqu), and “urban ecological control areas” (chengshi shengtai kongzhiqu)
within municipal regions. I simplify them with a single term because one of my
findings is that, despite extensive Chinese-language literature that details their
BEIJING
Beijing
Area of detail
within China
Chengdu
0 400 mi
SICHUAN
0 400 km
Dali
Kunming
YUNNAN
0 100 mi
0 100 km
9 ECOLOGICAL STATES
FIGURE 1. Map of research sites.
policy differences, for municipal state planners they serve the same function and
are treated in the same way. When I use the term ecological protection site, I am
referring to a particular site within an area zoned by the municipal government
for ecological protection.
Since this self-styled New-Type Urbanization Plan emerged, ecological pro-
tection areas have sprung up across municipal regions throughout China, par-
ticularly on peri-urban village land like Zhang’s on the outskirts of Kunming.
By peri-urban, I mean porous areas of transition between urban and rural land
uses, classifications, or characteristics that are proximate to municipal regions.
In Kunming alone, there are more than one hundred spatially distinct peri-urban
ecological protection areas. Over 200,000 peri-urban villagers were displaced in
10 INTRODUCTION
their making. For a municipal region with a population of six million, this is
a substantial subset of people—roughly 3.3 percent of the regional population.
Similar numbers are applicable to Chengdu with a population of more than
fifteen million and Dali with a population of 650,000. Zhang is one of these
peri-urban villagers.
After Zhang’s village land was incorporated into the urban-rural comprehen-
sive plan and zoned within an ecological protection area, he not only lost access
to his agricultural land, but was also notified by the local government that village
residents would be resettled into a high-rise resettlement complex being built
nearby. There, Zhang was expected to become a fully “urban” subject. But how
and on what terms was Zhang to become urban? How would he be compen-
sated for his rural land and housing? What would urban life be like for him? The
answers to these questions remained elusive. In his uncertainty, Zhang thought
about his future through his past.
Zhang felt that Mao’s environmental campaign had been turned on its head.
Instead of making farmland out of water, Zhang’s farmland was dredged and
filled with water. The municipal government, in conjunction with a private
developer, transformed Zhang’s former farmland into an artificial wetland for
treating urban wastewater. The ecological restoration landscape emphasized
botanical features, which symbolized beautification and environmental purifi-
cation. Not merely an aesthetic symbol, the treatment wetland was designed to
harbor effluent pollutants thereby mitigating pollution in Lake Dian. Moreover,
the site attracts tourists who come to witness state-led ecological optimization in
action from the comforts of pristinely manicured walkways. Meanwhile, Zhang
waits for resettlement housing to be built. Sometime in the coming years, when
resettlement housing would be completed, he and his fellow villagers will be
asked to relocate into one of the spatially concentrated high-rise housing units.
In the eyes of the state, such transformations are crucial to green urbanization
and making a beautiful China.
Urbanization, according to state development plans, is key to shifting China’s
political economy away from manufacturing and toward a service-oriented
economy driven by domestic consumption. The transition to a service-oriented
economy is gradual.23 Manufacturing remains the bulwark of China’s economy.
Yet spurring domestic spending is crucial to continuing economic growth with a
bourgeoning middle-class. The proliferation of ecological construction projects
and leisure-oriented ecological protection sites are indicative of this political-
economic transition. With a national average of two domestic trips annually and
many more locally, domestic tourism has become important to China’s transi-
tioning economy.24 Within this context, peri-urban sites offering natural and
rural aesthetics welcome urban tourists to environs close to home. Through the
11 ECOLOGICAL STATES
processes of ecological protection zoning and urban-rural comprehensive plan-
ning, Zhang’s agricultural land was transformed into one of these sites.
Zhang’s experience, although potentially isolating for him, is far from iso-
lated. Millions of rural citizens across China, like Zhang, find themselves in a
political bind as they confront state logics and techniques aimed at shaping their
conduct. With his farmland turned into a wetland, Zhang awaited ecological
migration. How will Zhang and rural citizens like him navigate state projects of
environmental protection and urbanization? As millions of China’s rural citizens
are enrolled in environmental campaigns to conserve nature and urbanize the
countryside, it is hard to overstate the relevance of this question to their every-
day lives.
Zhang was uncertain of how he will navigate the transitions underway. And
the question for him was an unsettling one. He felt proud to work on Mao’s envi-
ronmental campaign to fill in the lake. But after the elation of singing, dancing,
remembering the past, being reminded of the present and trying to forecast his
future, his face fell. He expressed feelings of reluctance at the prospect of forfeit-
ing his rural home and moving into an urban high-rise. Would Zhang make
sacrifices for the new environmental campaign as he did for the first?
In considering how these environmental campaigns intersected with his life,
Zhang articulated each as logically opposed to the other. In the first, the local
government, in their implementation of central state imperatives, spearheaded
a massive campaign to fill in Lake Dian. A key logic of the campaign was to
create more arable land in effort to foster agricultural modernization. The cur-
rent campaign, wherein Zhang’s farmland was requisitioned by the municipal
government, is orchestrated around building ecology and restoring a landscape
degraded, in part, through the first campaign. Although Zhang experienced each
campaign as thoroughly different from the other, Mao and Xi’s approaches to
governing natural and social worlds share common logics.
Mao’s logic entailed mobilizing social forces and state powers to shape the
natural world and modernize the country. It was avowedly anticapitalist and
anticolonial. Mao came to power on the heels of war. The People’s Republic of
China (PRC) was founded in 1949 after China’s Communist Party triumphed in
civil war against the US-backed Guomindang. That war was preceded by World
War II and a “century of humiliation” wrought by European, American, and
Japanese colonial powers. Xi’s logic exhibits significant continuity with Mao’s,
particularly regarding the notion of mobilizing social forces and state powers
toward environmental transformation and modernization. Xi’s logic is anti-
capitalist insofar as it espouses a model of sustainable development and eco-
nomic production that counters the deleterious environmental effects of global
capitalist forces. Perhaps most important, the current campaign fundamentally
12 INTRODUCTION
continues the ideological message that the state can scientifically orchestrate
modernist social and environmental improvement. Both espouse visions of
technical triumphalism over nature (much like elsewhere in the world). And
both propose the application of socio-environmental models across regional
contexts, even when they may not be appropriate for local conditions. Yet there
are also key shifts in how these logics are articulated and the role of environmen-
tal science within state governance.
During Mao’s rule, environmental science embodied tensions between Soviet-
inspired anti-Mendelian Lysenkoist science (that precipitated the disastrous
Great Leap Forward famine),
25 and Green Revolution–era agricultural science
that modeled pest management for the world while creating new agricultural
crop strains.
26 Environmental campaigns, during Mao’s reign, were models of
technocratic triumphalism. But the fraught negotiations between “reds” and sci-
entific “experts” throughout these campaigns reflected their dual functionality
as motors of modernization and theaters for performative politics. Principally
for Mao, environmental campaigns projected the achievements that could be
brought to fruition through the mechanization of correct political thought and
action. Politics were front and center, part and parcel of state efforts to govern
society and nature.
A key difference, under Xi, is that logics espoused by environmental scientists,
instead of being explicitly political, contribute to naturalizing technocratic socio-
environmental models of governance. I use the term eco-developmental to refer
to the logics that undergird state techniques of governing nature, society, and
space. These logics, in the contemporary period, revolve around complex sys-
tems science thinking, socio-environmental modeling, and a political narrative
of sustainable developmental progress. Central to Xi’s green modernization cam-
paign, and highly consequential to the lives of millions of rural citizens across
China, like Zhang, is the notion that state scientists and planners can optimize
socio-natural relations. And that scientific optimization is essential for societal
improvement and sustainable development.
For the state, attaining ecological civilization entails totalizing systems sci-
ence techniques aimed at bringing about steady-state equilibrium in the biophys-
ical world and optimized socio-spatial relations. The logic of this endeavor is
advantageous to state building as it solidifies the role of the state within a unitary
scientific paradigm.
27 In the current moment, the state supports a totalizing sys-
tems science approach to socio-environmental management in effort to build an
“ecological society.” Ecological society is presented, by the state and key environ-
mental scientists, as the natural endpoint of green modernist progress. Efforts to
create an ecological society are explicitly framed as righting the environmental
wrongdoings of the Maoist era and subsequent development-first approaches of
13 ECOLOGICAL STATES
the 1980s through the early 2000s.
28 During the reform era, scientists advanced
arguments that urbanizing the rural population was integral to a sustainable
future. These logics have become central to socio-environmental governance
under Xi. Hence, ecological civilization building reflects continuities with the
socialist modernization drive, but also departs from socialist-era logics as ecol-
ogy now figures centrally in the articulation and naturalization of state models
for sustainable development and civilizational progress.
Every civilizational story demarcates who is within and outside the bound-
aries of civilization. China has a long history of civilizational narratives dating
back to the first dynasties. In dynastic China, those who lived outside the bound-
aries of China’s empire were referred to as “barbarians” ( huren or yemanren).
Barbarians were portrayed by the imperial state as operating without capacity to
reason and without culture. The Chinese word for culture ( wenhua) is literally
the transformation ( hua) that comes through writing and language ( wen ). Those
outside of Chinese civilization, were imagined as barbarians ignorant of China’s
cultured forms of expression. They were framed as the relational other vis-à-
vis the imperial population. Narratives of barbarian outsiders served the impe-
rial state project of unifying the population around a shared sense of belonging.
The specificity of imperial narratives, within which social groups were either
within or outside the civilizational vision, changed throughout dynastic history.
Civilizational boundaries, therefore, ebbed and flowed with the boundaries of
empire.
29 In the present, the state’s civilizational story is tethered to ecology and
its myriad situated and contradictory meanings.
In China, or anywhere else for that matter, ecology is far from apolitical.
30
Ecology is embedded within and constitutive of the very workings of state power
and socio-spatial organization across contexts. By way of comparison, science
figures centrally in expressions and constitutions of state power across global
contexts. Ethnology, for instance, was central to the formation of US territorial
power from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. Counterin-
tuitive as it may seem, ethnology was crucial to framing Native Americans as
so-called noble savages—a social category closer to a primordial state of nature
and therefore outside the bounds of civilization.
31 Ethnologists were at the heart
of the US scientific understanding of its civilizing mission. Ethnological science,
therefore, was central to the US colonial project, in that it justified the state’s
acquisition of land and resources that had not been made productive by so-
called uncivilized societies. The US conservation movement and establishment
of national parks further advanced state land territorialization efforts and Native
American dispossession.
32 Analogously, ecology was integral to social Darwinist
and nativist expressions underlying the eugenics movement in fascist Germany,
which precipitated Nazism and the second world war.33 Therefore, as states the
14 INTRODUCTION
world over draw on science in constituting power, it is imperative not to simply
villainize China as an outlier in the global gambit.
Articulations of science and nature are distinct in any given historical, social,
and political contexts. Who and what relationships are deemed “natural”? Who
is civilized or—in other words—outside of and in control of nature? The answers
to these questions lie in particular expressions and constitutions of state power
in relation to science and politics of nature. In contemporary China, ecology has
come to figure centrally in articulations of state power.
Under Xi’s regime, ecology mediates the articulation between state power and
a differentiated citizenry navigating environmental governance. It mediates how
everyday people act, organize, or even resist incorporation into the state’s civiliza-
tional vision. I theorize this articulation of power through the multidimensional
framework of ecological states.
Ecological States
I define ecological states as expressions and constitutions of state power in rela-
tion to ecology. Ecology is not only a scientific discipline related to process-
pattern relationships in the world but also a multimodal signifier that has become
enrolled in a political narrative of socio-environmental change, human manipu-
lation of nature, and the role of the state in governing sustainable development.
In this framing, ecology is a situated universal with multiple logics. By logics
I mean ways of knowing nature that order how it is to be acted on.
34 Eco-
developmental logics undergird China’s national sustainable development
narrative, which projects an apex of biophysical, governmental, and aesthetic
achievement. At their core, eco-developmental logics hold that state interven-
tion will produce ecological equilibrium in the biophysical world, a modern
society, and an aesthetic sublime in physical landscapes. Therefore, I anchor eco-
logical states within key modes through which state power, society, and nature
articulate—the biophysical, governmental, and aesthetic.
Biophysical
First, and perhaps most immediate when considering ecology, is the study of bio-
physical relations. Across iterations of ecology, ecological states refer to relations
between biotic organisms and abiotic components constituted through the com-
ingling and interaction of compounds in totalizing systems. Since the late twen-
tieth century, the term ecosystem was used to describe the interactions between
organisms and physical environments linked through nutrient cycles and energy
15 ECOLOGICAL STATES
flows.
35 A key goal of the Chinese state in building ecological civilization is to
engineer equilibrium states in nature.
Engineering equilibrium states entails mechanistic approaches to managing
nature. Mechanistic approaches to nature define, measure, and operationalize
biophysical relations with the express purpose of optimizing them. Underly-
ing this logic, is the understanding that if nature is appropriately altered it will
exhibit desired relations and effects. Nature, in this sense, is modular. It can
be modeled and operationalized for specified ends. According to a mechanis-
tic logic, if the appropriate application of science and technical intervention is
applied, then desired outcomes in nature will result in a predictable machine-
like fashion. Mechanistic approaches to nature can be distinguished from other
human-nature relations, such as state simplifications of nature, which James
Scott argues have been central to modernist state governance.
36 In contrast,
mechanistic logics of governing nature hold biophysical relations as external
natures—distinct and separate from the human—but also manageable through
human interventions. Humans, as biotic entities, are crucial within the calculus,
not only as exceptionally agential organisms, but also as entities ascribed their
own natural qualities.
Human natures, as Raymond Williams argues, are linked to historically
specific ideas of nature and innate human qualities.
37 Ideas and meanings of
nature, however, are malleable. They change in different historical and epis-
temological contexts depending on how claims on nature are expressed and
made generalizable, not only to the biophysical world, but also to social groups.
Human natures (or other forms of nature, for that matter) take shape through
historical processes of scientifically knowing and defining nature. Processes of
defining human natures inevitably demarcate social differences. In chapters 1
and 2, I show how China’s natural and social scientists articulate ecology in
relation to biophysical natures, as well as malleable human natures categorized
in terms of urban and rural difference. Logics derived from ecological thought
define techniques for altering and ultimately improving biophysical and human
natures.
For scholars of science and technology, such as Donna Haraway, objects
of knowledge are not objective reflections of universal realities, but agential
forces that derive from social, historical, and political contexts.
38 Scientific log-
ics, therefore, need to be situated in the context of their articulation. Ecology
has been wielded across global contexts to propel nativist ideology in early
twentieth-century Germany,39 eugenics movements across Latin America,
40 and
US colonial expansion.
41 Ecology, like all sciences, is always social and political.42
So is sustainability, which takes on different meanings across social and histori-
cal contexts.
43
16 INTRODUCTION
Many key scientists involved in defining sustainable development in China
were engaged in global attempts to negotiate socialist thought with ecologi-
cal thought. Given the longstanding resonance between ecology and socialist
thought and the challenges for socialist states to balance industrial produc-
tion with its multiscalar environmental effects, the issue of remaking socialism
in relation to ecology resonated globally.44 As chapter 1 illustrates, ecological
thought in China developed over a century of global scientific exchanges across
Marxian political economy, botany, systems science, urban ecology, and ecologi-
cal economics. China’s scientists, from the 1920s through the present, shaped
ecology as a form of science organized around questions of how to optimize bio-
physical relations and foster civilizational progress. For Mao, the peasantry fig-
ured as the vanguard of modernization, revolution, and industrialization. This
logic was informed by a stage-oriented social evolutionary reading of Marxian
political economy. The scientific logics that predominated the 1980s socialist
reform period, however, articulated the role of the peasantry no longer as the
vanguard of socialist revolution, but as closer to an “original” or “primitive” form
of ecology ( yuanshi shengtai) and therefore outside the folds of ecological civili-
zation. Eco-developmental logics, such as these that project stage-oriented soci-
etal trajectories, emerged through the reasoned argumentation of natural and
social scientists. Their arguments took shape synchronously with civilizational
narratives of sustainable development, state-directed urbanization, national aes-
theticization, and societal optimization. These scientific logics, however, are not
uncontested.
Notable Chinese scientists offer alternative formulations of ecology, sustain-
able development, and the role of rural society. One alternative, for instance,
posits traditional rural lifeways and small-scale agricultural production as
models for sustainable development.
45 Such logics, however, do not predomi-
nate in state policy and action. While China’s debates are richly varied, I focus
on delineating logics that have become central to serving governmental ends.
46
My genealogy, therefore, focuses on how eco-developmental logics emerged in
relation to expressions and constitutions of state power from the rise of Mao to
the present.
Governmental
I refer to governance or, in other words, that which pertains to the governmental,
in two senses. The first relates to techniques aimed at governing nature, society,
and space. I define techniques as political technologies that target spatial orga-
nization, relations in nature, and populations. For Michel Foucault, forms of
17 ECOLOGICAL STATES
knowledge and practice produce political techniques of power and spatial ori-
entations aimed at governing populations—what he calls “biopower.”47 Power,
in this sense, refers to a multiplicity of forces that shape socio-natural configu-
rations and physical spaces.
48 Modern subjects come to know and understand
themselves, their societal roles, and realms of possible actions within this field
of power. Governmental power, therefore, operates through disciplinary modes
of “acting upon the actions” and interests of subjects and “conducting the con-
duct” of populations.49 In detailing eco-developmental logics and techniques,
I focus on disciplinary expressions of power and knowledge, as well as forms of
technical action that materialize through them.
50
The second sense of governmental relates to “states,” as in the institutions,
actors, and ruling entities enrolled in practices of governance. In China, this
includes institutions that span central and local jurisdictions, state scientists and
planners, as well as the party-state. Ecology, I contend, has become instrumen-
tal to expressions of state power—ideologically, territorially, and within banal
bureaucratic formations. Eco-developmental logics define the role of the state
as the builder of an ecological form of civilization. In other words, an ecologi-
cal civilization is to be brought into being through state intervention. Ecologi-
cal civilization building, therefore, is an inherently future-oriented governance
project.
According to state modernization plans from the Nineteenth National Party
Congress of 2017, ecological civilization will be attained by the year 2050; the
People’s Republic of China centennial is October 1, 2049. Such timelines por-
tray temporal logics of attaining a desired state of modernist achievement
through state techniques of socio-environmental optimization. Not merely
a discursive enterprise, state techniques that derive from eco-developmental
logics are key to the reproduction of state power. As I discuss in chapters 2
and 3, ecology has become central to extending the territorial reach of the local
state and producing landscapes that reflect the state’s vision of socio-natural
optimization. Eco-developmental techniques, such as ecological restoration,
are geared toward transforming biophysical relations in nature, beautify-
ing the landscape, and producing a modern urban society from one that has
been predominantly rural. How state scientists produce and read historical
ecological records is shaped by how they imagine restoration landscapes
and visualize landscape beautification and purification, as I have detailed in
chapter 2.
Chapter 3 illustrates how municipal bureaucrats’ conservation planning tech-
niques strengthen their control over rural land surrounding cities. I use the term
ecological territorialization to refer to the ecological protection and urban-rural
18 INTRODUCTION
planning processes through which opportunistic municipal government officials
incorporate rural land and housing under their control. The emergence of these
territorializing processes marks a new phase in, what You-tien Hsing calls, the
“urbanization of the local state.”51 State scientists and municipal planners discuss
ecological protection zoning not only as a technical process of optimizing bio-
physical relations in nature, but also as means to foster an ecological society. As
the second half of the book attests, however, the societal actions and outcomes
that emerge from ecological civilization building projects do not neatly fit the
state’s eco-developmental imaginary.
Although state scientists and planners deploy techniques aimed at mechaniz-
ing nature, and optimizing society and space, their mechanistic techniques don’t
simply produce mechanistic outcomes. Despite the veneer of a centrally orches-
trated environmental governance effort, there is a great deal of indeterminacy
to the processes involved. The interplay between the exercise of state power in
relation to ecology and social actions is filled with contradictions, refusals, and
creative reworkings. The final three chapters highlight forms of counter-conduct;
that is, the ways that people struggle with and against governmental processes
aimed at conducting society.
52 In highlighting forms of counter-conduct, I stress
that citizens do not merely internalize ecological expressions of power aimed at
producing an ecological society.53 Instead, society actively exercises capacities in
relation and counter to eco-developmental logics and techniques aimed at con-
ducting human conduct. In doing so, individuals and communities transform
their lives in relation to governmental forces.
There is an array of social trajectories contingent on the myriad ways people
navigate state environmental governance. By trajectories, I mean the differenti-
ated socioeconomic and spatiotemporal pathways through which people navi-
gate state power. How society transforms in relation to a state wielding ecology
to govern depends on how people act not only in relation to expressions of state
power, but within the context of preexisting unequal social positionalities and
emergent power relations. Therefore, trajectories are shaped by already existing
socioeconomic positionalities and environmental conditions, as well as the poli-
tics of counter-conduct. The exercise of individual and collective actions, within
this context, produces myriad social trajectories.
Trajectories are also shaped by the ways social differences come to be defined
and contested. Eco-developmental logics define distinct roles within China’s
citizenry. They categorically ascribe high value ( suzhi) to urban people and
low value to rural people. Within the ideological vision of ecological civiliza-
tion building, China’s future is urban. The past is rural. Urban populations are
modern and civilized. The nature of the rural citizenry, in this vision, is back-
ward and uncivilized. In these ways eco-developmental logics reify urban-rural
19 ECOLOGICAL STATES
difference and rural deficiency.
54 They hold that the nature of rural people and
their inherently malleable value can be improved through rational state-led
urbanization.
Although the urbanization of the rural population is often heralded as the
end of China’s villages,
55 rural lifeways do not simply disappear but transform in
relation to how society responds to a state wielding ecology to govern. Society
exercises power within this eco-developmental milieu—at times in line with the
state’s vision, but often in ways that counter it. For instance, many rural people
do not simply accept government terms for resettlement or embrace the prospect
of becoming urban. Instead, they harness individual and collective powers for
their own ends.
In some instances, rural people facing conservation-oriented displacement
and resettlement individually or collectively mobilize to maximize rural land and
housing compensation capital. In doing so, they utilize the state’s resources in
ways unintended by state planners. As I discuss in chapter 4, rural people navi-
gate the politics of valuation and compensation to reorient their relationships to
land, housing, and labor. Many strive to maximize resettlement compensation
capital, which they utilize as they see fit. Some balk at the prospects of living
in urban resettlement housing. Instead, they use compensation capital to lease
land outside their original village and continue farming elsewhere. Others move
into new agrarian sectors or otherwise act outside state prescriptions for planned
urbanization. While the aims and outcomes for individuals differ, and some also
readily accept and benefit from moving into new urban environs, I illustrate how
the aspirations of rural people facing ecological migration take shape in relation
to the volumetric politics of land and housing valuation and compensation. In
ways such as these, social navigations of state environmental governance remake
constellations of power, albeit unevenly.
Aesthetic
In the context of a state wielding ecology to govern, citizens draw on alternative
understandings of ecology for their own ends. They do so through banal spatial
practices, which aesthetically express the rural as ecological. Chapter 5 details
rural citizens’ spatial practices of aesthetically representing what I call a “rural-
ecological sublime” in villages being incorporated into ecological protection
areas. Politics of nature infuse, not only state governance, but also the ways rural
citizens remake rural spaces and meanings. The aesthetic senses they cultivate, at
times align with and at other times counter eco-developmental logics.
I consider aesthetics as shared senses and material forms through which things
in the world are spatialized, visualized, or associated with beauty. Aesthetics is
20 INTRODUCTION
inseparable from politics and power relations. Jacques Rancière theorizes aes-
thetics as the “distribution of the sensible”—a shared perception and sensibil-
ity in the arrangement of space.
56 D. Asher Ghertner, drawing on Rancière and
Foucault, argues that the aesthetic terms within which senses become shared
are central to rationalities of rule and the operation of government.
57 As these
scholars attest, politics operate within and through shared aesthetic senses. The
role of the Chinese state in the aesthetic vision of building an ecological civiliza-
tion and a beautiful China is that of a technical manager intervening to optimize
socio-natural relations and beautify the landscape.
In a related philosophical vein, the “aesthetic state” was articulated by
Friedrich Schiller in 1795 as a mode of politics that incorporates aesthetics into
state governance.58 Schiller’s notion of the aesthetic state was expounded on by
Republican-era thinkers, like Zhang Jingsheng who considered aesthetics as key
to revolutionizing postimperial China into a “beautiful society” and forming a
national, albeit authoritarian, “government of beauty” ( mei de zhengfu ). The aes-
thetic state was also discussed by late-imperial philosopher Kang Youwei who
articulated the science of beauty and aesthetic education as central to national
modernization and the creation of a moral society.
59 While acknowledging
Schiller’s, Kang’s, and Zhang’s insights into how political rationalities operate
through aesthetics, I depart from their romanticist and enlightenment tenden-
cies. Instead, I detail how aesthetics and power articulate not only in relation
to expressions of state power but also in expressions of social difference and
politics of nature.
I propose two contrapuntal aesthetic sublimes that figure prominently in
China’s state-society interplay—an eco-developmental sublime and a rural-
ecological sublime. An eco-developmental sublime underlies aesthetic expres-
sions of state power. It operates via two interweaving aesthetic registers. Ecology
as pristine natural object and ecology as technically enhanced natural object.
A pristine natural landscape, in this sense, is one that looks “natural,” without
trace of human activities (even though the appearance of pristine nature is created
through extensive human interventions). Since the imaginary of pristine nature
does not include humans, the state cultivates this aesthetic sensibility through
removing people and human activities from landscapes and altering them to
appear natural. An aesthetically pleasing natural landscape, therefore, is some-
thing “civilized” humans can produce. It is a technical form of beauty created
through rational scientific management, intentional landscape engineering, and
aestheticization. Semiotic gestures of ecology as pristine and optimized nature
are visually emplaced, for instance, in ecological protection areas and resettle-
ment housing. Through ecological construction efforts, the state endeavors to
transform landscapes that previously supported agriculture and rural housing
21 ECOLOGICAL STATES
into those that express an eco-developmental sublime. In place of rural land-
scapes, the state produces scientifically optimized landscapes, such as treatment
wetlands, artificial waterfall parks, and spatially concentrated housing facilities.
In these ways, eco-developmental aesthetics appear as landscape beautifications
and improvements on nature and society through the urbanizing-cum-civilizing
of the rural population.
Within this context, rural people produce a counter-aesthetic through
spatial practices that remake the rural in relation to ecology. They produce
a rural-ecological sublime for their own socioeconomic benefit as they navi-
gate uneven displacement from land and housing, and to maintain senses of
their rural past. As I discuss in chapter 5, this aesthetic is particularly preva-
lent in rural-themed restaurants and guesthouses ( nongjiale) within and on
the borders of ecological protection areas. Rural citizens’ spatial practices por-
tray rural-ecological natures in the built environment, cuisine, music, art, and
tourist-oriented service provisioning. In these sites, villagers, much like natu-
ral and social scientists, represent rural nature as closer to primitive ecology
(yuanshengtai). Doing so reifies urban-rural difference. Yet, their spatial prac-
tices also portray rural people as intimately tied to land and multigenerational
environmental stewards. In producing a rural-ecological sublime, villagers
actively aestheticize politics of nature and difference in the landscapes of their
own displacement.
Spatial practices of rural representation and the lived experiences of dis-
placement are contingent on historically conditioned forms of social difference.
Drawing on Brandi Summers’s work on aesthetics and politics of difference,
60
I advance “differentiated aesthetic emplacement” as a survival strategy for the
poor to profit from performing rurality and as a way of inhabiting space and
maintaining lifeways for rural elites. As people navigate environmental gover-
nance and state urbanization efforts, inter-rural class differences shape the aes-
thetic politics of displacement and forms of counter-conduct.
Some citizens resist state governance through confrontational forms of
counter-conduct. Chapter 6 highlights the role of what I call “infrastructural
diffusion” in delimiting forms of counter-conduct and maintaining authoritar-
ian rule. The chapter details partial destruction of village housing by demolition
bureaus, coercive demobilization by street-level police, militarized uprooting of
guerrilla agriculture, and digital erasure. These infrastructural expressions of
state power diffuse counter-conduct. Infrastructure, in this sense, refers both to
the built environment and forms of social organization. In theorizing the former,
I draw on Julie Chu’s insights into how citizen-state struggles play out through
infrastructure, particularly aesthetic politics of infrastructural disrepair. Regard-
ing the latter, I draw on the work of AbdouMaliq Simone who argues that
22 INTRODUCTION
infrastructures are not merely built environments, but also human activities and
forms of social organization.
61 My account of how infrastructural techniques dif-
fuse social expressions of resistance and collective mobilizations sheds light on
the limits of counter-conduct under an authoritarian regime.
In these ways, forms of counter-conduct are not outside of or external to eco-
logical expressions and constitutions of power. Rather, state techniques delimit
how society exercises power. As everyday citizens navigate ecological expres-
sions and constitutions of state power, they actively reshape their own social
trajectories.
While undoubtedly important to people in China, these relationships increas-
ingly bear on life everywhere else. How the Chinese state approaches environ-
mental governance is poised to shape the future of global sustainability and
geopolitics. The epilogue considers China’s environmental governance in global
contexts. The task between now and then is to chart the role of ecology in con-
solidating state power and shaping citizens’ uneven social trajectories.
1
MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
Chen Xueming, professor of ecology at Yunnan University and a leading sci-
entific assessor of ecological protection areas, welcomed me into his office. He
pushed aside a stack of books on a wooden desk to make room for two teacups.
Taking on a professorial air of someone who has lectured on the subject for
decades, he began talking about ecology by situating it in relation to place, peo-
ple, and global exchanges. Through interviews with ecologists, such as Chen,
as well as archival research, I learned about key natural and social scientists
and a palimpsest of global influences, travels, and trainings that shaped ecology
in China.
Meanings surrounding ecology shifted alongside transformations in the
Chinese state and society. In different eras, ecological thought became cen-
tral to state governance, unevenly categorizing the citizenry, and to notions
of historical transformation. Ecology represented, at times, the borderlands of
national territory, surplus energies embodied in the citizenry, nature aesthet-
ics, and scientific techniques to optimize socio-environmental relations. Over
a century of scientific articulations, ecology came to figure centrally in logics of
state governance and stage-oriented developmental progress toward a sustain-
able future.
Within China’s party-state, ecology is inseparable from articulations of
sustainable development and totalizing socio-environmental management—
commonly discussed as “ecological civilization building” ( shengtai wenming jian-
she). China’s Constitutional Amendment during the Eighteenth CCP Plenary of
25
26 CHAPTER 1
2012 reads: “The Development of Ecological Civilization should be integrated
into all aspects and the whole process of economic development, political devel-
opment, cultural development, and social development.”1 Such broad state-
ments, signal the cornucopian scope of what President Xi Jinping frequently
refers to as a “new human relationship with nature.” The Chinese Academy of
Sciences has officially labeled the process of creating ecological civilization as
the “second modernization.” According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences’
Ecological Modernization Report, Chinese society has moved through primitive
and industrial civilization toward ecological civilization. Notably, the Chinese
Academy of Sciences’ officially claims ecological civilization to be the highest
level of developmental attainment.
2
This unitary scientific and political logic permeates popular media, green
policy prescriptions, and the work of mainstream scientists.3 Media accounts
surrounding ecological civilization building suggest that the concept emerged
in 2007 during a famous speech by Hu Jintao at the Seventeenth National Party
Congress.4 In the speech, Hu proclaimed the importance of “building an eco-
logical civilization” by modeling economic growth and consumption, as well
as protecting the environment.
5 Scholars of China’s green modernization echo
this narrative by framing ecological civilization building as a green alternative to
“industrial civilizations” of the West.6 Scholarship in this mode holds the pursuit
of ecological civilization to be the “result of the constant progress of human civi-
lization, and a higher stage in the evolution of human civilization than industrial
civilization.”7
In this chapter, I depart from this naturalizing mode of scholarship by delin-
eating a genealogy of how ecology became developmental. I do so by detail-
ing the historical production of what I call eco-developmental logics. By logics
I mean ways of knowing nature that order how nature is to be properly acted
on. Drawing on a genealogical method,8 I situate ecology as a form of knowl-
edge that takes on meaning through global exchanges—a situated universal that
has become mobilized in the service of state power. Donna Haraway argues that
knowledge formations are relational, and that knowledge is conditioned by the
context in which it emerges.9 Drawing on this insight, I contend that ecology, like
any science, is a situated way of knowing that comes into being through social
and political practices of exchange, writing, collective experimentation, interpre-
tation, and claims making. Ecology emerged in the United States, for instance,
as a science of complexity often deployed to undermine modernist claims about
environmental controllability.10 As such, environmental historians have tended
to frame ecology in the West as posing a challenge to modernist thought.
11 In
what follows, I focus on a lineage of ecological thought central to modernist nar-
ratives of civilizational attainment and sustainable development, which underlie
27 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
expressions and constitutions of state power. In the vein of Raymond Williams,
who argues that forms of nature are always the product of social and historical
context,
12 I illustrate how ecological sciences in China have their own history and
politics steeped in global exchanges.
13
Scholars have demonstrated how scientific knowledge, often considered to
be universal and emanating from Global North to Global South or West to
East, is produced through global exchanges and localized meaning-making
practices. Michael Hathaway, for instance, argues that knowledge circulates
globally in contingent and multidirectional ways. For Hathaway, when ideas
enter new geographic spheres, they take on meanings contingent on local
contexts. New meanings generate novel scientific innovations, practices, and
knowledge. Hathaway’s key insight is that there is continual movement between
the localization and universalizability of knowledge.14 Hathaway conceptualizes
the content and meanings of scientific knowledge, however, as coterminous
across geographical spaces. In contrast, I contend that a plurality of meanings
exists under a given scientific knowledge signifier.
15 Moreover, politics and
power relations permeate the process of knowledge production. Ecology
emerges from a multiplicity of actions, actors, places, and claims within local-
ized contexts.
My conceptualization of ecological knowledge formation more closely aligns
with Michael Lewis and Celia Lowe who emphasize that processes of knowl-
edge formation are inseparable from power relations. For Lewis, what consti-
tutes “ecology” is not merely a local instantiation of a global idea or process, but
assemblages of powers mediated by cross-cultural exchanges, scientific practices,
research agendas, and flows of ideas.
16 Analogously, Lowe illustrates how ideas of
ecology emerge through interactions between local people, scientists, and devel-
opment institutions—stratified through colonial legacies.
17 The global exchanges
these scholars highlight shed light on how scientific knowledge and attendant
meanings shift over time. Shifting meanings surrounding ecology, as I show in
this chapter, shape the subjects of knowledge, as well as the techniques of science
in relation to state power.
In this chapter, I illustrate the articulation of ecology and state power through
the work of prominent scientists in China and their global exchanges spanning
the early twentieth century up to the present, across botany, political economy,
systems science, urban ecology, and ecological economics. Historically situating
the confluence of ecology, sustainability, and state power reveals how forms of
science take on meaning in localized social and political context. In doing so,
I call into question how ecology and sustainability are conceptualized, how
they function, and whom they serve.18 I argue that ecology is a situated form
of knowledge, wielded to define roles for the state, scientists, and the citizenry.
28 CHAPTER 1
Scientists are crucial actors in making ecology developmental. They produce eco-
developmental logics—knowledge that defines nature and how it is to be acted
on, which undergird state power.
Ecological Formations
Before ecology connoted sustainable development and civilizational attainment,
it was an emergent field of inquiry taking shape via global exchanges. Indeed,
the Chinese term for ecology is a neologism that traveled from Japan to China
through the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century botanist
Miyoshi Manabu. Miyoshi was born in 1861 to a Samurai family. From an early
age, he was fascinated with plants, in particular cherry blossoms and irises, which
were to become the focus of his life’s work. After studying at the Imperial Univer-
sity of Tokyo, he traveled to Germany to attend the University of Leipzig. From
1891 to 1895 he studied under the guidance of German botanist and ecologist
Wilhelm Friedrich Phillip Pfeffer. As he trained, he became deeply interested in
the emerging field of ecology ( oekologie) in Germany. Miyoshi earned a doctor-
ate from Leipzig in 1895 and returned to Japan to become a professor of botany
at Tokyo University and director of the botanical gardens from 1922 to 1924.
19
Upon returning to Japan, Miyoshi coined the Japanese term for ecology ( seit-
aigaku). The neologism came to China through Meiji-era texts created by Miyo-
shi and his students. Ecology came to be expressed in the Chinese language in two
ways. Ecology expressed as shengtai huanjing connotes ecology and environment.
This is analogous to the Japanese term seitai-kankyo.20 The other is shengtai. Both
mean “ecology,” but the former connotes ecological conditions and environments
interdependent with human activities. The latter connotes the science of ecology
(shengtaixue) and relations between biotic and abiotic entities. Early ecologists in
Japan, China, and the rest of the world, focused largely on the study of plant life.
21
Miyoshi focused primarily on Japanese botanical specimens, including Japa-
nese cherry blossoms ( prunus serrulata), plum trees ( prunus) and Japanese irises
(iris ensata). In 1905, he began publishing what was to become the world’s larg-
est multilingual compendium on Japanese vegetation.
22 He produced fifteen sets
within the compendium, the last of which was published in 1914. In addition,
he published widely across scientific journals and magazines. Like other natural
scientists of the day, his work entailed the aestheticization of natural objects of
science.23 In an 1890 publication in The Botanical Magazine, Miyoshi portrayed
botanical samples alongside poetic descriptions of landscape. He wrote, “On the
9th of August, 1890 I found a species of Pinguicula on Mount Koshin in the
province of Shimotsuke. It grows in great numbers on the moist exposed surface
of the huge rocks which constitute the rugged outline of the peak.”24 Miyoshi
29 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
proceeded to detail the roots, leaves, seeds fruits, calyx, and flowers. He also
produced a stylized plate of the botanical sample.
25 This example highlights how
Miyoshi’s scientific work aestheticized nature—a phenomenon that remains
central to ecology in China, albeit through different mediums.
With the advent of photography, scientists began using photos to capture and
communicate biophysical features of their subject matter. Photography proved
particularly useful in identifying species. For example, Miyoshi’s photographic
depiction of a cherry blossom in the 1921 publication On the Conservation of
Natural Monuments and Historic Sites: Plant Department (figure 2), displays
cherry blossoms in bloom and as buds. The darkened background and chiar-
oscuro lighting highlights a range of angles. Representational techniques of
capturing and communicating features of scientific subject matter, such as pho-
tography and descriptive writing, were mediums through which botanists and
early ecologists, like Miyoshi, aestheticized the natural world.
The neologism ecology, and the aestheticizing mediums that accompanied it,
took root in mainland China during the Republican period. The Qing dynasty,
the last of imperial China, fell in 1911. In the wake of empire came a period of
cultural and scientific flourishing in which many young elites, in particular, went
abroad to learn “modern” forms of science. During the Republican period, social
movements called for adopting scientific worldviews to improve the country.
26
The New Culture Movement (1910s–20s), a youth movement aimed at reorga-
nizing Chinese culture and society according to global norms of science, spurred
an interest in so-called new sciences. The movement advocated that Chinese
people familiarize themselves with “Mr. Science” ( sai xiansheng) to replace tradi-
tional Confucian pedagogy. The global engagements of those who went abroad
generated hybrid forms of scientific inquiry and practice. Early botanists, such
as Hu Xiansu, exemplified, much like Miyoshi, the aestheticization of scientific
subject matter in the process of producing knowledge.
Hu trained in classical poetry and literature at the Imperial University of
Peking. Matriculating in 1909, he moved to the United States to study botany.
After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, he obtained a doctor-
ate from Harvard University in 1925. He returned to China and founded the
Lushan Botanical Gardens in Yunnan Province in 1934, which was renamed the
Kunming Institute of Botany in 1938. Exemplary botanists, such as Hu, laid foun-
dations for plant ecology in China.
Through his fieldwork and writing, Hu defined the natural world in ways that
melded Chinese science and aesthetics with Western scientific taxonomy. Fol-
lowing the eighteenth-century Chinese scientific tradition of evidential research
(kaozheng),27 Hu endeavored to match classical plant descriptions with his botan-
ical observations to corroborate and therefore validate his finding in relation to
the Linnaean classification system. This approach is evident in a series of articles
FIGURE 2. Miyoshi Manabu’s cherry blossom photograph from a 1921 publica-
tion on plant ecology (Miyoshi 1921).
31 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
published in the popular Chinese-language journal “Science” ( kexue) in which
Hu matched Latin names for plants with names compiled in a botanical diction-
ary from the Eastern Han period (ca. 100 CE). Discussing this process, natural
historian Lijing Jiang argues that “it was through experiencing fieldwork that Hu
”28
found a consistent use of classical style for communicating botanical work.
The fusing of Linnaean classification and Chinese poetic and classical lit-
erary styles is further evinced by works produced during Hu’s 1920 fieldwork
expedition to Zhejiang Province, in which he conveyed scientific subject matter
through classical literary styles. Hu published a series of poems, essays, and diary
entries in the popular journal Xuecheng, in which he painted a literary portrait of
the subject matter and surrounding landscape. He described steep precipices of
Zhejiang’s mountains, verdant pines, cypress, and bamboo, as well as the colors
and scents of flowers.
29 His poetic landscape descriptions mirror classical land-
scape poetry and travel literature, exemplifying the nexus of nature aesthetics
and science in the early modern period.
Aestheticizing scientific subject matter and landscape occurred not only
through written descriptions of plants’ biophysical qualities, but also through
oral depictions of botanical expeditions. Hu recounted his 1920 botanical survey
to Zhejiang during a 1927 address to the Science Society of Canton describing
how, “sitting in a sedan chair, at three o’clock in the morning [I] was carried in
half awakened dreams toward the heavily forest-clad sacred mountain only to
find the towering forest giants of Cryptomeria japonica, mixed with Cunning-
hamia lanceolata and the broad-canopied weeping Cupresus fuenbris.” 30
In this excerpt, Hu aestheticized subject matter and landscape through a writ-
ing style that melds Chinese literary aesthetics with the Linnaean classification
system.31 This melding of aesthetics and science laid foundations for associating
ecology with pristine natural landscapes, an aesthetic association that remains
today. In contemporary China, ecology is widely associated with beauty and pro-
cesses of landscape beautification.
In 2017, during the Nineteenth Central Party Congress, Xi Jinping articu-
lated sustainable development as a process of building a “beautiful China.” In
the present, the association between ecology and beauty underlie state aesthetics
and logics associated with building ecological civilization.
32 A shared aesthetic
sense rooted in ecology as pristine nature is embedded in contemporary eco-
developmental logics. In the introduction of this book, I discussed this aesthetic
as an “eco-developmental sublime”—a shared aesthetic sensibility underlying
the operation of state power. It operates through two aesthetic modes. The first
is ecology as pristine natural object. This aesthetic sensibility, as I illustrated
above, has roots in the early scientific practices of botany and the dawn of ecol-
ogy in East Asia. The second mode is ecology as technically enhanced natural
32 CHAPTER 1
object. The second aesthetic register is interwoven, though contradictory, with
the first. It has roots in early twentieth-century socialist thought in China.
As he poured a second cup of tea, I asked Chen to reflect on influential people
in his training. I was surprised when, without hesitation, Chen began to talk
about Mao Zedong. “Mao Zedong,” he said, “did a lot to improve and modernize
China. The time I spent struggling ( chiku) in the countryside and learning about
biology through tending plants and animals strengthened my resolve to become
an ecologist.” I listened to Chen talk about his life as a sent-down youth and
the influence of ecological thought on Maoist thought. Mao’s ideas surrounding
historical transformation, political mobilization, and social improvement were
shaped by an ecological rendering of Marxian political economy.
While many remember Mao as the historical figure who advocated for
peasant-led revolution in China, the role of political economist Li Dazhao as a
thinker of “Marxian science” and one of Mao’s early influencers is often forgotten.
Also overlooked are the politics of nature—ideas of human nature and natural
cycles—embedded in their shared conception of sociohistorical change. Li, who
on July 1, 1921, cofounded the Communist Party of China with Chen Duxiu, laid
foundations for Marxian political economy in China and stage-oriented theories
of historical change.
Li was born into a peasant family in Hebei province. From 1914 to 1916, he
studied political economy at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. He returned to
China to become one of the leading intellectuals of the New Culture Movement
and the May Fourth Movement.33 Li’s political-economic work remade Marxian
notions of class struggle, which, in the classical formulation, held the urban pro-
letariat to be the key motor of revolutionary change. Li argued, instead, that Chi-
na’s peasantry would be the key class-leveling force and, therefore, the political
source of revolution. For Li, and subsequently for Mao, political revolution could
be brought about by harnessing social forces or energies latent within “backward”
social groups at the right moment in a socio-natural cycle. These logics of his-
torical change, social improvement, and projecting the future became central to
Mao’s efforts to lead the Chinese Communist Party to power and the formation
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
As an early interpreter of political economy and visionary for the Chinese Com-
munist Party, Li considered the aim of writing and theory to be the transformation
of social conditions. In his essays My Marxist Views (1919) and The Essentials of
Historical Study (1924), Li argued that each generation makes their own futures
through harnessing “social energies.” Li developed his perspectives on historical
revolution through engagements with the writings of Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky,
and myriad enlightenment thinkers. Li read universalist historians, such as Nico-
las de Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon, and Auguste Comte,
34 who Li argued
33 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
were foundational to Marxist philosophy and the scientific basis of socialism.
35 His
interpretation of Marxist historiography echoed the enlightenment principle that
human interactions with the material environment drive historical transforma-
tion. Li conceived of historical change through linear evolutionary stage-oriented
progressions of civilizational improvement directed by human action.
36 This posi-
tion countered social Darwinist ideas that had gained popularity in the late Qing
dynasty but waned during the Republican period. For Li, natural forces of histori-
cal change operate through the operationalization of surplus social energies.
Inspired by enlightenment historiography and Trotsky’s ideas on permanent
revolution,37 Li viewed backwardness as a harbinger of potential for political change
and that reaching a high level of developmental maturity would result in national
stagnation. Given this, Li considered China’s revolutionary potential to be lodged
within the body politic of the peasantry. This position contrasted with Marx’s writ-
ings that suggest an urban proletariat to be the wellspring of political transforma-
tion.
38 In the 1917, A Comparison of the French and Russian Revolutions, Li wrote:
From the point of view of the history of civilizations. Any particu-
lar national civilization has its period of flourishing and its period of
decline. The countries of Europe, like France and England, have reached
a period of maturity in civilization. They no longer have the strength
to advance any further. ... Because of isolation, Russia’s progress in
civilization was comparatively slow with respect to the other nations of
Europe, and just because of its comparative slowness, in the evolution of
civilization, there existed surplus energy [ yuli] for development [ suoyi
shangyou xiangshang fazhan zhi yuli].39
This excerpt indicates that Li understood latent potential for historical transfor-
mation to derive from socioeconomic backwardness. It also demonstrates that
his ideas of historical change are linear and progressive. When Li became profes-
sor of economy and head librarian at Peking University in 1920, he employed a
penniless peasant named Mao Zedong as a library clerk.
Mao formulated his ideas on socialism, historical change, political mobiliza-
tion, and the nature of the peasantry through Li’s reading groups. Mao inter-
nalized Li’s ecological view on energies latent in human populations as natural
drivers of historical and political change. Not only did Mao internalize them, but
he militarized them. Mao’s revolutionary class-leveling project was led by the
peasantry—a social group filled with the “surplus energies” capable of forging a
new nation.
40 Mobilizing the peasantry as a militarized revolutionary vanguard
became central to Mao’s, ultimately successful, efforts to form the PRC in 1949.
41
China’s modern state formation marked the end of internal warfare between the
Chinese Communist Party and the US-backed Guomindang.
34 CHAPTER 1
The logic that backward social energies, lodged in human populations, can
be improved through state intervention remains prominent today. Mobilizing
social energies in rural populations to bring about revolutionary transformation
remains a crucial logic underlying ecological civilization building. Yet, as I dis-
cuss in the following section, after Mao’s reign the logic of transformation has
been reconfigured as one of technical optimization. The second mode of eco-
developmental aesthetics—technically enhanced natural object—has roots in Li’s
notions of malleable social energies but was rearticulated by reform-era earth sys-
tems scientists who conceived of social, natural, and economic relations as an inte-
grated whole controllable through systems science modeling. During Mao’s tenure,
however, ecology was eventually relegated to the peripheries of the new nation-state.
Mao’s geographical placement of ecology research institutes reflected his
imaginary of nature and national territory. According to Chen, Mao equated
ecological sciences with the study of pristine nature. Mao, accordingly, moved
departments of ecology closer to their subject matter. In the early 1950s, Chi-
na’s premier ecologists were sent to two universities on the borderlands, sites
far removed from the seat of state power. One was Yunnan University near the
southwest border, where Chen and I drank tea and discussed ecology. The other
was Inner Mongolia University, along the northeastern border in the city of
Hohhot. Chen described the movement of ecological research institutes to the
peripheries as a political move that reflected Mao’s imaginary of ecology as the
study of pristine landscapes and untamed nature, the locations of which are far
from the capital.42 The role of ecologists during this period was to define nature
and, in doing so, bring knowledge of what lies along the national hinterlands
to the political center. Many of the early ecologists who took on this task were
trained abroad. Chen highlighted several “fathers of ecology” who received train-
ing through what he referred to as the US-English school ( yingmei xuepai ) and
the French-Swiss school (farui xuepai) of ecology.
Qu Zhongxiang (1905–90), Chen noted, was one of these fathers of ecology.
The year prior to the founding of the PRC, Qu received an MA in plant ecology
from the University of Minnesota under the guidance of ecologist William Skin-
ner Cooper. He returned to China to contribute to the nation-building project.
After teaching at Fudan University, Qu was promoted to the head of Yunnan
University’s ecology program as a part of Mao’s effort to reorient ecology to
the borderlands. This entailed moving from Fudan University to Yunnan—the
southwestern edge of national territory. Qu’s ecology program transferred along
with him. He was joined by his Fudan University colleague and another father of
ecology Zhu Yancheng, who was trained in the French-Swiss school of ecology.
When Mao assigned Qu and Zhu to Yunnan University, he also reassigned
prominent ecologist Li Jitong to Inner Mongolia. Li was trained in plant ecology
and botany at the Yale School of Forestry. He matriculated, first with an MA in
35 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
1923 and then a doctorate in 1925. In 1957, responding to Mao’s decree, Li moved
with his Peking University staff to Inner Mongolia University to head another
ecology department relegated to the borderlands. In Inner Mongolia, he focused
on forestry and vegetation surveys. From the late 1950s to the end of the Maoist
period, Yunnan University and Inner Mongolia University became the nation’s
peripheral “centers” of ecology. Both departments focused on plant ecology.43 An
abrupt shift in the latter half of the Maoist period reflected the turbulent political
times of the Cultural Revolution.
From the dawn of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 until Mao’s death in 1976,
ecology was not taught in China’s universities. Ecology became framed as one
of many “foreign” and “bourgeois” sciences. Many ecologists were sent down
to the countryside ( xia xiang) to labor in the fields as part of reeducation cam-
paigns. Red guards orchestrated impromptu trials and violent struggles against
class hierarchy and bourgeois ideas. Many ecologists, especially those educated
abroad, were targeted as symbols of foreign bourgeois education. Some ecologists
drew on their knowledge of medicinal plants to become “barefoot doctors.” Bare-
foot doctors traversed villages to provide medical services with limited medical
training. Other ecologists spent years laboring in the countryside.
44
At the end of the Maoist regime and with the dawn of the reform era, there
was a resurgence of the sciences under the “four modernizations.” This modern-
ization drive emphasized strengthening agriculture, industry, national defense,
science, and technology. A renewed focus on science brought about a resurgence
of university education, in which ecology came to figure centrally. The univer-
sity entrance exam (gao kao) was reinstated thereby allowing people young and
old to seek university education, after over a decade without the opportunity.
Following the reinstatement of the college entrance exam, Yunnan University
and Inner Mongolia University welcomed back their former faculty members.
Chen was part of the first cohort to take the reinstated college entrance exam. He
tested into Yunnan University where he studied botany before pursuing a doctor-
ate in Beijing. Although Mao effectively halted university education during the
latter portion of his reign, Chen felt like the lessons he learned as a sent-down
youth working in the countryside gave him a strong background in biological
processes, and the resolve to become an ecologist.
From the late 1980s to the present, the geographical locations of ecology
research institutes shifted—once again—in ways that reflected evolving imagi-
naries of ecology. This time ecology research centers moved from the national
periphery to the capital. This geographical shift not only reflected the increas-
ingly prominent role of ecology in state-led development, but also economic
and geopolitical shifts. The state instituted market reforms in the early 1980s,
in which China welcomed foreign direct investment (FDI) and capitalist market
forces. Over the first two decades of reform, FDI was largely concentrated in
36 CHAPTER 1
cities located in the southern and eastern seaboard, including Beijing. The Chi-
nese Ecology Institute headquarters moved to Beijing in the 1990s, effectively
centering ecology at the heart of national political leadership and urban culture.
The reorientation of ecological research institutes from the hinterlands to the
capital exemplified the growing importance of ecology in the eyes of the state and
its changing meanings. Chen completed his systems ecology PhD in Beijing at a
time when the field became central to defining notions of sustainable develop-
ment in China.
During the early reform era, logics of social improvement, with roots in
Marxian political economy, melded with earth systems science logics of socio-
environmental controllability and technical optimization. These coalesced
through the work of Beijing-based earth systems scientists who articulated sys-
tems science approaches to sustainable socialist development.
45
Earth Systems Science Rationales for
Sustainable Socialist Development
Reform-era systems scientists, like Ma Shijun, laid foundations for logics of sus-
tainable development. Ma matriculated from the University of Minnesota in 1950
with a study on moth larvae control and returned to China in 1952 to become
one of the nation’s premier systems scientists. During the early reform era, he
rose through the ranks to become a national-level leader and state representative
on environmental affairs. The systems techniques he promoted, which are now
ubiquitous in China, include socio-environmental modeling and functional land
zoning.
Notions of ecological balance, rules by which ecosystems function, and what
became known as sustainable development rose to prominence in part due to
Ma’s work. In the late 1970s, he began publishing on “sustainability” and “sustain-
able development.” Ma first wrote about the former concept as “continual regen-
eration potential” ( chiyongxu de zaisheng chuanli ) and the latter as “continuous
development” ( chixu fazhan and kechixu fazhan). Ma served on the Brundtland
Commission as a member of the United Nations World Commission on the
Environment and was one of the principal authors of Our Common Future issued
in 1987.46 The work defined sustainability globally for decades. During the post-
Brundtland era, when sustainability became a globally circulating term, kechixu
fazhan came to be translated as sustainable development.
Ma’s “social-economic-ecological systems theory” ( shehui jingji shengtai
xitong), published before the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future , pro-
vided direction for China’s social and natural management from the 1980s to
37 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
the present. In the 1981 article The Function of Ecological Rules in Environmental
Management, for instance, Ma laid out a structure of ecosystem functioning as an
”47 His integral whole that he refers to as the “social-economic-ecological system.
theorization of systems science management revived logics of social evolution by
conceiving of human progress and civilizational transformation through inter-
actions within an integrated social-economic-ecological complex system. In his
teleological narration, humans begin as “primitive” ( yuanshi) beings that main-
tain their material lives through struggling with nature.
48 As humans develop
scientific technologies, society progresses through stages of development tending
toward modern (jindai) humanity in a linear stage-oriented fashion. But modern
capitalist development, Ma suggests, has also brought about ecosystem disequi-
librium. Disequilibrium, for Ma, emerges from monopoly capitalists’ ignorance
of human dependence on the natural environment and predatory approaches
to natural resource use, which have brought about ecological crises.
49 Ma advo-
cated for a new relationship with nature through socialist environmental plan-
ning based in earth systems science.
For Ma, modern socialism requires a merging of evolutionary ecology and
ecological economics from which state scientists can restructure relationships
between socioeconomic organization and the natural world. Bringing about
this new stage of “scientifically based socialism,” Ma argued, entails adopting
systems science principles to manage natural resources and industrial produc-
tion, which could maximize production and generate a harmonious relation-
ship ( xietiao guanxi) between humans and nature.
50 To do so, he advocated
for mechanistic approaches to optimizing ecosystem functionality. One way to
optimize functionality, for Ma, is through functional land zoning and subsys-
tem modeling, which he claimed, can maximize the production and circulation
efficiency of energy and material goods in industrial and agricultural produc-
tion process.
51
Ma held that a scientifically managed complex systems structure ( fuhe xitong
jiegou) could be achieved through coordinating industrial production and natu-
ral metabolic functions. He contended that systems scientists could manage a
holistic network of circulation by optimizing the material metabolism of waste
(feiwu) and energy ( nengliang). This can be achieved by coordinating “open”
natural systems ( ziran kaifangxi) and human-made “closed” engineered systems
(rengong gongchengde bihuan xitong) of industrial production.
52 Central to this
schema, Ma argued, is creating coordinated functional zones with built environ-
ments for human habitation ( juminqu) at the center. The functional zones he
advocated include agricultural production areas ( nongye shengchanqu ), indus-
trial production areas (gongye shengchanqu), water storage areas, and natural
ecosystem areas ( shengtai xitongqu) (figure 3). Each functional zone within the
38
s
mineral solar
energy energy
solar
energy biomass
hydraulic
products
products
organic maer
(nutrients)
products
resources
degradaon
resources
water resources
regulaon
regulaon
producon,
raw
materials
producon,
energy
organic maer
(nutrients)
environmental
regulaon
environmental
regulaon
natural
ecosystem
micro-
organisms animals
plants
reservoir
benthic
organisms
fish
products
plankton
s
e
l
f
-
p
u
r
i
f
y
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g
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e
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wastes
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e
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acvity
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e
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solar
energy energy energy
CHAPTER 1
FIGURE 3. A redrawing of Ma Shijun’s 1981 complex systems model.
integrated whole has distinct, yet integrated, material metabolisms that supple-
ment subsystem functionality ( buchong zuoyong).53 Importantly, Ma held that
systems modeling was necessary to manage the relationship between functional
zones.
Earth systems science logics proliferated in conjunction with Ma’s positions as
a state adviser and leader of scientific organizations. In 1981 when The Function
of Ecological Rules in Environmental Management was published, Ma was a lead-
ing scientist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Several years later he became
chairman of the Chinese Ecological Society and then an adviser for the State
Council Environmental Protection Commission. He served on multiple national
and international environmental boards from the late 1970s up to his death in
1991. Ma’s ideas remain central to socio-environmental management in China,
in part through the work of his students. While much of Ma’s focus was on indus-
trial and agricultural relations, his student, Wang Rusong, articulated systems
science logics in relation to urban systems.
Wang Rusong’s scientific work brought systems science thinking to urban
planning. In 1984, Ma Shijun and Wang Rusong jointly published a research
39 MAKING ECOLOGY DEVELOPMENTAL
article called The Social-Economic-Natural Complex System.54 This article reit-
erated the social-economic-ecological system concept, discussed by Ma in
1981. But it situated the theory as crucial to sustainable urban development. In
this work, the authors advocated for coordinated systems management of cit-
ies and urbanization processes. Ma and Wang described the social, economic,
and in this iteration, “natural” ( ziran) as part of an interlinked system, within
which no parts are totally separate. Optimizing cities entailed managing the
relations between spaces of human habitation and natural ecosystems that sup-
port them.
Ma and Wang argued that to optimally manage urbanization processes sci-
entists must recognize the multiple relational feedbacks in complex systems.
These feedbacks could be stabilized, they contended, through mechanistic
managerial techniques, such as modeling and functional zoning to optimize
socio-natural systems. They claimed that once scientists optimized relations
and obtained functional equilibrium, development would be sustainable . The
key contradiction within this logic is the assumption that mechanizing system
functions can simultaneously achieve biophysical equilibrium and economic