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Social-environmental dilemmas
of planning an ‘ecological
civilisation’ in China
Jia-Ching Chen
levels. In this context, phrases evoking ‘the state’ in relationship to
power or authority must be read as extending beyond
Introduction
Over the past three decades, China has undergone social and environmental changes of
astonishing in speed and scale. Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation have contributed to
dramatic economic growth and reduction of poverty. However, these successes have been
accompanied by sharply increasing social inequality, starkly uneven development and wide-
spread environmental degradation. In response, the party-state has promoted “the construction
of an ecological civilisation” as a pillar of its ideology of socialist development, “merging com-
prehensively with national economic construction, political construction, cultural construction
and all aspects of constructing society” (Xinhua News Agency 2012). At the centre of this
undertaking is China’s national programme of integrated rural transformation and urbanisation.
In major policy statements, the Central Committee describes this programme as the simultane-
ous implementation of policies of urbanisation to stabilise economic growth and improve living
standards, and environmental governance to curb pollution and to optimise the use of rural land
and natural resources. Together, these policies and plans for ‘ecological construction’ are aimed
at and ideologically justified as unifying efforts to transform and govern the economy, soci-
ety and environment for sustainable (and nominally ‘socialist’) development on a coordinated
national scale. In this context, spatial planning in contemporary China continues to pursue goals
and techniques centred on economic growth and the zoning and regulation of land markets.
However, it is distinctive as an emergent mode of territorialisation and as a regime for producing
and governing a national spatial structure and nationally scaled environmental values.
These policies are most prominently drawn together in master planned construction of new
towns and cities as models for remaking China’s development in its pursuit of ecological civilisa-
tion (State Council 2014; Xinhua News Agency 2015). As such model ecological construction
projects entail widespread dispossession of village lands, and the eviction and demolition of
millions of households each year, the party-state must also constantly justify its normative visions
for change. Within the context of China’s single-party government structure, I use the term
‘party-state’ to refer to the combined social, cultural and political apparatuses of the Communist
Party of China (CPC) and the government at all administrative levels. In this context, phrases
evoking ‘the state’ in relationship to power or authority must be read as extending beyond
180
Chen, Jia-Ching. 2017. “Social-Environmental Dilemmas of Planning an ‘Ecological
Civilization’ in China.” In Companion to Planning in the Global South, edited by Vanessa
Watson, Gautam Bhan, and Smita Srinivas. Routledge.
Social-environmental dilemmas in China
181
the formal government bureaucracy and into the mostly opaque domain of the party, whose
leadership is legally enshrined in the constitution. Cartier (2015) highlights the salience of the
term in analysing questions of state scale and territoriality in processes of urbanisation and socio-
spatial transformation in China. Cartier (2015) argues that the party-state shapes processes of
‘territorial urbanisation’ as integral to a process of state building across scales. Here, by highlight-
ing the party-state’s efforts to optimise national spatial structure and to construct and govern
environmental value at a national scale – efforts that I argue are at the centre of the ideological
conception of ecological civilisation – I complement Hoffman’s (2011: 55) approach to ‘urban
modelling’ as a “governmental practice that shapes, disciplines, and produces particular kinds
of spaces and subjects”. In this chapter’s discussion of spatial planning within such processes of
modelling, this conceptual approach facilitates a combined analysis of the party’s authoritative
discourse, municipal government and expert planning practices.1 By analysing model urbanisa-
tion within a larger programme of national ecological construction, I argue that the party-state
sees urbanisation as a mode of governing larger dynamic processes, and that China’s contempo-
rary spatial transformation cannot be fully grasped through analyses that privilege urbanisation (as
multi-scalar or isolated place-based processes) per se (cf. Brenner 2013; Scott and Storper 2015).2
In this chapter, I argue that the party-state’s overarching paradigm of ecological civilisation
and the contemporary process of ecological construction hinge critically on spatial planning, and
analyse how authoritative discourse and expert practices of spatial planning work to define envi-
ronmental value at a national scale. Utilising an analysis of national policy discourse on urban
and rural transformation, this chapter demonstrates that (1) the Chinese party-state is promoting
spatial planning as a key to maintaining long-term social stability and political legitimacy; and
(2) that planning for spatial optimisation is conceived of in broadly environmental terms, with
focus on constructing and governing nationally scaled environmental resource values. In the
following sections, the chapter outlines the context for the enrolment of eco-urbanisation plan-
ning as a key expression of the policy and practice of ecological construction, and then analyses
this enrolment in discourse and policy. The chapter then turns to the implementation of this
programme of national spatial restructuring, which is taking place in hundreds of master planned
eco-urbanisation projects around the country. Planning practice in a model eco-city project
in Yixing, Jiangsu province (see Figure 14.1) is analysed in the context of national policy and
Figure 14.1 Locations of Jiangsu Province and Yixing City
Source: Chen (2012: 83).
Jia-Ching Chen
182
authoritative discourse. The chapter argues that, driven by the political goals of the party-state
this model constitutes an ideological conflation of eco-urbanisation with ecological construction
and its historically established notions of national development and modernisation. Through
the case study, the chapter documents how model eco-urbanisation produces metonymies of
national environmental rationality to justify the massive dispossession of rural residents and
wholesale transformation of rural landscapes. In conclusion, the chapter examines the implica-
tions for planning and argues that these processes and outcomes produce fundamental dilemmas
of social-environmental injustice across localities and scales.
The crisis context of China’s eco-urbanisation paradigm
China is confronting the social and environmental limits of over three decades of growth-
above-all development policy. Industrial pollution in city centres and rural hinterlands has
gone under-regulated since the beginning of the reform period, resulting in severe contami-
nation of water supplies in 75 per cent of the rivers and lakes and 90 per cent of urban
groundwater supplies (Shapiro 2012: 8). For decades, unregulated industrial effluents and
agricultural runoffs have fed massive hazardous blooms of cyanobacteria, leading to frequent
shutdowns of factories and municipal water systems in several coastal provinces. Air and water
pollution and resulting negative health and economic impacts are increasing causes for social
unrest, with tens of thousands of ‘mass incidents’ occurring each year (Economy 2004; Jing
2000; Stern 2010). This is also a crisis in China’s human environmental health. Liu (2010: 8)
has counted 459 “cancer villages” documented in official and unofficial reports across 29 of
China’s 33 provincial-level administrative divisions. In 2007, a joint report by the Ministry
of Environmental Protection (MEP) and the World Bank reported that the economic cost of
air pollution in premature deaths and health care costs in 2003 was conservatively estimated at
157.3 billion CNY (World Bank and SEPA 2007).3 In 2013, Chinese officials estimated that
outdoor air pollution contributes to up to 500,000 premature deaths every year, and analysis
based on the 2010 Global Burden of Diseases Study estimated 1.2 million premature deaths in
2010 alone (Health Effects Institute 2013).4
Meanwhile, China’s national economy has been slowing down with nominal growth in
GDP estimated at 5.3 per cent in 2015 compared to an average of over 10 per cent from 1978
through 2011 (IMF 2016). As a share of GDP, exports are down by more than 10 per cent
over the past decade (IMF 2016). This decline presents serious challenges to the local gov-
ernments that are tasked with generating revenue for infrastructural modernisation and social
development targets. Following fiscal recentralisation in 1994 and rural tax reforms in the
subsequent decade, local governments have increasingly relied on revenues derived from land
and real estate development to pay for an expanding share of social services and infrastructure
(Hsing 2010; Lin 2009; Lin etal. 2006). The local political economy of land generates 70 per
cent or more of local government revenues (Cai 2012; Hsing 2010). Moreover, this has led
to the steady enclosure of rural land and the corresponding dispossession of villagers by town-
ship and municipal governments (Hsing 2010). Cai (2012) has shown that since constitutional
reforms created the leasehold market in the 1980s, the growth of the overall economy has
closely tracked the conversion of arable land to other uses. In sum, the industrialisation and
urbanisation of rural land has been a fundamental component of China’s economic growth
over the past three decades, with urban real estate speculation driving a disproportionate share
of economic growth (e.g. Hsing 2010). With rural localities holding over 37 per cent of
national debt, there is an even greater pressure to utilise urbanisation as a tool for government
revenue generation, and ultimately for capital accumulation (Cai 2012).5
Social-environmental dilemmas in China
183
Local officials are tasked with broadening access to quality housing, transportation and
basic physical and social infrastructural services. Moreover, the pressing need for improv-
ing rural access to health care and education is further heightened as under-employment and
impoverishment are sharpened by the declining economy as well as by rural dispossession for
urban modernisation projects. Caught in this pincer of massive rural dispossession and agrarian
transition, rural-to-urban migration continues to feed unplanned urban population growth
(Chuang 2015). These processes are producing multiple dynamics of social stratification, eco-
nomic class differentiation and forms of socio-spatial segregation (Chen 2013a; Chuang 2014;
Hsing 2010). Land dispossession is the leading cause of social unrest with tens of thousands of
protests – amounting to 65 per cent of officially recorded “mass conflicts” each year (He 2010;
Yu 2005). Between 1980 and 2006, Yu (2006) estimates that up to 66 million farmers were
dispossessed of housing or land. Master planning is largely justified as a correction to these
decades of illegal seizures and conversions of village lands for development that proceeded with
little central oversight over compensation and resettlement practices.
Spatial planning as foundational development: institutionalising
eco-urbanisation in discourse and policy
In the face of these myriad environmental, economic and social challenges, the party-state is
pursuing master planned spatial optimisation as the foundational sine qua non for development.
Discursive practices of modelling eco-urbanisation link spatial planning at local-regional scales
to the construction of optimised national spatial structure. Hoffman (2011) highlights urban
modelling as a mode of shaping what cities and their inhabitants are supposed to be. This section
highlights modelling from another tack to analyse its role in national state building. In particular,
this section analyses spatial planning for eco-urbanisation at the local-state level as a mode of
governing – and thereby constituting – national environmental value and territorial space.
International media have reported frequently on China’s urbanisation push (e.g. Johnson
2013). However, contrary to widespread impressions and dystopian imaginaries of seemingly
endless urban agglomeration, the broader process of urbanisation is one of social and spatial
differentiation. Rather than homogenisation under a uniform blanket of urban fabric, China’s
state-led urbanisation is producing a variety of new towns and peri-urban districts in addition
to expanding secondary and tertiary cities and its vast metropolitan areas. These phenomena
are more accurately conceptualised as master planned urban and rural transformation as opposed
to a total subsumption of the rural by a singular urban form. Moreover, the urbanisation nar-
rative de-emphasises the broader phenomenon of environmental resource governance and the
maintenance of distinct rural spaces and populations (Chen etal. 2017).
Spatial planning policy for model eco-urbanisation frequently refers to “urban–rural inte-
gration” (e.g., State Council 2014); a concept illustrated by a plethora of slogans that include
“without industry, no wealth; without agriculture, no stability” and “industry nourishes
agriculture, the city supports the countryside”. By combining such myriad goals, these contem-
porary practices of spatial planning must be analysed as a mode of regulation linking domains
environmental, social and economic planning. The ability of contemporary spatial planning
to bring such domains together depends upon a generalised rationale of development – a
regime of development-truth – and the consolidation of its disciplinary status in this broadened
domain.6 The Major Functional Zones Plan, a key policy encapsulation of this development-
truth is subtitled, “the construction of a high efficiency, coordinated, and sustainable structure
for national territorial spatial development”. The plan details the coordination of spatial plan-
ning at all administrative levels and a strategic agenda for technological, informational and
Jia-Ching Chen
184
expert disciplinary development. This expansive ambit for spatial planning thus extends what
is commonly thought of as a practice of making urban places to one of optimising national ter-
ritorial space as the “institutional materiality of the state” (Poulantzas 1978).
The past decade has seen official discourse place major importance upon ‘scientific’ spa-
tial planning practices. As the first ‘green’ national development plan, the Eleventh Five-Year
Plan represented a significant reorientation of China’s development goals and principles. Since
then, the five-year plans have placed considerable emphasis on state planning authority and
practice as foundational to sustainable overall social and economic development (NPC 2006,
2011; Xinhua News Agency 2015). The approach is characterised by a push to plan optimised
functional zones of more homogenous and spatially efficient patterns of land use for urban
development, industrial and agricultural production and ecological services. This emphasis fol-
lows on decades of Malthusian preoccupation with agricultural land supply and food security
(Chen 2013b). Rooted in the party-state’s overall goal of social stability, much of the environ-
mental policy concern of the past decade addresses questions of the human environment and
environmental quality. The National Plan for a New Model of Urbanization (State Council
2014), National Ecological Functional Zones Plan (MEP 2008) and National Major Functional
Zones Plan (State Council 2010) are emblematic of this approach. Accordingly, these policies
enrol spatial planning into addressing industrial location, pollution, environmental health, social
development, economic growth, agricultural development and overall land supply across urban
and rural locales.
This explicitly spatial strategy has been institutionalised as the integrated and comprehen-
sive approach to ecological construction and ‘sustainable development’. Beginning in the early
2000s, China pioneered efforts in master planned ‘eco-city’ and ‘eco-industry’ planning and
construction on rural greenfield sites.7 The regime of model eco-urbanisation rapidly expanded
to include systems of standards, pilot programmes, new legislation and the official development
policies set forth by the Eleventh and Twelfth Five-Year Plans (2006–2010 and 2011–2015,
commonly referred to as the ‘11-5’ and ‘12-5’ plans). The 11-5 Plan set targets for energy
intensity (the amount of energy used per unit of GDP) and renewable energy generation,
and introduced a vocabulary of environmental governance into China’s official development
lexicon. Key central government development policies and initiatives by ministry-level agen-
cies have defined master planned eco-urbanisation as including: comprehensive urban–rural
spatial planning; the integration of social services, labour and land markets; the promotion
of strategic energy and environmental industries; improved physical infrastructure; relocation
and elimination of polluting rural industries; concentration of housing for rural populations;
professionalisation and scientific industrialisation of agricultural production; preservation and
economic development of ecological resources (MOST 2007, 2012; NDRC 2012; NPC 2011).
The Twelfth Five-Year Plan and the Eighteenth National Congress emphasised the “optimi-
zation of national spatial structure as the vehicle for the construction of ecological civilization”
(Hu 2012). The National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Housing,
Urban and Rural Development, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Ministry of
Science and Technology have produced complementary policies and standards for establish-
ing model eco-city and sustainable development zone projects. According to the Ministry of
Environmental Protection, over 97 per cent of prefectural-level cities (284 of 293 total) and
80 per cent county-level cities (288 of 363 total) now have state designated eco-city and low-
carbon city projects. Together, this irruption of model eco-urbanisation discourse and policy
constitutes a paradigm of Chinese ecological modernisation that centres on scientific–rational
spatial planning as the method and the self-referential justification for social-environmental
transformation and governance. Ecologically rational space qua sustainable development is a
Social-environmental dilemmas in China
185
discursive syllogism produced through the evocation of science and state planning authority
(e.g., He 2007; State Council 2014).8
In 2014, the State Council approved a plan to concentrate 60 per cent of the national popula-
tion into urban areas by 2020 (State Council 2014).9 By 2025, China is projected to have 221
cities with over one million inhabitants. The construction of model eco-urbanisation is distin-
guished within this broader process of state-led urbanisation in that it reflexively (in its official
state and technical discourses) addresses the shortcomings of prevalent practices of building urban
space through speculative economic bubbles centred on the construction sector itself. While
these problems plague eco-urbanisation just the same, it is still important to note that the politi-
cal, expert scientific and technical work that proceeds under its banner is distinct in arguing for
a high degree of state intervention into integrating strategic industrial development planning,
rural social transformation through dispossession and the optimisation of land and environmental
resources across all scales of territorial jurisdiction.
Metonymies of eco-urbanisation: producing locales of
national environmental rationality
Yixing is a site of what might be termed ‘commonplace greening’ in China. Its projects are not
internationally known and reported. Rather, it is a site where green development ideas have
attained authority in shaping municipal government processes of yoking economic development
to spatial planning. It is a place where it has become common sense to join eco-city construction
to the pursuit of rapidly expanding global markets in environmental commodities as levers for
overall social-environmental transformation. Yixing is not simply a ‘model’ in the sense of a leading
example. Rather, it also provides a paradigmatic standard – now one of the hundreds as mentioned
above – a devised display of what is understood to be ‘correct’. Hoffman (2011) argues that such
models emphasise attainability and replicability. This section examines how Yixing’s model of
commonplace greening is embedded in the making of ecological civilisation and the particular
social–environmental relationships it enacts across urban, regional and national scales.
Like other cities in the Yangzi delta region, Yixing changed rapidly as urbanisation and
industrialisation accelerated through the Chinese countryside. Unlike its neighbours, Yixing
has been an object of intense environmental policy attention and has received numerous
citations from the central government for its work under official rubrics for ecological protec-
tion and sustainable development (see Table 14.1). In 1993, the Yixing Industrial Park for
Environmental Science and Technology was designated as the research and development cen-
tre for China’s Rio Declaration Agenda 21 Program for environmental protection. By 1998,
Yixing generated 18 per cent of the national total value added in the environmental industry
(Zhang 2002: 62). In 2006, the National Yixing Economic and Technological Development
Zone (hereafter, ‘the Zone’) was established. The Zone was created to focus on ‘greentech’ and
‘cleantech’ industries, especially solar photovoltaics and optoelectronics, to support – and capi-
talise on – national targets for the production of commodities in these strategic sectors. These
green industry projects formed the economic motor for what is conceived of in Yixing’s master
plan as a larger project of eco-urbanisation and rural resource integration. This regional vision
was prominently articulated by a national Party Central Committee member, Li Yuanchao,
who extolled Yixing as a national model “eco-city” and called for its integration of rural areas
extending from the western shore of Taihu Lake across Yixing’s chain of lakes (see Figure 14.2).
In 2008, to achieve this vision as a model for simultaneous industrial upgrading, urbanisation,
environmental protection and rural development, the Zone’s planning authority was extended
to 98.3 square-kilometres. Its designation as a National Sustainable Development Experimental
Jia-Ching Chen
186
Zone in 2009 recognised its strategic incorporation of projects of industrial development in key
industries (especially environmental protection industries, solar energy, batteries for electric
vehicles, and optical electronics), “high standard” agricultural land, ecological set asides, and
village land consolidation for conversion to other uses. Now with projects occupying over 330
square-kilometres of rural land dispossessed from hundreds of villages, Yixing’s model develop-
ment lies explicitly at the intersection of national land management policies and the urban–rural
transformation processes of ecological construction at the local level (see Table 14.2).
Yixing’s eco-urbanisation projects are predicated on large-scale enclosures of village land
for direct land use allocation under its municipal authority. Dispossessed rural land has formed
the basis for municipal development finance of eco-urbanisation including free facilities as
incentives for strategic green industries. The Yixing eco-city master plan’s “conservative
and intensive land use” entails the planned dispossession and resettlement of 100,000 village
Figure 14.2 Yixing city major green development projects
Source: Chen (2012: 84).
Note: This map shows the central area of the Yixing city-region with its major green development projects
YXEDZ, YIPEST and the area of Xinjie annexed by YIPEST are all shaded in darker grey.
Table 14.1 State designations for model green development in Yixing
Year Designation Agency
2005 National garden city Ministry of Urban–Rural Development
2006 National environmental protection model city State Environmental Protection Agency*
2006 State ecological model zone State Environmental Protection Agency*
2008 Jiangsu provincial sustainable development
experimental zone
Jiangsu Department of Science and
Technology
2009 National model experimental sustainable
development zone
Ministry of Science and Technology
2011 National (state) ecological city Ministry of Environmental Protection
Source: author.
*The State Environmental Protection Agency was restructured as the Ministry of Environmental Protection in 2008.
Social-environmental dilemmas in China
187
residents between 2010 and 2020 (Yixing BLR 2010).10 As a consequence, Yixing’s model
eco-urbanisation extends state practices of rural dispossession and reconstitutes patterns of
urban-rural inequality (Chen 2013a). As ecological construction has become unequivocally
linked to spatial restructuring, the discourse and practices of planning represent predominant
patterns of rural society, economy and landscapes as environmentally irrational.
Under the rubric of urban–rural integration, local governments are expanding their direct plan-
ning authority over the rural villages within their jurisdictional boundaries. This rural land is held
directly by village collectives. Because law stipulates that the state conducts direct allocation of land
for non-agricultural purposes only in urban areas at the county level and higher, the Yixing gov-
ernment has reorganised and eliminated rural town, township and village administrations in order
to facilitate the state-rationalisation of rural land under its master plan (e.g. Jiangsu BLR 2006).
Since 2006, these activities have increased pace and scope to integrate an expanding array of rural
land uses into municipal planning. In urban–rural integration planning, a major objective is the
consolidation of village land resources for centralised reallocation for urban development, higher
intensity agriculture, and environmental governance. However, the conversion of agricultural land
to other uses is accounted for and regulated through a national quota system (Cai 2012). In this
regard, rural land is constituted as national space and through spatial planning as the infrastructural
foundation for ecological construction. In contrast to earlier forms of practice, where planning was
limited to state-owned land in urban districts, ecological construction endeavours to encompass all
rural land in the cohesion of a national state scaled environmental space and territory.
The implications for planning
As spatial planning for ecological construction increases its efforts at totality, it blunts any ana-
lytical purchase in narrative distinctions of top-down versus bottom-up drivers of socio-spatial
transformation in China. Despite its historical singularity, Yixing yielded practical models for its
Table 14.2 Yixing city environmentalised land enclosures
Name Year Project type/justification Area
(km2)
National Yixing Industrial Park
for Environmental Science
and Technology (YIPEST)
1992 National R&D, Economic Development Zone 4
YIPEST 1993 Park expansion 11
Jiangsu Yixing Economic
Development Zone (YXEDZ)
2006 Provincial economic development zone; national
solar and new energy development land base
54
Jiangsu Yixing Economic
Development Zone (YXEDZ)
2006 Integrated green urban and industrial
development; ecological preservation
30
Taihu Greenbelt 2007 Ecological preservation 133
Scientific Innovation New City
(under YXEDZ authority)
2009 Eco-city with ‘green solar valley’ R&D and
manufacturing base
22
Environmental Science and
Technology New City (under
YIPEST planning authority)
2011 Eco-city and park-district integration;
environmental industry R&D
87
Gaocheng New Town (under
YIPEST planning authority)
2012 ‘World-class city’ urban–rural integration of the
YIPEST eco-industrial zone
110
Total 331
Source: author.
Jia-Ching Chen
188
neighbours and instantiations of the party-state’s ideological conception of ecological civilisation.
For the former, the enclosure of rural land as a source of financing and incentives for the production
environmental commodities like solar panels became so widespread that the global solar industry
experienced a three-year oversupply crisis, with hundreds of millions of dollars lost to bankruptcies
and millions of tonnes of CO2-equivalent benefit lost in dismantled production facilities. In terms
of the latter, by centring so much on governing and optimising rural land supply, practices of eco-
logical construction makes the unit area of rural land into a fungible environmental value and spatial
planning into a simultaneous practice of speculative place-making, state territorialisation and intense
socio-spatial transformation. These processes must be seen in a relational context, simultaneously in
the locale of Yixing, the political reality of the party-state, and an imaginary national space that is
produced and represented in the spreadsheets of land managers rather than in official maps.
Acting upon space and the environment through planning is in many ways seen as a basic
state function (e.g., Holston 1989; Rabinow 1989; Scott 1998). Graham and Marvin (2001: 43)
describe the modernist “infrastructural ideal” as a unitary and total (nation-scaled) network pro-
ducing “coherent urban relations” among the urban totality of people, institutions, places and
the environment. However, with such a broad ambit of ideological justification and accelerated
relevance, spatial planning for ecological construction is bound to fail, to continue to create
unevenness and dialectics of conflict and social and environmental devaluation, with fundamen-
tal dilemmas of social-environmental injustice across localities and scales.
By insisting that environmental value can and should be planned, the party-state constructs
environmental value as something that is inherently tied to landscapes, but is also paradoxically
fungible and divisible from any particular place and the people who might inhabit them. In his
discussion of the construction of biodiversity as an object of environmental governance, Bowker
(2005) introduces the concept of “coinage” to highlight the erasures necessary in capital and aggre-
gate environmental metrics alike. A totalising logic of planning that is justified by a universalised
notion of environmental value and utility harkens Foucault’s (2008: 259–271) brief discussion
of a mode of “governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its
variables” as the basis for “the generalization of the ‘enterprise form in the social field”. The ‘envi-
ronmentality’ of ecological civilisation, then, seems to depart in important ways from previous
regimes of rural development, yielding a process of subjectivation as an epiphenomenon rather
than as a central goal. This paradox of planned social-environmental value is a clear illustration of
what Timothy Morton (2016) describes as the “Mobius strip” of the Human/Nature dichotomy;
a spiralling “retroactive fantasy construct” (Morton 2007) that seeks to resolve previous modern-
ist failures with ever broader efforts at totality.11 As the social-environmental fabric of ecological
civilisation takes shape through increasingly abstracted planning, it is not clear how its long-term
effects will unfold, or how any potential counter-movement in policy or social resistance might
take form. However, critical, reflexive and socially engaged practices will undoubtedly be needed
to assert alternative forms of scientific, sustainable and ecological construction.
Notes
1 While it is fair to characterise this chapter as a ‘state-centred’ approach to analysing planning in China
(where many non-state and transnational actors exist), it also does not presume that such empirical
objects are mere units within a single monolithic entity. Rather, the chapter highlights planning as one
domain of the party-state’s ongoing construction of ideology and practice. In this regard, the use of
“party-state” also refers to the historical debate over the relationship between the vanguard party and
the government apparatus in theory and in practice under one-party state of Bolshevik rule and sub-
sequent Marxist-Leninist regimes, including the CPC and People’s Republic of China (e.g. James and
Grimshaw 1992; LeBlanc 2014).
Social-environmental dilemmas in China
189
2 In the comparative context of this volume, the analysis of processes of planning as extending beyond the
connes of government bureaucracies might serve to highlight the limits of conventional distinctions of
state-society relationships, while putting the state ‘in its place’. The practices of modelling discussed here
as a domain of politics are also comparable with cases of ‘world-class’ and eco-city building elsewhere.
3 Approximately USD25.6 billion at current exchange rates. The State Environmental Protection
Administration (SEPA) was expanded and strengthened as the Ministry of Environmental Protection in
2008.
4 The Global Burden of Diseases Study (GBD) is published by The Lancet (available at: www.thelancet.
com/global-burden-of-disease). Chen Zhu, former Minister of the Environment, and members of the
Chinese Academy for Environmental Planning reported the 2010 annual estimate in a Lancet commen-
tary on the GBD (Chen etal. 2013).
5 In an update to its series on national debts, McKinsey estimates that nearly half of China’s government,
household and non-nancial corporation debt is in real estate. At approximately 9.5 trillion dollars, this
debt is nearly equivalent to China’s national GDP in 2015 (MGI 2015).
6 This conceptualisation draws upon the work of Foucault and Latour. In Truth and Power, Foucault
(1980 [1977]: 131–133) discusses “regimes of truth” as a “general politics” or “political economy” that
in modern society consist of the modes through which truth can be discerned, produced and made
to function; and that are centred on scientic discourse, mass circulation and production through
politically and economically elite institutions; and that engender political incitement and social and
political struggles. In the essay “Visualization and Cognition”, Latour (1986: 5) examines practices of
representation and the agonistic contexts in which they “make a dierence”.
7 Among such eorts was the internationally lauded plan for Dongtan Eco-City by Arup, the most
renowned engineering rm in the world, for the Shanghai government. Although the plan failed
to be implemented, Arup has continued to utilise the project as a means of marketing its eco-city
expertise.
8 Such processes of making new domains of scientic expertise and political rationales are not new in
China. In her denitive account the so-called One Child Policy, Greenhalgh (2008) reveals the evolu-
tion of state concerns over agricultural capacity into a biopolitical governmentality that ruled human
reproduction through mathematical models and village level cultural transformations.
9 In the National Plan for a New Model of Urbanization (State Council 2014), the approximate 60 per
cent gure refers to permanent residence in towns and cities. The urban household registration rate is
projected at 45 per cent.
10 This gure is over 23 per cent of the 2010 registered village population, which does not account for
migrant residents with household registration status in other locales.
11 Morton’s image of the Mobius strip is also resonant with Rosalind Williams’ (2008: 1) description of
environment and technology as forming “not a dichotomy but a continuum”.
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