Charlotte Bruckermann’s research while affiliated with University of Cologne and other places

In global environmental governance, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions often involve turning pollution rights into commodities, essentially privatizing the air. Policies like carbon pricing and market approaches are considered effective solutions, especially within capitalist systems, and continue to rely on logics of the tragedy of the (atmospheric) commons. In China, the Communist Party proposed environmental policies aligning with capitalist development principles under the concept of ‘ecological civilization’. However, the perspectives on the ground differ from the government’s plans. Citizens, including sci-fi enthusiasts and eco-utopian thinkers in both rural and urban areas, have their own visions for a shared future that go beyond the narrow focus on economic growth, markets and pricing. Contrary to official narratives, interviews, social media discussions and popular artworks reveal that many envision the future ‘ecological civilization’ with clean air as commons for the more-than-human world. I argue that anthropological perspectives must attend to such creative spaces in which political subjects become enfolded in the commons, without eclipsing their potential to reinforce class divisions and social inequalities in environmental aspirations.

In response to a perceived ‘moral crisis’ amid global capitalism, China's communist party currently aims to instil morality, credibility and trust among citizens. This article examines an instance of technomoral governance that fosters citizen self-regulation in pursuit of the neosocialist agenda of green development: a digital platform called Ant Forest that steers consumers towards ‘ecological consciousness’. The app mobilises techniques of quantification, especially through green credits and carbon metrics, to recalibrate accountability away from corporations and the state and towards individual behaviour. It also attempts to facilitate sustainable choices by offering a simple interface for monitoring green behaviour that reduces complexity, both for onscreen choices and offline activities. The app thereby paves the way to ‘automating morality’, in the sense of replacing the physical work and moral effort involved in attaining a desired ‘green’ subjectivity. Ethnographic insights, ranging from rural afforestation workers to urban app users seeking sustainable futures, underscore the tensions and contradictions between embracing digital tools for diverse moral ends. Exploring China's digital administration system, designed to be predictive and conflict-averse, sheds light on the technomoral dimensions underlying this approach to environmental restitution. Beyond neoliberalism, this convergence of governance, technology and society's self-regulation contributes to global discourse on environmental policy and digital social management, presenting a distinct neosocialist approach to technomoral governance. Résumé Pour répondre à la perception d'un ‘crise moral’ dans le contexte de capitalisme mondial, la partie communiste en Chine vise à installer de la moralité, de la crédibilité, et de la confiance dans la population. Cet article examine un cas de gouvernance techno-morale pour promouvoir le contrôle de soi comme un comportement citoyen afin de mettre en pratique le programme néosocialiste de développement écologique. Une plateforme numérique, qui s'appelle La Forêt de fourmis, dirige les consommateurs vers ‘la conscience écologique’. L'application mobilise des outils de quantification, surtout au travers des crédits verts et des métriques de carbone, afin de libérer les corporations et les états de leurs responsabilités et de focaliser davantage sur le comportement individuel. De plus, l'application cherche à faciliter des choix durables en créant une interface simple pour surveiller des gestes écologiques ; celle-ci réduit de la complexité, à la fois pour des choix faits en ligne et pour des activités hors ligne. Ainsi, l'application ouvre le chemin vers une façon de ‘automatiser la moralité’, ou de remplacer le travail physique et l'effort moral nécessaires pour obtenir une subjectivité écologique désirable. Des connaissances ethnographiques, tirées des gestionnaires de forêt dans des zones rurales ainsi que des consommateurs urbains qui cherchent des solutions durables, surlignent les tensions et les contradictions liées à l'utilisation des outils numériques pour diverses finalités morales. Une exploration du système administratif et numérique en Chine, qui a été conçu pour éviter des conflits et pour prédire, révèle les dimensions techno-morales qui soutiennent cette approche à la restitution environnementale. Au-delà du néolibéralisme, cette convergence de la gouvernance, de la technologie, et de l'autorégulation de société contribue à un discours mondial sur la politique environnementale et la gestion sociale et numérique, en présentant une approche néosocialiste spécifique à la gouvernance techno-morale.

Faced with environmental degradation and atmospheric pollution, Chinese citizens increasingly envision the good life as a green life. Yet in cities and the countryside, understandings of environmental hardship and ecological redress diverge and at times even contradict each other. Nonetheless, promises of a greener future mobilize shared notions of cooperation in exchanges of work and support between urbanites and their rural counterparts. Situated between socialist sacrifice, market service, and digital technologies, these reciprocal environmental engagements challenge historical narratives of a smooth transition from the Maoist collective-oriented and public-spirited hero to the private and individualistic new subject of the Reform era. The mobilization of ecological labor instantiates a distinct formation of neosocialist desires and subjectivities oriented toward a greener future. Underlying this vision is a conception of shengtai yishi 生态意识 (ecological consciousness) that resonates with the government rhetoric of constructing a shengtai wenming 生态文明 (ecological civilization) in China and beyond.

In the “coal province” of Shanxi, residents grapple with tensions between caring for their families and caring about their environment. In creating ethical pathways through care, residents must navigate the paradox of livelihoods dependent on forms of development that endanger lives and pollute environments. This dilemma has crystallized over time, as the personal and particular demands of the present have become enmeshed with long-standing concerns over environmental degradation. Rather than characterizing family care as concrete and environmental care as abstract, acts of care in Shanxi link the reproductive crisis of the family with the reproductive crisis of the environment: the article presents instances under which the attention, empathy and recognition of care for concrete others are scaled up to the levels of ecology and planetary crisis.

Faced with stifling levels of airborne pollution, Chinese citizens hold the state accountable, demanding solutions through effective environmental policy. To reduce emissions, the state has set up experimental pilot carbon markets, where potential failure is cast as integral to continuing improvement. Those in charge of conceptualizing and implementing these experiments, namely carbon bureaucrats, consultants, and developers, feel their public responsibility acutely, sharpened by personal anxieties about pollution and health. But they also often perceive these carbon markets as doomed to fail, in absolute terms, in delivering decarbonization goals. Those charged with realizing carbon markets are therefore caught between, on the one hand, policy failure being folded into continual, pragmatic experimentation and, on the other, their embodied knowledge that such progressive, positively freighted failure is in fact terminal. Le pragmatisme de l’échec perpétuel : la politique écologique comme expérimentation en Chine Résumé Face à une pollution qui rend leur air irrespirable, les citoyens chinois mettent en cause la responsabilité de l’État et exigent des solutions passant par une politique écologique efficace. Afin de réduire les émissions, l’État a mis en place des marchés‐pilotes du carbone expérimentaux, dont l’échec potentiel figure comme partie intégrante de l'amélioration permanente. Les bureaucrates, consultants et développeurs chargés de conceptualiser et de réaliser ces expériences ont une conscience aiguë de leur responsabilité sociale, encore aiguisée par leurs inquiétudes personnelles liées à la pollution et à la santé. Ils ont aussi le pressentiment que ces marchés du carbone ne peuvent qu’échouer à atteindre les objectifs de décarbonation, en chiffres absolus. Les experts chargés de déployer les marchés du carbone sont donc coincés entre l’échec d'une politique enveloppée dans une expérimentation pragmatique perpétuelle, d'une part, et d'autre part leur conscience que cet échec progressif, chargé d'une valeur positive, est en réalité fatal.

In China, the exchange of carbon credits prevalent in global environmental governance has expanded beyond emissions exchanges focused on polluting industrial installations and peripheral green lungs. Instead, an innovative field of individual carbon accounting schemes rescaled the responsibility for carbon emissions, savings, and offsets to the consumer-citizen through digital apps. This repurposing of carbon cannot be traced to simple top-down command-and-control measures conventionally associated with authoritarian regimes, nor to pure market-driven interests ascribed to neoliberal governance. In individual carbon accounting the auditing, consultancy and accountability strategies preaching resilience in the face of the global risks and capitalist crises meet with the Marxist-Leninist commitments to the “mass line.” The Chinese Communist Party and related actors thereby foster GDP growth while performing environmental redress. Chinese social management measures, including individual carbon accounting, belong to a cybernetic, autonomous, and aspirational promise of a more harmonious melding of ecology and economy, often distilled in visions of Ecological Civilization, yet placing hope in the possibility of green capitalism.

Banned in China between 1998 and 2005, the reemergence of network marketing allows rural young women to distribute a wide range of consumer products across uneven rural–urban landscapes. The rhizomic distribution channels of network marketing long confounded Chinese legal and regulatory governance based on workplaces embedded in particular locations, a problem compounded by the rise of e‐commerce in the last decade. As network marketers and their potential clients maneuvered spatial inequalities, gender hierarchies, and financial exclusion, they confronted the subversion of long‐term mutuality and sociality to short‐term transactional exchanges, a process partially inverted by the move from physical to virtual retail and its digital rating systems. As the Chinese state sought to establish, monitor, and guarantee trust in economic activities by delimiting predatory schemes, its initial targeting of network marketing companies has given way to regulating the sellers themselves. In contrast to contexts where network marketing forges enterprising subjectivities of neoliberalism, however, Chinese salespersons prioritized meeting aspirations of an imagined pastoral state and idealized social relations over business transactions. By championing that earning trust forms the ultimate measure of success, the discourse of network salespersons and their potential customers rings with the ways that e‐commerce platforms and digital bureaucracy attempt to measure, evaluate, and regulate the trustworthiness of Chinese citizens.

Examining the rise of children’s birthday celebrations in rural China, this article asks what is at stake in these festivities. As kin, friends, and neighbours rally around offspring, birthday parties focus on what children are and will become. Through ritual acts relatives express ties to scarce offspring as kin, often in competition with one another and the values they seek children to attain. Rural citizens thereby negotiate and contest new forms of social exclusion linked to population policies and economic transformation in the Chinese countryside. By imbuing birthday parties with ritual forms, these celebrations challenge theoretical assumptions about the secularisation of kinship under capitalism and the nuclearisation of the family through state bureaucracy.