China Goes Green. Judith Shapiro
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and China’s environmental challenges under Mao and in the present. Independently, we have been reflecting on China’s implementation of a form of authoritarian environmentalism that is both attractive and worrisome. We are glad to be able to join forces to supplement each other’s understandings and experiences. Because of the speed of China’s rise, and the transformative depth and impact of this set of green authoritarian policies, a book addressing the implications of these phenomena seems urgently needed, even as the rate of change provides particular challenges. Emerging policies and techniques like the urban recycling mandate, the Belt and Road Initiative, big Earth data, and geoengineering technologies can be difficult to analyze because they change quickly.
In writing China Goes Green, our sources include personal experiences and conversations with a wide range of Chinese people, as well as our knowledge of the scholarly and policy literature about China, environmental governance, and the implications of China’s rise. We also draw upon news reports from mainstream publications like the New York Times and South China Morning Post and insider news streams like Sixth Tone, as well as official data and reports from Chinese government agencies. Our case studies build on the scientific literature in forestry, conservation biology, environmental chemistry, data science, climate science, and related fields. We are by no means experts in these fields, but we draw from peer-reviewed publications and convey their findings. The book is intended to be both argumentative and empirically grounded. We aim to organize the challenges so as to clarify them conceptually and provide a basis for debate.
This book is organized along spatial and chronological lines. Chapter 1, “Asserting ‘Green’ Control: The State and its Subjects”, examines the industrialized East, focusing on China’s domestic environmental governance. In Chapter 2, “‘Green’ China Pacifies its Borders,” we move to the less developed Western part of the country and border areas to focus on the forcible “ecological migration” of nomadic groups into settlements. Chapter 3, “The State on the ‘Green’ Belt and Road,” studies the international implications of China’s “ecological civilization,” as the country rises to become a world superpower and seeks to export a development model that is both green and state-led. Chapter 4, “Global China Goes ‘Green’,” focuses on China’s role in global trade, biodiversity, and climate, as the state finds its footing as a key contributor to the problems and a key actor in trying to find solutions. In these empirical chapters, we follow the protagonist of the Chinese state as it broadens and deepens its exercise of environmental power. We close with Chapter 5, “Environmental Authoritarianism on a Troubled Planet,” in which we reflect on the implications of our work and point toward the future.
We hope that this book will appeal to both academic and general readerships. Scholars of environmental studies, political science, sociology, geography, East Asian studies, development, political theory, and international political economy may find the book of interest, as it speaks to the ongoing debates in the social sciences about authoritarianism, the East Asian developmental state, the decoupling of economic growth and ecological footprint, ecological modernization, globalization, and the challenges of the Anthropocene. We have also tried to write in such a way that the book will be of interest to students and activists who are seeking a way forward on a planet that is losing ground against humanity and that many of them will inherit.
The prevailing sentiment in the West about China and the environment often entails two faces – pessimism over climate change and insecurity about a rising China. We do not provide a falsely rosy picture to counter either of these sentiments. Instead, we stress the importance of a systematic, evidence-based understanding of China’s exercise of environmental power. The empirical examples and cases in the chapters that follow have convinced us that the future of the planet hinges on the Chinese state’s efforts to go genuinely green. To do so, the state must trust the Chinese people to participate in environmental governance through “supervision by the masses,” rather than using a green cloak to obscure its current trajectory toward totalizing social control.
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