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Author Response for Society and Space Book Forum for Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China
F
or brilliant reviews, I am deeply grateful to I-Chun Catherine Chang, Ding Fei, Tyler Harlan, Mi Shih, and Emily Yeh. I have been fortunate to engage with these scholars during book forums at Princeton and Rutgers, as well as an AAG Author Meets Critics panel. Here I endeavor to respond to several points they raise in their reviews. This response builds on the commentaries and work of five scholars and reflects on some of the key findings and insights found in the book Ecological States. Furthermore, it provides direction for investigating articulations between ecology and state power in a global register.
Ecological States examines the relationship between ecology and power in the context of China’s state mandate to transform 20% of land into ecological redlines and urban ecological protection areas, which propelled the largest urban-rural transformations on the face of the earth. Alongside a genealogy of how ecology came to figure so prominently in the present moment, the book examines the uneven incorporation peri-urban villagers’ land and housing in urban ecological protection zoning. The forms of green governance that emerge reconfigure state power at the city-level and facilitate land-based accumulation and the involuntary resettlement of peri-urban villagers — a process I refer to as "ecological territorialization." Through ethnographic analyses, Ecological States further illustrates how rural people individually and collectively navigate the volumetric politics of land and housing valuation. Some draw on aesthetic tropes of rurality to remake their lives and livelihoods in the aftermath of conservation-oriented dispossession. Others collectively resist state-led resettlement, and in doing so face politics of infrastructural removal, such as housing demolition, and stoppages in electricity and water service, thereby making their built environments uninhabitable.
In this context, "ecological states" refers to the biophysical, governmental, and aesthetic articulations of ecology and power, which I argue undergird everyday state-society relations and social inequalities across contemporary China. Ecological States doesn’t portray a juggernaut top-down authoritarian state, but rather one that comes into being through forms of ecological knowledge production, struggles over resources within the local state, and everyday negotiations. The book makes the case that eco-developmental logics and practices emerge through the reasoned arguments of China’s scientists. These logics undergird state techniques that extend power over land and people. And everyday people navigate state policies in ways that reconfigure their lives and livelihoods.
Mi Shih's (2024) analysis brings attention the importance of the urban scale in ecological state formation. Elsewhere, Shih (2021) demonstrates how, as municipal states strive to expropriate land from villagers in the city, villagers find sanctuary within forms of communal human vitality (renqi) and the economic protections provided by rural land. Yet, these vitalist forms face clear threats under state-directed programs aimed to urbanize the rural population. Within this context, Ecological States details how rural people strive to maximize compensation capital for land and housing. While some successfully navigate the fraught and slippery volumetric politics of land and housing valuation and compensation and in so doing accumulate through their own displacement, others fail to obtain adequate compensation. These peri-urban ecological migrants describe their migrations into high-rise resettlement apartments along a spectrum of moving into poverty and moving into riches (ban fuyou). Chang (2019) finds parallels in what she calls 'accumulation through relocation' in China's eco-city development and resettlement processes. In ways such as these, everyday citizens strive to thrive amidst the atomizing effects of state-led urbanization.
Ding Fei (2024) reflects on how the Chinese state, rather than being monolithic, is divided across a number of levels each with competing interests. This is commonly described as a tiao-kuai power matrix, which entails a vertical hierarchy of power (tiao) that correspondences to a horizontal distribution of areal control (kuai). Within the context of urban-rural comprehensive planning and ecological protection zoning, Ding asks, "how are the competing interests of various bureaus within a municipal region reconciled under this 'new paradigm of planning' (page 87)?" The answer depends on the specific functions under consideration, particularly ecological functions, as well as the relative position of a given bureau. Each bureau involved in comprehensive planning puts forward proposals that reflect their priorities and interests. "Merging multiple forms of planning into one" (duoguiheyi) (see Shih 2024) is inevitably a contested process within local states hierarchies. During fieldwork, I found that enviromental bureaus held greater power than in years past. Ultimate decisions over outstanding planning discrepancies, however, were made by high-level municipal cadres.
Fei (2024) further inquires into comparative aspects of place and region in national ecological civilization processes. In the book, I focus primarily on socio-spatial processes common across Chengdu (Sichuan Province), Kunming and Dali (Yunnan Province) rather than drilling into key differences. That said, some points of distinction are warranted. In Yunnan, a province that includes high numbers of ethno-minoritized people, I observed concerted efforts by rural-themed restaurant and guesthouse proprietors to produce ethno-racialized expressions of difference in cuisine, decor, dance, and infrastructure. In this, individuals and communities produced ethno-racialized aesthetic expressions of, what I refer to in the book as, the rural-ecological sublime. This is the case not only for minoritized people but also Han Chinese (i.e. China's ethnic majority at over 90%). In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, in contrast, I found numerous forms of collective rural social organization around shared assets derived from land. For instance, residents in Chengdu partnered with corporations to strengthen their collective bargaining. In other instances, they agglomerated rural-themes guesthouses on collectively owned land. These experiments reflect broader southwestern regional economic dynamics as China's gateways to the "Develop the West" (xibudakaifa) campaign and the "Belt and Road" (yidaiyilu) initiative.
In her review, Emily T. Yeh (2024) examines the role of systems science thinking surrounding carbon neutrality and state attempts to optimize enviromental functions of the Tibetan Plateau. Yeh (2022), for instance, discusses the Sky River project, which entails intercepting water vapor over the southern Tibetan Plateau and redirecting it as rainfall in the comparatively dry Yellow River Basin. The forms of recursive displacement and ecological resettlement that Yeh identifies in Tibet, through figures like Tsongyi, mirror those described in Ecological States, which together signal the scale of social transformations accompanying nationwide shifts from productivist logics of yesteryear to those of ecological construction today. In this vein, Ecological States analyzes the aesthetic politics undergirding how China's state scientists "see" ecological histories and "sense" ecological restoration. Seeing and sensing like a state scientist, as I discuss in the book, entails valuing written works of authoritative botanists rather than agricultural legacies. This way of seeing and sensing serves to justify rural displacement. Displacement in the name of socio-natural optimization and beautification is critical to state efforts to produce an eco-developmental sublime in the landscape.
In this vein, I-Chun Catherine Chang (2024) situates Ecological States in relation to eco-state debates in the field of geography. Chang brings attention to "the dynamic, complex, and plural nature of the ecological state in China across different locations and scales" and therefore identifies the impetus for pluralizing conceptions of the eco-state as expressed in the title “ecological states.” Presciently, Chang notes how the book provides a foundation to explore questions of China's extra-territorial state power in relation to the environment and inquires if this will become a new research direction for me. While I have made some headway on China's diverse roles in global green governance (Rodenbiker 2023, 2023b), mechanizing ocean natures in the South China Sea (Rodenbiker 2023c), and on how Chinese land investments shape regional and multi-scalar territorial politics precipitating a new red scare (Rodenbiker 2024), others have laid indispensable foundations for the study of ecology and state power globally.
Productive directions for examining ecology and power in global registers have emerged from scholars investigating the diversity of Chinese corporations and communities abroad, the roles of China's enviromental and developmental models in the Global South, China's leadership in international enviromental forums, and how attempts to optimize biophysical natures have transformed the material grounds upon which power relations are produced elsewhere. For instance, the movement of Chinese citizens into expatriate life in Africa – a necessary correlate to the materialization of BRI infrastructure – produces complex sets of power relations and dispossessory processes inherent to migratory experiences (Fei 2024b). Such work illustrates the importance of examining the multiplicity of actors and relations that materialize alongside BRI infrastructure. Others analyze the proliferation of China models abroad and green cooperation (Harlan and Lu 2022; 2024), which are reorienting environmental and development practices across Global South contexts. China, furthermore, is taking on significant leadership roles in multilateral environmental platforms, such as in international climate change forums (Qi and Dauvergne 2022) and nature-based solutions (Zhu et al. 2024). These works lay the foundations for grounded research on China's role in international environmental arenas and how the mobilization of China's environmental models and ideas is shaping global environmental governance. Finally, attempts to optimize biophysical relations don't sit neatly within China's national borders (Yeh 2022, Zee 2022). Rather attempts to optimize socio-natural relations shape the material grounds upon which power relations are produced elsewhere. Investigation of transnational material linkages and their role in reconfiguring power relations is yet another productive domain of inquiry. In addition to the insights found in Ecological States, I contend that these works offer productive foundations for future research on global articulations of ecology and state power.
References
Chang, I.C.C. 2019. Livelihood transitions during China’s ecological urbanization: An ethnographic observation. Remaking Sustainable Urbanism: Space, Scale and Governance in the New Urban Era, pp.161-183.
Chang, I.C.C. 2024. The Territoriality and Plurality of China's Ecological States. Society and Space online.
Harlan, T. and Lu, J. 2022. Green Cooperation: Environmental Governance and Development Aid on the Belt and Road. Woodrow Wilson Center Report. Washington D.C.
Harlan, T. and Lu, J., 2024. The cooperation‐infrastructure nexus: Translating the ‘China Model’ into Laos. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 45(2), pp. 204–224.
Fei, D. 2024. Planning for Ecological Civilization. Society and Space online.
Fei, D., 2024b. China–Africa skills transfer through overseas economic and trade cooperation zones. Journal of International Development, 36(1), pp.172-191.
Qi, J.J. and Dauvergne, P., 2022. China’s rising influence on climate governance: Forging a path for the global South. Global Environmental Change, 73, p.102484.
Rodenbiker, J., 2023. Green silk roads, partner state development, and environmental governance: Belt and road infrastructure on the Sino-East African frontier. Critical Asian Studies, 55(2), pp.169-192.
Rodenbiker, J. 2023b. Ecological Civilization Goes Global: China's Green Soft Power and South-South Enviromental Initiatives. Woodrow Wilson Center Report. Washington D.C.
Rodenbiker, J. 2023c. Ecological Militarization: Engineering Territory in the South China Sea. Political Geography 106, 102932
Rodenbiker, J., 2024. Global China in the American heartland: Chinese investment, populist coalitions, and the new red scare. Political Geography, 111, 103110.
Shih, M. 2021. “The Sanctuary of the Collective: Contesting the Fictions of State-led Commodification of Peri-urban Guangzhou” in (eds.) Ghertner, D and Lake. B. Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country. Cornell University Press. Ithaca: NY.
Shih, M. 2024. China's Urban Future. Society and Space online.
Yeh, E.T., 2022. Sky river: Promethean dreams of optimising the atmosphere. Made in China Journal, 7(2), pp.96-101.
Yeh, E. T. 2024. Review of Ecological States by Jesse Rodenbiker. Society and Space online.
Zee, J.C., 2022. Continent in dust: experiments in a Chinese weather system. University of California Press.
Zhu, A.L., Weins, N., Lu, J., Harlan, T., Qian, J. and Seleguim, F.B., 2024. China’s nature-based solutions in the Global South: Evidence from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Global Environmental Change, 86, p.102842.
Jesse Rodenbiker is an associate research scholar at Princeton University with the Center on Contemporary China at PIIRS, and an assistant teaching professor of geography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Rodenbiker is author of Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China (2023, Cornell University Press).