Making Ecology Developmental: China’s Environmental Sciences and Green Modernization in Global Context

Abstract

Although the science of ecology is often understood in antimodernizing terms, this article shows how ecology in China has become a means to articulate green modernization and sustainable development. As scholars predominantly focus on the policy rhetoric surrounding China’s national modernization and sustainable development program called “ecological civilization building,” the origins of how ecology came to take on developmental meanings remain obscure. This article highlights moments of global exchange and knowledge production by Chinese Marxists, earth systems scientists, and economists that produced eco-developmental logics. These logics define an interventionist role for the state, frame urbanization as moral progress, and refashion the role of the peasantry from the revolutionary vanguard to a backward social force impeding modernization. Ecological sciences in China, therefore, lay an epistemological foundation for legitimizing state-led technocratic practices of socioenvironmental engineering and naturalizing social inequalities between “urban” and “rural” people. In highlighting Chinese scientists’ agency in producing knowledge, this article counters diffusionist accounts of science as singular systematically organized branches of knowledge that emanate from the West. Instead, I demonstrate how ecology is contingent on the historical and political conditions through which it takes on meaning. In the context of China, ecology has become integral to environmental governance, state formation, and uneven relations of power.

虽然生态学通常被认为是反现代化的, 本文显示, 生态学如何在中国成为表述绿色现代化和可持续发展的手段。学者们主要关注的, 是围绕中国现代化和可持续发展计划（“生态文明建设”）的政策论调。但是, 生态学开始具有发展含义的起源, 我们仍然不清楚。针对制定了生态发展逻辑的中国马克思主义者、地球系统科学家和经济学家, 本文重点介绍了其全球交流和知识生产的时刻。这些逻辑, 界定了国家干预主义者的作用, 将城市化视作道德的进步, 并将农民的角色从革命先锋队重塑为阻碍现代化的落后社会力量。因此, 中国的生态科学, 为国家主导和技术官僚式的社会环境工程实践的合法化、为“城市”人口和“农村”人口之间社会不平等的自然化, 奠定了认识论基础。在强调中国科学家在创造知识的作用同时, 本文反驳了科学扩散论者的关于科学是从“西方”衍生而来的、单一的、系统性知识分支的论调。相反, 本文论证了生态的意义如何取决于历史和政治条件。在中国, 生态已成为环境治理、国家形成和不均衡权力关系的组成部分。

Aunque a menudo la ciencia de la ecología es entendida en términos antimodernizantes, este artículo muestra cómo en China la ecología se ha convertido en un medio para articular la modernización verde con el desarrollo sustentable. Si bien los eruditos se enfocan predominantemente en la retórica política que rodea en China la modernización nacional, y al programa de desarrollo sustentable designado como “construyendo civilización ecológica”, siguen oscuros los orígenes de cómo vino la ecología a adquirir allí significaciones desarrollistas. Este artículo destaca los momentos de intercambio global y producción de conocimiento por marxistas chinos, científicos de los sistemas terrestres y economistas que produjeron lógicas ecodesarrollistas. Estas lógicas definen un rol intervencionista para el estado, enmarcan la urbanización como progreso moral y rehacen el papel del campesinado, desde el de una función vanguardista revolucionaria al de una fuerza social retrógrada que se interpone a la modernización. Consecuentemente, las ciencias ecológicas contribuyen en China una fundamentación epistemológica para legitimar prácticas tecnocráticas orientadas por el estado en ingeniería socioambiental, y naturalizar desigualdades sociales entre la gente “urbana” y la “rural”. Al destacar la agencia de los científicos chinos para producir conocimiento, este artículo contradice las explicaciones difusionistas que ven las ciencias como singulares ramas del conocimiento organizadas sistemáticamente por “Occidente”. Demuestro, por el contrario, cómo la ecología es contingente con las condiciones históricas y políticas a través de las cuales aquella asume significaciones. Dentro del contexto chino, la ecología se ha convertido en puntal de la gobernanza ambiental, la formación de estado y de las relaciones desiguales de poder.

Key Words:

• China
• ecological civilization
• ecology
• modernization
• science and technology studies

关键词：:

• 中国
• 生态文明
• 生态
• 现代化
• 科学技术研究。

Palabras clave::

• civilización ecológica
• China
• ecología
• estudios de ciencia y tecnología
• modernización

Acknowledgments

This article has been some time in the making. I presented an early version in 2016 at the American Association of Geographers Conference in San Francisco, and another version in 2017 at Sichuan University’s School of Public Administration. In 2019, I presented portions of this article as part of the Nordic Geographer’s Sustainable Geography-Geography of Sustainability Conference at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Finally, I presented material for this article in 2020 at the University of Pittsburgh’s Asian Studies Center as part of the “Ecological Civilization and Chinese Studies” workshop. I thank discussants and participants in these events for their comments, especially Corey Byrnes, Runqiu Liu, Janet Sturgeon, Brooke Wilmsen, and Emily Yeh. I am grateful to You-tien Hsing, Jake Kosek, Andrea Marston, Nancy Peluso, and Michael Watts for constructive comments on earlier versions of this article. Finally, I thank anonymous reviewers and the managing editor Kendra Strauss for their insightful comments.

Notes

1 See Odum (1959).

2 See Kingsland (1985) and Hutchinson (1978). Although ecology emerged in the West as an explicit critique of modernity, ecological sciences are often mobilized in support of development projects.

3 For additional work on how global exchange shapes ways of knowing, see Tagliacozzo, Siu, and Perdue (2015) and Culp, U, and Yeh (2016).

4 See Foucault, Rabinow, and Rose (2003), particularly, “The Subject and Power” (126–44).

5 For an example of this kind of ethnological account, see Morgan (1877).

6 For works on the politics of improvement, see Magubane (2003), T. Li (2007), and Yeh (2013). For works on reform-era roles of China’s peasantry see Yeh (2013), Schneider (2015), and Chen, Zinda, and Yeh (2017).

7 Marx ([1867] 2001) is often discussed as a Eurocentric unilinear thinker who advocated for sociopolitical revolution through the urban proletariat. In contrast with this reading, the work of Anderson (2002, 2016) engaged Marx’s 1872 French edition of Das Kapital (as opposed to the 1867 version), the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto (Marx 1882), Gundrisse (Marx [1939] 2005), journalistic writings, and unpublished notebooks to make the case that Marx was an adroit global thinker on varieties of human social and historical development that include race, ethnicity, and nationalisms. It is of particular relevance to this article that within the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto Marx highlighted communal villages of Russia as a potential source of socialist development, which is analogous to Li Dazhaos position.

8 See Trotsky ([1930] 2008; [1931] 2010). Trotsky’s notion of “permanent revolution” held that countries’ development trajectories depended on national class dynamics in the context of global capitalism. This was later reinterpreted by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution as continual internal revolution headed by “red guard” youth (see Yang 2016).

9 The translation of yuli as surplus energy noted in this text aligns with the translation by Meisner (1967, 65), although the term also connotes the power, ability, or capacity for social development. In other parts of the text when discussing nations’ social transformation, Li used the term shili, which could also be rendered as force or power.

10 See, for instance, Condorcet ([1795] 1955).

11 See D. Li (1919, 1924) and Meisner (1967, 158–61).

12 For a firsthand village account of class leveling practices, see Hinton (1997). For a historical overview, see Moise (2013).

13 For an analysis of the different positions and schools of thought within China’s reform-era intelligentsia, see Day (2013).

14 Writings on ecological civilization building began to emerge during the mid-1980s. They have grown exponentially since. Z. Wang (2012) enumerated the increasing volume of writings on ecological Marxism in China. Wang noted that during the decade of 1991 through 2000 there were forty-five academic peer-reviewed journal articles on the topic of ecological Marxism, whereas from 2000 to 2010, the number was nearly 600.

15 Western academics were writing and publishing works that developed an ecological Marxist project nearly simultaneous with Wang’s writing. The Western academic tradition of ecological Marxism, however, has a distinct historical lineage and categories of analysis from those that appeared in China’s early writings on ecological Marxism. For influential works in the Western tradition see O’Connor (1988), Foster (2000), and Moore (2015).

16 Wang attributed steady-state economics to John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and other political economists. Wang interpreted the steady state as a way of stabilizing national economic production, such that there is a balance between national resource extraction and production. This contrasts with neoclassical economists’ readings of Adam Smith who advocate national economies as endless machines of growth. See Arrighi (2007).

17 When earth systems scientists of the reform era discuss energy, they primarily use nengliang, which connotes energy in the sense of the power derived from the utilization of a resource, a by-product of a relational biochemical or biophysical action or reaction, or stored potential.

18 For examples of how functional land zoning, ecological redlining, and green building are being implemented and with what effects, see Pow and Neo (2015), Zhou (2015), Pow (2018), and Rodenbiker (2019, 2020).

19 Whereas aesthetic facets of early ecology in the United States emerged in relation to Southwest desert and riparian landscapes (Sayre 2010), in contemporary China ecological aesthetics are integral to environmental governance as shown through ecocity constructions (Pow 2018), urban brownfield restorations (Rodenbiker 2017), and urban–rural environmental planning projects that integrate “pristine” nature aesthetics with functional land zoning.

20 For accounts regarding circular economy and socioenvironmental modeling in other national contexts, see Geng and Dobertsein (2008), Yuan et al. (2008), and Su et al. (2013).

21 Ye used zhiliang and suzhi interchangeably within his writing to express “quality.” During the 1980s population quality began to appear in state documents and elite discourses surrounding and a new regime of value embodied in persons within a population. Population quality expressed through suzhi became predominant in the latter half of the 1980s.

22 Carrying capacity has been critiqued for being idealistic and immeasurable at all scales, for assuming that highly dynamic environmental qualities are static, as well as for the difficulties in determining veracity of data across scales given changing environmental conditions (Sayre 2008). Identifying stable in-patch dynamics at any scale has proven untenable.

23 See Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (2016).

24 For an account of grazing practices in western China and the state of scientific field studies, see Yeh (2009).

Additional information

Funding

The research and writing for this article were supported by the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, Fulbright-Hays DDRA, Social Science Research Council, Chiang-Ching Kuo Foundation, Institute of International Studies, University of California Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, and the Confucius China Studies Program.

Notes on contributors

Jesse Rodenbiker

JESSE RODENBIKER is an Atkinson Postdoctoral Fellow in Sustainability in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at Cornell University, Ithaca NY 14853. E-mail: [email protected]. He is concurrently a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. His research interests include critical environmental science and sustainability studies, urban political ecology, political economy of development, environmental justice, and global China.