The politics of conservation in contemporary rural China

Abstract

Placing conservation within a broad framework of agrarian and environmental politics, this review article argues that natural resource governance is fundamental to rural politics in China. Much of the environmental literature adopts a technocratic approach, ignoring the political nature of the redistribution of access to and control over natural resources, and of knowledge vis-à-vis degradation. Reading the managerial literature with and against the grain of political ecological studies, the essay reviews contemporary environmental issues including Payments for Ecosystem Services and other market-based approaches, the establishment of national parks and resettlement schemes justified through ecological rationales. The first section following the introduction focuses on two of the largest forest rehabilitation schemes in the world. Next, the paper reviews work on China's rapidly growing number of nature reserves, examining their role as enclosures and their entanglement with tourism income generation. This is followed by a discussion of research on the politics of rangeland degradation and property rights. The inclusion of pastoralism within the scope of rural politics is sometimes obscured by the fact that China's extensive rangelands coincide almost completely with its minority populations. The misrecognition of rural politics over resources and the environment as ethnic politics is addressed in the concluding section.

Keywords:

• China
• environment
• conservation
• payment for environmental services
• rangelands
• nature reserves
• ethnic minorities
• forests

Thanks to Elizabeth Wharton for research assistance, and to three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹One notable exception is Joshua Muldavin's work on the political ecology of agrarian reform, which argues that the ‘mining of communal capital’ such as reservoirs, irrigation canals and erosion-control structures, and the redirection of investments from communal infrastructure to private agricultural investments have exacerbated rural environmental problems in the reform period. Against the market triumphalist narrative, he suggests the collective period was in some respects better environmentally than what followed (Muldavin 1996, 1998, 2000).

²They argue that wildlife habitat has improved through the implementation of the program in nature reserves such as Wolong. However, the species planted as part of the program are generally monocrops (as the authors acknowledge), making wildlife habitat improvement questionable.

Additional information

Emily T. Yeh is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She conducts research on nature-society relations, primarily in Tibetan parts of the People's Republic of China, including projects on conflicts over access to natural resources, the relationship between ideologies of nature and nation, the political ecology of pastoral environment and development policies, vulnerability of Tibetan herders to climate change, and emerging environmental subjectivities. Her book, Taming Tibet: landscape transformation and the gift of Chinese development (Cornell University Press, 2013), explores the intersection of the political economy and cultural politics of development as a project of state territorialization.