Abstract
If a civilization thrives by modifying, exploiting, and damaging its environment—and has done so for several millennia—does it make sense to call it a “sustainable” one? With its claims to be one of the oldest civilizations in world history and a rising superpower in the twenty-first century, China is a paradoxical case. Not only are China’s aspirations for sustainable development at odds with its current status as one of the world’s worst polluters, but the expansion of Chinese-style settlements and croplands has historically been a major driver of environmental transformation and degradation on the eastern Eurasian landmass. As China’s environment continues to be altered in the twenty-first century, “ecological civilization” (shengtai wenming) has emerged as an ideological framework for the type of sustainable development that China’s political leadership envisions for the country. Incorporated into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China in 2018, “ecological civilization” is the newest among five guiding principles for China’s development in the post-Mao era. To address the potentialities of China’s "ecological civilization," we should first recognize the paradoxical nature of Chinese interactions with the environment. This chapter offers a critical survey of key positions on China’s history, culture, and environment to illuminate what scholars perceive to be the paradox of China’s sustainability.
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Notes
- 1.
The Commission was convened by the United Nations in 1983, following the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), also known as the Earth Summit, was first held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.
- 2.
WCED, Our Common Future, 8–9.
- 3.
See Ehrlich, The Population Bomb and Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth. These works have also been criticized for being alarmist and unreliable. For the authors’ subsequent reflections on their respective works, see Meadows et al., Beyond the Limits, 105 and Ehrlich and Ehrlich, “The Population Bomb Revisited.”
- 4.
Luke, “Sustainable Development as a Power/Knowledge System,” 21–22. See also Basiago, “Methods of Defining Sustainability” and Dobson, Justice and the Environment, 33–61.
- 5.
Jackson, Prosperity without Growth, 17.
- 6.
Barry, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability, 5–8.
- 7.
Dobson, Green Political Thought, 62. See also Dobson, Justice and the Environment, 33–61.
- 8.
Tilt, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China, 138–140.
- 9.
“Ecological civilization” was introduced at the 17th Party Congress in 2007. See Parr and Henry, “A New Starting Point”; Wang-Kaeding, “What Does Xi Jinping’s New Phrase ‘Ecological Civilization’ Mean?”; and Geall and Ely, “Narratives and Pathways towards an Ecological Civilization in Contemporary China.” The four other guiding principles are “material civilization” (wuzhi wenming), “spiritual civilization” (jingshen wenming), “political civilization” (zhengzhi wenming), and “social civilization” (shehui wenming). See Dynon, “‘Four Civilizations’ and the Evolution of Post-Mao Chinese Socialist Ideology.”
- 10.
Chai Jing, a former investigative reporter and television host for China Central Television, describes the effects of China’s air pollution on the wellbeing of its citizens and criticizes the inefficacy of government regulations. The film garnered hundreds of millions of views in the first days of its online release and was promptly censored by the Chinese Communist Party. See Wong, “China Blocks Web Access to ‘Under the Dome’ Documentary on Pollution.”
- 11.
China and the US together accounted for approximately 40 percent of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2012. EIA, International Energy Outlook 2016, 140. See also EIA, International Energy Outlook 2017, 137–140. The 2018 reports limit their analysis to India, China, and Africa only.
- 12.
EIA, International Energy Outlook 2016, 92, 3. See also EIA, International Energy Outlook 2017, 83–84, 141–142.
- 13.
EIA, Energy Implications of China’s Transition Toward Consumption-led Growth, 2–3.
- 14.
Office of the Press Secretary, “U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change and Clean Energy Cooperation.”
- 15.
Economy, The River Runs Black, 63, 106–117. Tilt, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China, 69–70, 109–120. See also Ma and Ortolano, Environmental Regulation in China.
- 16.
See Kirby, “When Did China Become China? Thoughts on the Twentieth Century.” In this book chapter, I use the term “China” to refer to the People’s Republic and its predecessors, broadly defined. My usage follows existing arguments that assume a certain historical continuity between ancient, imperial, and modern China. Some may find this nomenclature acceptable, while others less than ideal.
- 17.
Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 321. However, “untouched” Nature is itself a construct rooted in culture. As William Cronon reminds us, wilderness is “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history” (“The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” 69). Ramachandra Guha observes in his postcolonial critique of Western environmentalism that it is typical to “equate environmental protection with the protection of wilderness” (“Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation,” 79). Elvin seems to be making a similar assumption here that lands are protected from exploitation when they are “untouched.”
- 18.
Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 17. For a similar narrative about tigers in southern China, see Marks, Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt, 324–326.
- 19.
Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 32. Compare to Murphey, “Man and Nature in China,” 315.
- 20.
For a classic discussion of “Chineseness” and the politics of knowledge production, see Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem.” See also Shi et al., Sinophone Studies.
- 21.
Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 33–43, 49. Perdue, “The Chinese.”
- 22.
Mullaney, Critical Han Studies, 2. According to Mark Elliot, the term “Han” originated in the Han period as a political identifier: it signified the subjects of the Han emperor and did not refer to culture, descent, language, or ethnicity. The term began to emerge as an ethnonym in the Northern Wei dynasty; however, it had various uses from the Tang to the Yuan and did not approach its modern meaning of ethnicity until the Ming dynasty. See Elliot, “Hushuo.”
- 23.
Officially called the Office of Chinese Language Council International (Guojia Hanyu guoji tuiguang lingdao xiaozu bangongshi), Hanban is affiliated with the PRC’s Ministry of Education. In addition to overseeing the Confucius Institute, Hanban is known for administering the Hanyu shuiping kaoshi (HSK), translated as the Chinese Proficiency Test.
- 24.
Mullaney, Critical Han Studies, 2–3.
- 25.
Ibid., 5. See also Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation.
- 26.
Elvin considers the Han encroachment on non-Han peoples in a case study on Guizhou in The Retreat of Elephant, 216–232. See also Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History, and Di Cosmo, Ancient China and Its Enemies.
- 27.
As early as the Zhou dynasty, people of the Middle Kingdom differentiated themselves from foreign tribes not only by their hair, skin, clothing, and shelter but also by whether they cooked their food and ate grains. For example, the people of the Middle Kingdom were called “grain-eaters” (lishi zhi min). See Legge, Sacred Books of the East, 27:22 [Liji 3.III.14], and Watson, Mozi, 85 [Mozi 7A:5]. See also Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China, 7.
- 28.
Marks, China, 401.
- 29.
Scott, Against the Grain, 23.
- 30.
Ibid., 135. Scott further suggests that the power of early Chinese states was limited to the arable drainage basins of the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers because nonagricultural subsistence activities beyond these areas were difficult to tax (Against the Grain, 134–5).
- 31.
Chang, The Rise of the Chinese Empire, 1:211–213. Marks, China, 90.
- 32.
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 215.
- 33.
Ibid., 11.
- 34.
Ibid., 12, 306.
- 35.
Marks, China, 161, 184, 288. By Pomeranz’s calculation, China’s forest cover circa 1700 could be as high as 37.2 percent, if the figure excluded the large, sparsely populated regions of Tibet, Xinjiang, Qinghai, and Outer Mongolia, which were far away from the empire’s core regions. See Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 228. Based on figures in Ling, “Wo guo senlin ziyuan de bianqian,” 1983.
- 36.
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 222, 312. As quoted in Williams, “Forests,” 181. The figure for France’s forest cover in 1789 is nine million hectares. See Cooper, “In Search of Agrarian Capitalism,” 21n3.
- 37.
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 227.
- 38.
Ibid., 23.
- 39.
Ibid., 283.
- 40.
Ibid., 239, 285.
- 41.
Ibid., 7.
- 42.
Pomeranz, Great Divergence, 287. Marks, China, 398. Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 32. Totman, Pre-Industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective, 1–3, 126–128. In the case of Japan, fish was an additional source of sustenance and fertilizer.
- 43.
Elvin uses the Gwoyeu Romatzyh (guoyu luomazi) Chinese romanization system, in which the additional “r” indicates the second tone. Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 32–33. Italics added.
- 44.
Elvin, “Three Thousand Years of Unsustainable Growth,” 32.
- 45.
Using the terminology of the American philosopher W. V. Quine, I classify Elvin’s thesis as a “veridical paradox.” In “Ways of the Paradox,” Quine identifies three types of paradoxes: veridical, falsidical, and the antinomy. In a veridical paradox, a proposition that appears to be absurd at first is found to be true. When one discovers the reasoning that makes the proposition sound, the sense of absurdity quickly dissipates. The example that Quine gives is Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance who, despite being 21 years old, has experienced only five birthdays. When one realizes that Frederick, who was born on February 29, technically has a birthday once every leap year, the paradoxicality of the proposition is resolved. As Quine notes, veridical paradoxes tend to lose their paradoxical quality over time, as people are increasingly attuned to the underlying reasoning.
- 46.
Marks, China, 1, 7, 398.
- 47.
As quoted in Marks, China, 159.
- 48.
Marks, China, 131. The introduction of quick-ripening and drought-resistant Champa rice varieties, widely planted by the twelfth century, was a major breakthrough in Chinese agronomy. See Bray, Science and Civilisation in China, 6.II.493.
- 49.
Marks, China, 398.
- 50.
Ibid., 316, 380n26, 327.
- 51.
Callicott and Ames, Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought. Swearer, “An Assessment of Buddhist Eco-Philosophy.” See also Environmental Ethics 8.4 (Winter 1986), a special issue on “Asian Traditions as a Conceptual Resource for Environmental Ethics.”
- 52.
Three volumes in this series are especially relevant to Chinese environmental ethics: Tucker and John Berthrong’s Confucianism and Ecology, N. J. Girardot et al’s Daoism and Ecology, and Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams’ Buddhism and Ecology.
- 53.
There is an abundance of Chinese-language scholarship on this topic as well. Ren Junhua and Liu Xiaohua’s A Cultural Explanation of Environmental Ethics (Huanjing lunli de wenhua chanshi) and Lu Shuyuan’s The Space for Ecological Criticism (Shengtai piping de kongjian) are particularly helpful in contextualizing Chinese sources in the broader study of environmental ethics.
- 54.
See Tu, “The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism” and Tu, “The Continuity of Being.” Also worth mentioning is Chen Yexin’s Confucian Ecological Consciousness and Environmental Protection in Ancient China (Rujia shengtai yishi yu Zhongguo gudai huanjing baohu yanjiu), which situates the emergence of Confucian concepts and practices of environmental stewardship in the pre-Qin and Qin-Han periods. See also Miller, China’s Green Religion.
- 55.
Essays representing the spectrum of views include: Goldin, “Why Daoism is not Environmentalism”; Cooper, “Is Daoism Green?”; Harris, “An American Appropriation of Buddhism”; and Sponsel and Natadecha-Sponsel, “Buddhist Views of Nature and the Environment.”
- 56.
Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 323. Elvin credits Roetz, Mensch und Natur im alten China, 85. Others such as Rhoads Murphey, Vaclav Smil, Gary Snyder, and Karen Thornber have made similar arguments, as I will discuss later.
- 57.
Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 323. Original italics modified.
- 58.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 1.
- 59.
Ibid., vii. Aldo Leopold addresses an earlier instance of this problem in “Outdoor Recreation, Latest Model,” which discusses the building of roads in nature parks for easy access by automobiles. See Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 165–166, 176.
- 60.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 9, 381, 417.
- 61.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 19. See also Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 323–324.
- 62.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 3–4.
- 63.
See White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” and Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature. For a comparative study of Europe and China, including a response to White, see Tuan, “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behavior.”
- 64.
Murphey, “Asian Perspectives of and Behavior toward the Natural Environment,” 35–36.
- 65.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 19.
- 66.
Murphey, “Asian Perspectives of and Behavior toward the Natural Environment,” 55–56.
- 67.
Smil, “China’s Environment: Resilient Myths and Contradictory Realities,” 174, 180.
- 68.
Snyder, The Great Clod, xv–xviii.
- 69.
Nixon, Slow Violence, 6–10.
- 70.
Ibid., ix–x.
- 71.
Ibid., 26.
- 72.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 7, 26.
- 73.
Ibid., 5.
- 74.
Ibid., 15–16.
- 75.
Nixon, Slow Violence, 100. Stegner’s novel was first serialized in the company magazine Aramco World, published as a book in Beirut in 1971, and made available in the US by Selwa Press in 2007. On the controversy surrounding its publication, see Thompson, “Was This ‘Discovery!’ Meant to Be Found?”
- 76.
Nixon, Slow Violence, 104, 107. See also Amnesty International, A Criminal Enterprise.
- 77.
Thornber, Ecoambiguity, 21.
- 78.
See Thornber, “Literature, Asia, and the Anthropocene” and Thornber, “Wolf Totem and Nature Writing,” 892–894.
- 79.
Thornber, “Literature, Asia, and the Anthropocene,” 989.
- 80.
As quoted in Marks, China, 159. See Chao, Man and Land in Chinese History.
- 81.
Qu and Li, Population and the Environment in China, 174–175.
- 82.
See Mallory, China: Land of Famine and Li, Fighting Famine in North China.
- 83.
In 1957, the economist Ma Yinchu presented a study on controlling China’s population, which was eventually labeled “Malthusian” by the Chinese Communist Party. Ma was forced to resign his official posts and withdrew from public life until his rehabilitation in 1979. See Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature, 39–45.
- 84.
Guo, Complete Works, 3:251. See also Sun, “War against the Earth.”
- 85.
Marks, China, 312, 378–379n11. See Smil, The Bad Earth; Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature; and Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine.
- 86.
Wilcke, “Kellogg to Build 8 Plants in China.”
- 87.
Smil, China’s Past, China’s Future, 115–116.
- 88.
On renewable energy in China, see Lewis, Green Innovations in China and Tilt, Dams and Development in China.
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Tong, C.K. (2019). The Paradox of China’s Sustainability. In: Chang, Cj. (eds) Chinese Environmental Humanities. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18634-0_11
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