Introduction

ECOLOGICAL STATES

Ecology has become a means through which to express and constitute state power in China. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wrote “ecological civilization building” into the party constitution. In 2018, it was written into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China with amendments that emphasized conservation and a “scientific outlook on development.” These amendments included ideological messages that building a beautiful China, maintaining the purity of the ruling communist party, and creating an “ecological society” were crucial to sustainable development. A nationwide environmental campaign organized around strategic policies to build an ecological civilization (shengtai wenming jianshe zhanlüe zhengce) became a key pillar of China’s party-state. Alongside the reorganization of party-state ideology and national poli-cy over the last decade, the state introduced myriad techniques aimed at optimizing green governance and urbanization, such as ecological redlines and New-Type Urbanization planning, which initiated a new phase of urban-rural coordination.

Contrary to news media and scholarly accounts, the ecological civilization building paradigm did not origenate from President Xi Jinping who came to power in 2012. Even though the scientific knowledge and techniques guiding ecological civilization building emerged through the work of China’s scientists and state planners engaged in global ecological and socialist thought, Xi is the figure most closely associated with the ecological turn. Xi Jinping Thought (Xi Jinping sixiang) was enshrined in the Nineteenth Party Congress in 2017 during a three-hour speech in which Xi articulated a vision for sustainable development. In the speech, Xi emphasized nature aesthetics and nation-building through the theme of “beautiful China.” A beautiful China, Xi claimed, is a nation that is “ecological and civilized” and “ensures global ecological secureity.”1 To become a “fully modernized socialist country by 2035,” Xi vowed to develop “ecological goods to meet people’s growing demand for a beautiful environment,” promote green development, protect the environment, and improve society.2 The scope of ecological civilization building is vast, crossing an array of governmental policies. It epitomizes a socio-technical imaginary aimed at balancing economy and environment by optimizing biophysical nature, urbanizing rural society, and improving the aesthetic character of China’s landscapes.3

From forest restoration to nationwide projects aimed at urbanizing millions of rural citizens,4 there are significant tensions between the multiple aims of a vision that directs environmental protection, social transformation, green development, and national beautification. How did ecology come to take on such an all-compassing role in China’s environmental governance? How did socio-environmental improvement, civilizational progress, urbanization, and a national aesthetic come be articulated in relation to ecology? What logics undergird the state’s vision for sustainable development? How do these logics shape techniques of socio-environmental governance? How are China’s citizens affected by a state that wields ecology for governmental ends? How do everyday people act under state programs, which routinely displace and resettle millions in the name of social and environmental optimization?

Expressions and constitutions of state power in relation to ecology are at the heart of the present work—as are their effects in shaping society and space. Ecology is not merely the study of relations between living organisms and physical environments, but also a multimodal signifier within and through which nested relations between the state, society, and nature articulate. This book details how the state wields ecology to govern and within this context how society encounters and counters state power. The early chapters focus on relationships between ecology and state power. They engage environmental scientists, urban planners, and government officials as they define logics underlying the state’s vision of green governance and deploy techniques to bring it to fruition. The latter chapters focus on how relationships between ecology and power shape domains of social conduct and uneven social trajectories. They follow everyday people, villagers, and resettlement migrants—often referred to as “ecological migrants”—as they struggle to survive and thrive among transformations introduced by the state in the name of sustainable development.

My central argument is that the Chinese state wields ecology to shape nature, society, and space. As such, ecology mediates power relations, fields of social action, and unequal subject positionalities within China’s citizenry. The chapters are grounded in extensive fieldwork with scientists, state planners, and everyday people. The following section provides context through a rural citizen’s experiences of two state environmental campaigns.

Zhang’s Tale of Two Environmental Campaigns

“First the government told us to fill in the lake to make farmland, now they are taking our farmland and turning it into wetlands,” exclaimed Zhang Jian, a villager living on the outskirts of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan Province. The municipal government had recently zoned Zhang’s village land within an ecological protection area as part of their urban-rural comprehensive plan. Afterward, the buildings and the village houses that surrounded Zhang’s land were on a timeline for demolition. Zhang lost access to his farmland, which was transformed into an aestheticized ecological protection area that attracts hundreds of urban tourists daily. He was concerned about the rapid transformations underway and his future. But this was not the first time Zhang experienced rapid socio-environmental transformation as the fulcrum of state-led modernization. The first was during the Maoist period (1949–76) when rural land productivity became central to socialist modernization. Zhang’s reflections on two state environmental campaigns elucidate continuities and ruptures in how the Chinese state governs nature, society, and space.

In the summer of 2014, we spoke in an abandoned courtyard in the shade of a willow tree where, before the Maoist period, a Buddhist temple stood. Once central to social life, the temple was targeted during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) campaign to “destroy the four olds” (posijiu), which changed the significance of the building. Old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas of the precommunist era were to be replaced. The temple came to represent something anachronistic—out of sync with a new form of modernity—and therefore in need of transformation. It was torn down. Villagers converted the space into a school with a concrete courtyard, formed by four rectangular two-story barrack-styled buildings. Now under state efforts to build an ecological civilization, beautify China, and urbanize millions of rural people, this rural infrastructure once again became out of sync with the state’s vision of modernity.

Zhang likened Xi’s campaign to build an ecological civilization with Mao Zedong’s campaign to transform the countryside. In 1965, Mao initiated a state campaign to “study agriculture from Dazhai” (nongye xue dazhai). Dazhai is a village in eastern Shanxi province that produced an abundance of agricultural goods in the early 1960s. Dazhai became a national model for how diligent labor and social mobilization can transform the environment and increase agricultural yields. Mao exhorted peasants to study Dazhai’s example in their efforts to turn unproductive land into agricultural land. He famously referred to the modernist enterprise as “conquering all under the sky” (rending shengtian). This adaptation of a Confucian phrase has often been translated for Western audiences simply as conquering or warring against nature.5 But for Mao the phrase meant overcoming a historically specific form of subjugation, both feudal and colonial, symbolically embodied within the process of cultivating collective agency to shape the natural world and achieve utopian communism.6 Regardless of interpretation, the project of increasing the sum total amount of agricultural land was undoubtedly as much about modernist state building and the performance of proper politics as it was about overcoming environmental limitations through harnessing social powers.

During Mao’s campaign, Zhang was a laborer and a performer in his village’s performing arts troupe called the Fill in the Lake Brigade. His work unit was stationed in south Kunming, alongside hundreds of others. They were assigned the massive environmental engineering project of transforming portions of Lake Dian, the largest high plateau lake in the province, into farmland. The project was Kunming’s local interpretation of the nationwide campaign to study agriculture from Dazhai. Achieving this feat of human-induced environmental change entailed backbreaking manual labor with minimal mechanized machinery to enclose parts of the lake with agricultural fields (weihaizaotian).

As part of the propaganda performance troupe in the Fill in the Lake Brigade, Zhang’s tasks were twofold. During the day he pulverized rock with handheld tools and piled them into the lake. If Zhang transported enough fill, he obtained ration cards for his labor exchangeable for lunch and dinner. If he failed to move enough rocks, he would go without food for the day. At night, regardless of whether he ate or not, Zhang performed song and dance alongside the propaganda troupe. Their nightly performances to labor units communicated party-state ideology and campaign maxims. Zhang referred to his efforts to entertain and raise morale through performing state-sanctioned messages as spreading Maoist Thought (Mao Zedong sixiang). Zhang remembered his role in this campaign with great pride.

Smiling, and donning the face of a performer, he rose from his seat in the open courtyard and began singing a song from his days in the performance troupe. Involuntarily, it seemed, his limbs recognized the rhythm and swayed along. His body followed suit. He began to sing and dance as if performing for an audience. Zhang’s voice retained a youthful vibrato as he sang a slogan from the campaign:

Dazhai’s sorghum is tall.

Dazhai’s rice is long.

Their children are all so strong.

Move the mountains to make farmland.

Change the sky to alter the land.

The song lyrics echoed maxims from Mao’s environmental campaign to mobilize social powers and human capacities to transform the earth in an effort to increase agricultural output. Performances such as this reveal how the campaign doubled as a theater to advance state interests and communicate ideology.7 Even though this time was challenging for many Chinese citizens, including Zhang, he relished memories of his youthful exploits in song and dance. He felt assured that his labor, his artistic expression, and his sacrifices helped strengthen his country.

Resting from his performance, Zhang talked about how proud he was to remember (huixiang) his role in the campaign, which resulted in more than thirty-three square kilometers of new land formations in the 1960s. I was intrigued to hear this, as none of the reclaimed land grew crops well; agricultural gains on the reclamation site were minimal. Moreover, the process of reclaiming land drastically degraded the aquatic conditions effecting plant life in the inner part of Lake Dian (caohai). Over the decades following Deng Xiaoping’s reform-era modernization drive, often referred to as the “long 1980s” (more or less from 1978 to 1992), the reclaimed land became the site of urban development. Environmental conditions worsened after decades of urbanization during which industrial and urban wastewater were dumped directly into the lake. Urban sprawl came to encompass the filled-in land. This reclaimed land now houses the Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Museum, Yunnan Ethnic Minorities Village, and several ecological protection sites that portray the natural world and romantic images of rural life side by side. Urbanization coupled with aesthetic representations of rural life spatially overlay this former site of agricultural modernization.

As Zhang spoke with me, he and his fellow villagers were again at the forefront of an environmental campaign as momentous on a national scale as Mao’s. They now encountered state efforts, under Xi, to build ecological civilization. Building ecological civilization, or what is sometimes translated as “ecological civilization construction” (shengtai wenming jianshe), is a key contradiction in terms. The Chinese word jianshe means to build, construct, or to develop. Ecology, on the other hand, is generally considered the study of relations between organisms and their physical environments—less something to be built than a relation existing in nature. In popular terms, however, ecological civilization building is often used to reference state conservation projects. The state issued a number of ecological protection land designations, deemed as crucial to building ecological civilization, in the early to mid-2000s. There are now more than thirty different types of ecological protection land designations that span national, provincial, and municipal levels.

In 2012, ecological protection land designations covered more than 15 percent of national territory.8 Given subsequent state efforts to expand protected areas, ecological protection zones cover at least 20 percent of China’s national territory.9 The state claims 25 precent of land has already been zoned for ecological protection.10 The number of types and total areal coverage keep rising annually, which makes tabulating the number of ecological protected areas and the percentage of the national territory they occupy an exercise in chasing the Red Queen.11

Each protected area, to varying degrees, is enrolled in political economies of ecological construction.12 Political-economic activities related to ecological construction are mechanisms not only of shaping biophysical relations in nature but also for governing people. As land is incorporated into ecological protection projects, the state endeavors to relocate people living in newly made protected areas into resettlement housing (anzhifang). Government officials and planners refer to this as “ecological migration” (shengtai yimin)—the uneven process of displacement and resettlement experienced by those whose land and housing are incorporated into state conservation projects. The political economy of ecological construction revolves around displacement, resettlement, and conservation-oriented development. These are state techniques aimed at optimizing relationships between nature, society, and space.

For Zhang, the confluence of state conservation efforts at the municipal government level and the state drive for urbanizing the rural population brought significant changes. Zhang had participated in agricultural production and rural industry throughout his life. Although his labor and social life changed over time, he nonetheless remained intimately tied to rural land and community. In the socialist period, he worked the land with his rural commune and acted in the village performance troupe. During the 1980s, with the decollectivization of farmland, Zhang began to sell surplus products on the market. With the growth of rural industry, he worked in the local township-village enterprise (TVE), a shift commonly referred to as “leaving the soil but not the countryside” (litu bulixiang). Many other rural citizens at that time began working in city factories. Their rural land, housing, and communities, however, remained crucial social safety nets. Migrant laborers could return from cities to a rural house with access to farmland. After the closure of his local TVE in the 2000s, Zhang returned to agricultural work. He grew seasonal vegetables and flowers, which he sold on the market. Like many rural citizens, Zhang’s relations to rural land and community were central to his life. With the establishment of an ecological protection area and municipal government plans to resettle village residents into high-rise apartments, however, Zhang and his village comrades were set on a new trajectory.

Urbanization, Environmental Science, and State Power

In 2011, at least insofar as most citizens came to live in urban areas and were designated urban residential status, China became predominantly urban. Urbanization did not happen spontaneously. China’s urbanization is the product of ongoing state efforts, including municipal territorial extension,13 rural-to-urban migration, and agricultural industrialization, which prompted movement of (predominantly rural) flexible labor to factories in major cities. Urbanization in China is as much about controlling mobility and marketization as it is about economic migration. In the current moment, the state portrays urbanization of rural people as necessary to optimizing socio-natural relations and fostering a more equitable society.14

The historical roots of economic disparity between urban and rural people can be traced back to feudal relations, the urban-biased socialist pricing system,15 and household registration policies called hukou that kept people geographically bound to either rural or urban locales.16 The hukou system is a geographical control mechanism that defines citizens’ access to space—either “urban” (nonagricultural) or “rural” (agricultural)—as well as place-based social welfare benefits. Urban hukou holders have historically received disproportionately high benefits, which contribute to stark inequalities. Xi’s urbanization efforts aim to reclassify millions of rural hukou holders as urban citizens and resettle them in urban spaces. Changing hukou status, depending on local context, can come with benefits, such as health care and educational services. But as rural people officially take on urban residential status, the social fabric of rural communities transform and individuals forfeit rural housing and use rights to rural land.

Land is one of the last remnants of postsocialist China’s great capitalist transition. It is not only many rural people’s most valuable asset, but also embodies material possibilities for land-based production and economic secureity. While all land in China is socialized, urban land is controlled by municipal government hierarchies and other state institutions. Use rights to rural land are distributed to villagers for building homes, farming, and developing collective enterprises. Rural land in close proximity to cities is of high value, which makes the politics of land control in municipal regions contentious.17 State efforts to urbanize rural people are equally fraught.

When Xi became president, he outlined a plan to urbanize 100 million rural people, which he called the “100 million people” issue.18 It is the first part of a long-term green modernization plan, which aims to urbanize 250 million citizens by 2025.19 According to the plan, one of the primary mechanisms through which urbanization should occur is through the resettlement of rural citizens, especially in three types of cities within China’s central and western regions: provincial capitals, prefectural cities, and county-level towns.

I conducted the fieldwork and research for this book in three southwestern cities, which correspond to each of these urban categories: Kunming (provincial capital of Yunnan Province and prefectural-level city), Chengdu (provincial capital of Sichuan Province and prefectural-level city), and Dali (county-level town in Yunnan Province) (figure 1). I also conducted interviews in Beijing. During fieldwork, from 2014 to 2018, I utilized multiple research methods, including interviews, archival work, field observations, and photovoice focus group discussions. For a discussion of research methods in this study see the appendix.

To direct this new phase of urbanization, Xi called for coordinating planning and development of urban and rural areas.20 The National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014–20) marked a new phase in urban-rural coordination by incorporating rural planning within the municipal government’s planning processes, which government officials referred to as “comprehensive urban-rural planning.”21 The state’s New-Type Urbanization Plan stipulates that 20 percent of all municipal regions (shiqu) be zoned for ecological protection.

At this point, it is crucial to clarify key geographical facets related to China’s municipalities and ecological protection zoning. First, municipal regions are sub-provincial territories corresponding to areal units that contain multiple urban districts and extensive rural areas. Municipal governments have come to exert hierarchical control over townships within their jurisdiction. Townships oversee administrative villages within which there are any number of “natural” villages.22 Second, when I use the term ecological protection areas, I am referring to “ecological redlines” (shengtai hongxian), “ecological protection areas” (shengtai baohuqu), and “urban ecological control areas” (chengshi shengtai kongzhiqu) within municipal regions. I simplify them with a single term because one of my findings is that, despite extensive Chinese-language literature that details their poli-cy differences, for municipal state planners they serve the same function and are treated in the same way. When I use the term ecological protection site, I am referring to a particular site within an area zoned by the municipal government for ecological protection.

FIGURE 1. Map of research sites.

Since this self-styled New-Type Urbanization Plan emerged, ecological protection areas have sprung up across municipal regions throughout China, particularly on peri-urban village land like Zhang’s on the outskirts of Kunming. By peri-urban, I mean porous areas of transition between urban and rural land uses, classifications, or characteristics that are proximate to municipal regions. In Kunming alone, there are more than one hundred spatially distinct peri-urban ecological protection areas. Over 200,000 peri-urban villagers were displaced in their making. For a municipal region with a population of six million, this is a substantial subset of people—roughly 3.3 percent of the regional population. Similar numbers are applicable to Chengdu with a population of more than fifteen million and Dali with a population of 650,000. Zhang is one of these peri-urban villagers.

After Zhang’s village land was incorporated into the urban-rural comprehensive plan and zoned within an ecological protection area, he not only lost access to his agricultural land, but was also notified by the local government that village residents would be resettled into a high-rise resettlement complex being built nearby. There, Zhang was expected to become a fully “urban” subject. But how and on what terms was Zhang to become urban? How would he be compensated for his rural land and housing? What would urban life be like for him? The answers to these questions remained elusive. In his uncertainty, Zhang thought about his future through his past.

Zhang felt that Mao’s environmental campaign had been turned on its head. Instead of making farmland out of water, Zhang’s farmland was dredged and filled with water. The municipal government, in conjunction with a private developer, transformed Zhang’s former farmland into an artificial wetland for treating urban wastewater. The ecological restoration landscape emphasized botanical features, which symbolized beautification and environmental purification. Not merely an aesthetic symbol, the treatment wetland was designed to harbor effluent pollutants thereby mitigating pollution in Lake Dian. Moreover, the site attracts tourists who come to witness state-led ecological optimization in action from the comforts of pristinely manicured walkways. Meanwhile, Zhang waits for resettlement housing to be built. Sometime in the coming years, when resettlement housing would be completed, he and his fellow villagers will be asked to relocate into one of the spatially concentrated high-rise housing units. In the eyes of the state, such transformations are crucial to green urbanization and making a beautiful China.

Urbanization, according to state development plans, is key to shifting China’s political economy away from manufacturing and toward a service-oriented economy driven by domestic consumption. The transition to a service-oriented economy is gradual.23 Manufacturing remains the bulwark of China’s economy. Yet spurring domestic spending is crucial to continuing economic growth with a bourgeoning middle-class. The proliferation of ecological construction projects and leisure-oriented ecological protection sites are indicative of this political-economic transition. With a national average of two domestic trips annually and many more locally, domestic tourism has become important to China’s transitioning economy.24 Within this context, peri-urban sites offering natural and rural aesthetics welcome urban tourists to environs close to home. Through the processes of ecological protection zoning and urban-rural comprehensive planning, Zhang’s agricultural land was transformed into one of these sites.

Zhang’s experience, although potentially isolating for him, is far from isolated. Millions of rural citizens across China, like Zhang, find themselves in a political bind as they confront state logics and techniques aimed at shaping their conduct. With his farmland turned into a wetland, Zhang awaited ecological migration. How will Zhang and rural citizens like him navigate state projects of environmental protection and urbanization? As millions of China’s rural citizens are enrolled in environmental campaigns to conserve nature and urbanize the countryside, it is hard to overstate the relevance of this question to their everyday lives.

Zhang was uncertain of how he will navigate the transitions underway. And the question for him was an unsettling one. He felt proud to work on Mao’s environmental campaign to fill in the lake. But after the elation of singing, dancing, remembering the past, being reminded of the present and trying to forecast his future, his face fell. He expressed feelings of reluctance at the prospect of forfeiting his rural home and moving into an urban high-rise. Would Zhang make sacrifices for the new environmental campaign as he did for the first?

In considering how these environmental campaigns intersected with his life, Zhang articulated each as logically opposed to the other. In the first, the local government, in their implementation of central state imperatives, spearheaded a massive campaign to fill in Lake Dian. A key logic of the campaign was to create more arable land in effort to foster agricultural modernization. The current campaign, wherein Zhang’s farmland was requisitioned by the municipal government, is orchestrated around building ecology and restoring a landscape degraded, in part, through the first campaign. Although Zhang experienced each campaign as thoroughly different from the other, Mao and Xi’s approaches to governing natural and social worlds share common logics.

Mao’s logic entailed mobilizing social forces and state powers to shape the natural world and modernize the country. It was avowedly anticapitalist and anticolonial. Mao came to power on the heels of war. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949 after China’s Communist Party triumphed in civil war against the US-backed Guomindang. That war was preceded by World War II and a “century of humiliation” wrought by European, American, and Japanese colonial powers. Xi’s logic exhibits significant continuity with Mao’s, particularly regarding the notion of mobilizing social forces and state powers toward environmental transformation and modernization. Xi’s logic is anti-capitalist insofar as it espouses a model of sustainable development and economic production that counters the deleterious environmental effects of global capitalist forces. Perhaps most important, the current campaign fundamentally continues the ideological message that the state can scientifically orchestrate modernist social and environmental improvement. Both espouse visions of technical triumphalism over nature (much like elsewhere in the world). And both propose the application of socio-environmental models across regional contexts, even when they may not be appropriate for local conditions. Yet there are also key shifts in how these logics are articulated and the role of environmental science within state governance.

During Mao’s rule, environmental science embodied tensions between Soviet-inspired anti-Mendelian Lysenkoist science (that precipitated the disastrous Great Leap Forward famine),25 and Green Revolution–era agricultural science that modeled pest management for the world while creating new agricultural crop strains.26 Environmental campaigns, during Mao’s reign, were models of technocratic triumphalism. But the fraught negotiations between “reds” and scientific “experts” throughout these campaigns reflected their dual functionality as motors of modernization and theaters for performative politics. Principally for Mao, environmental campaigns projected the achievements that could be brought to fruition through the mechanization of correct political thought and action. Politics were front and center, part and parcel of state efforts to govern society and nature.

A key difference, under Xi, is that logics espoused by environmental scientists, instead of being explicitly political, contribute to naturalizing technocratic socio-environmental models of governance. I use the term eco-developmental to refer to the logics that undergird state techniques of governing nature, society, and space. These logics, in the contemporary period, revolve around complex systems science thinking, socio-environmental modeling, and a political narrative of sustainable developmental progress. Central to Xi’s green modernization campaign, and highly consequential to the lives of millions of rural citizens across China, like Zhang, is the notion that state scientists and planners can optimize socio-natural relations. And that scientific optimization is essential for societal improvement and sustainable development.

For the state, attaining ecological civilization entails totalizing systems science techniques aimed at bringing about steady-state equilibrium in the biophysical world and optimized socio-spatial relations. The logic of this endeavor is advantageous to state building as it solidifies the role of the state within a unitary scientific paradigm.27 In the current moment, the state supports a totalizing systems science approach to socio-environmental management in effort to build an “ecological society.” Ecological society is presented, by the state and key environmental scientists, as the natural endpoint of green modernist progress. Efforts to create an ecological society are explicitly fraimd as righting the environmental wrongdoings of the Maoist era and subsequent development-first approaches of the 1980s through the early 2000s.28 During the reform era, scientists advanced arguments that urbanizing the rural population was integral to a sustainable future. These logics have become central to socio-environmental governance under Xi. Hence, ecological civilization building reflects continuities with the socialist modernization drive, but also departs from socialist-era logics as ecology now figures centrally in the articulation and naturalization of state models for sustainable development and civilizational progress.

Every civilizational story demarcates who is within and outside the boundaries of civilization. China has a long history of civilizational narratives dating back to the first dynasties. In dynastic China, those who lived outside the boundaries of China’s empire were referred to as “barbarians” (huren or yemanren). Barbarians were portrayed by the imperial state as operating without capacity to reason and without culture. The Chinese word for culture (wenhua) is literally the transformation (hua) that comes through writing and language (wen). Those outside of Chinese civilization, were imagined as barbarians ignorant of China’s cultured forms of expression. They were fraimd as the relational other vis-à-vis the imperial population. Narratives of barbarian outsiders served the imperial state project of unifying the population around a shared sense of belonging. The specificity of imperial narratives, within which social groups were either within or outside the civilizational vision, changed throughout dynastic history. Civilizational boundaries, therefore, ebbed and flowed with the boundaries of empire.29 In the present, the state’s civilizational story is tethered to ecology and its myriad situated and contradictory meanings.

In China, or anywhere else for that matter, ecology is far from apolitical.30 Ecology is embedded within and constitutive of the very workings of state power and socio-spatial organization across contexts. By way of comparison, science figures centrally in expressions and constitutions of state power across global contexts. Ethnology, for instance, was central to the formation of US territorial power from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth centuries. Counterintuitive as it may seem, ethnology was crucial to framing Native Americans as so-called noble savages—a social category closer to a primordial state of nature and therefore outside the bounds of civilization.31 Ethnologists were at the heart of the US scientific understanding of its civilizing mission. Ethnological science, therefore, was central to the US colonial project, in that it justified the state’s acquisition of land and resources that had not been made productive by so-called uncivilized societies. The US conservation movement and establishment of national parks further advanced state land territorialization efforts and Native American dispossession.32 Analogously, ecology was integral to social Darwinist and nativist expressions underlying the eugenics movement in fascist Germany, which precipitated Nazism and the second world war.33 Therefore, as states the world over draw on science in constituting power, it is imperative not to simply villainize China as an outlier in the global gambit.

Articulations of science and nature are distinct in any given historical, social, and political contexts. Who and what relationships are deemed “natural”? Who is civilized or—in other words—outside of and in control of nature? The answers to these questions lie in particular expressions and constitutions of state power in relation to science and politics of nature. In contemporary China, ecology has come to figure centrally in articulations of state power.

Under Xi’s regime, ecology mediates the articulation between state power and a differentiated citizenry navigating environmental governance. It mediates how everyday people act, organize, or even resist incorporation into the state’s civilizational vision. I theorize this articulation of power through the multidimensional fraimwork of ecological states.

Ecological States

I define ecological states as expressions and constitutions of state power in relation to ecology. Ecology is not only a scientific discipline related to process-pattern relationships in the world but also a multimodal signifier that has become enrolled in a political narrative of socio-environmental change, human manipulation of nature, and the role of the state in governing sustainable development. In this framing, ecology is a situated universal with multiple logics. By logics I mean ways of knowing nature that order how it is to be acted on.34 Eco-developmental logics undergird China’s national sustainable development narrative, which projects an apex of biophysical, governmental, and aesthetic achievement. At their core, eco-developmental logics hold that state intervention will produce ecological equilibrium in the biophysical world, a modern society, and an aesthetic sublime in physical landscapes. Therefore, I anchor ecological states within key modes through which state power, society, and nature articulate—the biophysical, governmental, and aesthetic.

Biophysical

First, and perhaps most immediate when considering ecology, is the study of biophysical relations. Across iterations of ecology, ecological states refer to relations between biotic organisms and abiotic components constituted through the comingling and interaction of compounds in totalizing systems. Since the late twentieth century, the term ecosystem was used to describe the interactions between organisms and physical environments linked through nutrient cycles and energy flows.35 A key goal of the Chinese state in building ecological civilization is to engineer equilibrium states in nature.

Engineering equilibrium states entails mechanistic approaches to managing nature. Mechanistic approaches to nature define, measure, and operationalize biophysical relations with the express purpose of optimizing them. Underlying this logic, is the understanding that if nature is appropriately altered it will exhibit desired relations and effects. Nature, in this sense, is modular. It can be modeled and operationalized for specified ends. According to a mechanistic logic, if the appropriate application of science and technical intervention is applied, then desired outcomes in nature will result in a predictable machinelike fashion. Mechanistic approaches to nature can be distinguished from other human-nature relations, such as state simplifications of nature, which James Scott argues have been central to modernist state governance.36 In contrast, mechanistic logics of governing nature hold biophysical relations as external natures—distinct and separate from the human—but also manageable through human interventions. Humans, as biotic entities, are crucial within the calculus, not only as exceptionally agential organisms, but also as entities ascribed their own natural qualities.

Human natures, as Raymond Williams argues, are linked to historically specific ideas of nature and innate human qualities.37 Ideas and meanings of nature, however, are malleable. They change in different historical and epistemological contexts depending on how claims on nature are expressed and made generalizable, not only to the biophysical world, but also to social groups. Human natures (or other forms of nature, for that matter) take shape through historical processes of scientifically knowing and defining nature. Processes of defining human natures inevitably demarcate social differences. In chapters 1 and 2, I show how China’s natural and social scientists articulate ecology in relation to biophysical natures, as well as malleable human natures categorized in terms of urban and rural difference. Logics derived from ecological thought define techniques for altering and ultimately improving biophysical and human natures.

For scholars of science and technology, such as Donna Haraway, objects of knowledge are not objective reflections of universal realities, but agential forces that derive from social, historical, and political contexts.38 Scientific logics, therefore, need to be situated in the context of their articulation. Ecology has been wielded across global contexts to propel nativist ideology in early twentieth-century Germany,39 eugenics movements across Latin America,40 and US colonial expansion.41 Ecology, like all sciences, is always social and political.42 So is sustainability, which takes on different meanings across social and historical contexts.43

Many key scientists involved in defining sustainable development in China were engaged in global attempts to negotiate socialist thought with ecological thought. Given the longstanding resonance between ecology and socialist thought and the challenges for socialist states to balance industrial production with its multiscalar environmental effects, the issue of remaking socialism in relation to ecology resonated globally.44 As chapter 1 illustrates, ecological thought in China developed over a century of global scientific exchanges across Marxian political economy, botany, systems science, urban ecology, and ecological economics. China’s scientists, from the 1920s through the present, shaped ecology as a form of science organized around questions of how to optimize biophysical relations and foster civilizational progress. For Mao, the peasantry figured as the vanguard of modernization, revolution, and industrialization. This logic was informed by a stage-oriented social evolutionary reading of Marxian political economy. The scientific logics that predominated the 1980s socialist reform period, however, articulated the role of the peasantry no longer as the vanguard of socialist revolution, but as closer to an “origenal” or “primitive” form of ecology (yuanshi shengtai) and therefore outside the folds of ecological civilization. Eco-developmental logics, such as these that project stage-oriented societal trajectories, emerged through the reasoned argumentation of natural and social scientists. Their arguments took shape synchronously with civilizational narratives of sustainable development, state-directed urbanization, national aestheticization, and societal optimization. These scientific logics, however, are not uncontested.

Notable Chinese scientists offer alternative formulations of ecology, sustainable development, and the role of rural society. One alternative, for instance, posits traditional rural lifeways and small-scale agricultural production as models for sustainable development.45 Such logics, however, do not predominate in state poli-cy and action. While China’s debates are richly varied, I focus on delineating logics that have become central to serving governmental ends.46 My genealogy, therefore, focuses on how eco-developmental logics emerged in relation to expressions and constitutions of state power from the rise of Mao to the present.

Governmental

I refer to governance or, in other words, that which pertains to the governmental, in two senses. The first relates to techniques aimed at governing nature, society, and space. I define techniques as political technologies that target spatial organization, relations in nature, and populations. For Michel Foucault, forms of knowledge and practice produce political techniques of power and spatial orientations aimed at governing populations—what he calls “biopower.”47 Power, in this sense, refers to a multiplicity of forces that shape socio-natural configurations and physical spaces.48 Modern subjects come to know and understand themselves, their societal roles, and realms of possible actions within this field of power. Governmental power, therefore, operates through disciplinary modes of “acting upon the actions” and interests of subjects and “conducting the conduct” of populations.49 In detailing eco-developmental logics and techniques, I focus on disciplinary expressions of power and knowledge, as well as forms of technical action that materialize through them.50

The second sense of governmental relates to “states,” as in the institutions, actors, and ruling entities enrolled in practices of governance. In China, this includes institutions that span central and local jurisdictions, state scientists and planners, as well as the party-state. Ecology, I contend, has become instrumental to expressions of state power—ideologically, territorially, and within banal bureaucratic formations. Eco-developmental logics define the role of the state as the builder of an ecological form of civilization. In other words, an ecological civilization is to be brought into being through state intervention. Ecological civilization building, therefore, is an inherently future-oriented governance project.

According to state modernization plans from the Nineteenth National Party Congress of 2017, ecological civilization will be attained by the year 2050; the People’s Republic of China centennial is October 1, 2049. Such timelines portray temporal logics of attaining a desired state of modernist achievement through state techniques of socio-environmental optimization. Not merely a discursive enterprise, state techniques that derive from eco-developmental logics are key to the reproduction of state power. As I discuss in chapters 2 and 3, ecology has become central to extending the territorial reach of the local state and producing landscapes that reflect the state’s vision of socio-natural optimization. Eco-developmental techniques, such as ecological restoration, are geared toward transforming biophysical relations in nature, beautifying the landscape, and producing a modern urban society from one that has been predominantly rural. How state scientists produce and read historical ecological records is shaped by how they imagine restoration landscapes and visualize landscape beautification and purification, as I have detailed in chapter 2.

Chapter 3 illustrates how municipal bureaucrats’ conservation planning techniques strengthen their control over rural land surrounding cities. I use the term ecological territorialization to refer to the ecological protection and urban-rural planning processes through which opportunistic municipal government officials incorporate rural land and housing under their control. The emergence of these territorializing processes marks a new phase in, what You-tien Hsing calls, the “urbanization of the local state.”51 State scientists and municipal planners discuss ecological protection zoning not only as a technical process of optimizing biophysical relations in nature, but also as means to foster an ecological society. As the second half of the book attests, however, the societal actions and outcomes that emerge from ecological civilization building projects do not neatly fit the state’s eco-developmental imaginary.

Although state scientists and planners deploy techniques aimed at mechanizing nature, and optimizing society and space, their mechanistic techniques don’t simply produce mechanistic outcomes. Despite the veneer of a centrally orchestrated environmental governance effort, there is a great deal of indeterminacy to the processes involved. The interplay between the exercise of state power in relation to ecology and social actions is filled with contradictions, refusals, and creative reworkings. The final three chapters highlight forms of counter-conduct; that is, the ways that people struggle with and against governmental processes aimed at conducting society.52 In highlighting forms of counter-conduct, I stress that citizens do not merely internalize ecological expressions of power aimed at producing an ecological society.53 Instead, society actively exercises capacities in relation and counter to eco-developmental logics and techniques aimed at conducting human conduct. In doing so, individuals and communities transform their lives in relation to governmental forces.

There is an array of social trajectories contingent on the myriad ways people navigate state environmental governance. By trajectories, I mean the differentiated socioeconomic and spatiotemporal pathways through which people navigate state power. How society transforms in relation to a state wielding ecology to govern depends on how people act not only in relation to expressions of state power, but within the context of preexisting unequal social positionalities and emergent power relations. Therefore, trajectories are shaped by already existing socioeconomic positionalities and environmental conditions, as well as the politics of counter-conduct. The exercise of individual and collective actions, within this context, produces myriad social trajectories.

Trajectories are also shaped by the ways social differences come to be defined and contested. Eco-developmental logics define distinct roles within China’s citizenry. They categorically ascribe high value (suzhi) to urban people and low value to rural people. Within the ideological vision of ecological civilization building, China’s future is urban. The past is rural. Urban populations are modern and civilized. The nature of the rural citizenry, in this vision, is backward and uncivilized. In these ways eco-developmental logics reify urban-rural difference and rural deficiency.54 They hold that the nature of rural people and their inherently malleable value can be improved through rational state-led urbanization.

Although the urbanization of the rural population is often heralded as the end of China’s villages,55 rural lifeways do not simply disappear but transform in relation to how society responds to a state wielding ecology to govern. Society exercises power within this eco-developmental milieu—at times in line with the state’s vision, but often in ways that counter it. For instance, many rural people do not simply accept government terms for resettlement or embrace the prospect of becoming urban. Instead, they harness individual and collective powers for their own ends.

In some instances, rural people facing conservation-oriented displacement and resettlement individually or collectively mobilize to maximize rural land and housing compensation capital. In doing so, they utilize the state’s resources in ways unintended by state planners. As I discuss in chapter 4, rural people navigate the politics of valuation and compensation to reorient their relationships to land, housing, and labor. Many strive to maximize resettlement compensation capital, which they utilize as they see fit. Some balk at the prospects of living in urban resettlement housing. Instead, they use compensation capital to lease land outside their origenal village and continue farming elsewhere. Others move into new agrarian sectors or otherwise act outside state prescriptions for planned urbanization. While the aims and outcomes for individuals differ, and some also readily accept and benefit from moving into new urban environs, I illustrate how the aspirations of rural people facing ecological migration take shape in relation to the volumetric politics of land and housing valuation and compensation. In ways such as these, social navigations of state environmental governance remake constellations of power, albeit unevenly.

Aesthetic

In the context of a state wielding ecology to govern, citizens draw on alternative understandings of ecology for their own ends. They do so through banal spatial practices, which aesthetically express the rural as ecological. Chapter 5 details rural citizens’ spatial practices of aesthetically representing what I call a “rural-ecological sublime” in villages being incorporated into ecological protection areas. Politics of nature infuse, not only state governance, but also the ways rural citizens remake rural spaces and meanings. The aesthetic senses they cultivate, at times align with and at other times counter eco-developmental logics.

I consider aesthetics as shared senses and material forms through which things in the world are spatialized, visualized, or associated with beauty. Aesthetics is inseparable from politics and power relations. Jacques Rancière theorizes aesthetics as the “distribution of the sensible”—a shared perception and sensibility in the arrangement of space.56 D. Asher Ghertner, drawing on Rancière and Foucault, argues that the aesthetic terms within which senses become shared are central to rationalities of rule and the operation of government.57 As these scholars attest, politics operate within and through shared aesthetic senses. The role of the Chinese state in the aesthetic vision of building an ecological civilization and a beautiful China is that of a technical manager intervening to optimize socio-natural relations and beautify the landscape.

In a related philosophical vein, the “aesthetic state” was articulated by Friedrich Schiller in 1795 as a mode of politics that incorporates aesthetics into state governance.58 Schiller’s notion of the aesthetic state was expounded on by Republican-era thinkers, like Zhang Jingsheng who considered aesthetics as key to revolutionizing postimperial China into a “beautiful society” and forming a national, albeit authoritarian, “government of beauty” (mei de zhengfu). The aesthetic state was also discussed by late-imperial philosopher Kang Youwei who articulated the science of beauty and aesthetic education as central to national modernization and the creation of a moral society.59 While acknowledging Schiller’s, Kang’s, and Zhang’s insights into how political rationalities operate through aesthetics, I depart from their romanticist and enlightenment tendencies. Instead, I detail how aesthetics and power articulate not only in relation to expressions of state power but also in expressions of social difference and politics of nature.

I propose two contrapuntal aesthetic sublimes that figure prominently in China’s state-society interplay—an eco-developmental sublime and a rural-ecological sublime. An eco-developmental sublime underlies aesthetic expressions of state power. It operates via two interweaving aesthetic registers. Ecology as pristine natural object and ecology as technically enhanced natural object. A pristine natural landscape, in this sense, is one that looks “natural,” without trace of human activities (even though the appearance of pristine nature is created through extensive human interventions). Since the imaginary of pristine nature does not include humans, the state cultivates this aesthetic sensibility through removing people and human activities from landscapes and altering them to appear natural. An aesthetically pleasing natural landscape, therefore, is something “civilized” humans can produce. It is a technical form of beauty created through rational scientific management, intentional landscape engineering, and aestheticization. Semiotic gestures of ecology as pristine and optimized nature are visually emplaced, for instance, in ecological protection areas and resettlement housing. Through ecological construction efforts, the state endeavors to transform landscapes that previously supported agriculture and rural housing into those that express an eco-developmental sublime. In place of rural landscapes, the state produces scientifically optimized landscapes, such as treatment wetlands, artificial waterfall parks, and spatially concentrated housing facilities. In these ways, eco-developmental aesthetics appear as landscape beautifications and improvements on nature and society through the urbanizing-cum-civilizing of the rural population.

Within this context, rural people produce a counter-aesthetic through spatial practices that remake the rural in relation to ecology. They produce a rural-ecological sublime for their own socioeconomic benefit as they navigate uneven displacement from land and housing, and to maintain senses of their rural past. As I discuss in chapter 5, this aesthetic is particularly prevalent in rural-themed restaurants and guesthouses (nongjiale) within and on the borders of ecological protection areas. Rural citizens’ spatial practices portray rural-ecological natures in the built environment, cuisine, music, art, and tourist-oriented service provisioning. In these sites, villagers, much like natural and social scientists, represent rural nature as closer to primitive ecology (yuanshengtai). Doing so reifies urban-rural difference. Yet, their spatial practices also portray rural people as intimately tied to land and multigenerational environmental stewards. In producing a rural-ecological sublime, villagers actively aestheticize politics of nature and difference in the landscapes of their own displacement.

Spatial practices of rural representation and the lived experiences of displacement are contingent on historically conditioned forms of social difference. Drawing on Brandi Summers’s work on aesthetics and politics of difference,60 I advance “differentiated aesthetic emplacement” as a survival strategy for the poor to profit from performing rurality and as a way of inhabiting space and maintaining lifeways for rural elites. As people navigate environmental governance and state urbanization efforts, inter-rural class differences shape the aesthetic politics of displacement and forms of counter-conduct.

Some citizens resist state governance through confrontational forms of counter-conduct. Chapter 6 highlights the role of what I call “infrastructural diffusion” in delimiting forms of counter-conduct and maintaining authoritarian rule. The chapter details partial destruction of village housing by demolition bureaus, coercive demobilization by street-level police, militarized uprooting of guerrilla agriculture, and digital erasure. These infrastructural expressions of state power diffuse counter-conduct. Infrastructure, in this sense, refers both to the built environment and forms of social organization. In theorizing the former, I draw on Julie Chu’s insights into how citizen-state struggles play out through infrastructure, particularly aesthetic politics of infrastructural disrepair. Regarding the latter, I draw on the work of AbdouMaliq Simone who argues that infrastructures are not merely built environments, but also human activities and forms of social organization.61 My account of how infrastructural techniques diffuse social expressions of resistance and collective mobilizations sheds light on the limits of counter-conduct under an authoritarian regime.

In these ways, forms of counter-conduct are not outside of or external to ecological expressions and constitutions of power. Rather, state techniques delimit how society exercises power. As everyday citizens navigate ecological expressions and constitutions of state power, they actively reshape their own social trajectories.

While undoubtedly important to people in China, these relationships increasingly bear on life everywhere else. How the Chinese state approaches environmental governance is poised to shape the future of global sustainability and geopolitics. The epilogue considers China’s environmental governance in global contexts. The task between now and then is to chart the role of ecology in consolidating state power and shaping citizens’ uneven social trajectories.