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esse Rodenbiker’s book Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China brings into conversation two threads of scholarly work – one on capitalist urbanization and the other on ecological governance – with a focus on how the Chinese state has reified and expanded its territorial power. SinceChina’s economic reform in 1979, rapid urbanization has penetrated and impacted almost all non-economic spheres of society and the built environment, manifesting in large-scale urban redevelopment, demolition, displacement, and the more recent hukou reform that attempts to convert villagers to urban residents (shimin) while yoking this “urbanization of people” process to intensified land development in the countryside. Rodenbiker has now brought to the forefront, through rich ethnographic work and nuanced theoretical engagement, another crucial aspect of this state-led process of urban transformation: China’s ecological turn. Globally, municipal and state entrepreneurialism has deepened the treatment of land as a source of money. EcologicalStates shows that, under Xi Jinping’s construction of an ecological civilization, acquisitive urbanism and state power expansion go hand in hand.

I find Rodenbiker’s investigation of China’s“mechanistic approach” (189) to ecological protection and urban planning stimulating and insightful. Urban planning, the field that is my primary home of intellectual and professional life, is often about the urban future. A major portion of any planning curriculum is devoted to technical training in plan making, visionary mapping, and rule setting, skills with which students invoke and mainstream a different, and supposedly improved, urban future. What is rarely examined, however, is how easily the worldview of planners can become part of normalization technologies by the powerful and the hegemonic under which the diversity and plurality of ways of life, labor participation, market relations, and sociopolitical rights are reduced and dismantled. By detailing the techniques that state planners employ to future proof China’s worldview of “how nature should be acted on,” the book presents a convincing case of how ecological territorialization has become the latest mode of municipal state territoriality in China.

Rodenbiker analyzes the idiosyncrasies ofChina’s eco-development logic with the aim of developing a higher-level conceptualization of the co-constitutive relationship between planning techniques, the operationalization and normalization of capitalist land development, and the subordination of the social to state-led capitalist urbanization elsewhere that can apply elsewhere in the world. As a reader, it is stimulating to see how a supposedly uniquely Chinese state-led process is, in fact, strangely similar to other urban transformations found globally. In the remainder of my review, I highlight two aspects of Ecological States that demonstrate these global resonances and why non-China specialists should read this book.  

In Chapter Three, we learn that the demarcation of Lake Dali as an ecological zone is part of a larger campaign of scientific “spatial optimization” (kongjian youhua). In the 1990s, zoning techniques allowed economic planners of central and local governments to demarcate certain areas as zones of exception where civil rights, labor rules, land use regulations, and even certain state powers were bent and sometimes removed to tempt global capital and corporate investments. This is an important mechanism through which China inserted itself into the global capitalist market after the 1979 economic reform. Now, ecological zoning has emerged as a new urban planning technique that municipal planners have at their disposal. Used in conjunction with zoning is another planning technique, called “merging multiple forms of planning into one” (duoguiheyi), or, as it is commonly termed, “governing the entire city with one map” (quanshiyizhangtu).

What this hyper-comprehensive, Euclidean, and top-down planning does is map out certain land uses and lived experiences as illegitimate, wasteful, and backward while normalizing and futureproofing others into reality. “Merging multiple forms of planning into one” is also a concept and practice of scientism, but not of scientific experimentation. It does not allow for trials and errors, messy conditions, and democratic deliberation. It creates a politics of zoning in the name of ecological protection and green urbanism that then reduces difficult and power-laden questions about growth, progress, displacement, ecological migration, and uneven trade-offs as technologically solvable problems. 

Prying open the politics and consequences of scientism is crucial to planning and environmental education. Expert-led, rule-based planning is commonplace globally. Rodenbiker has convincingly shown how China’s mechanistic approach to governing nature has enabled it to deploy its urban development spectacles to reify Chinese-style planning. It is easy and politically tempting to disaggregate and disassemble Chinese planning into discrete practices and technical lessons that can then be exported globally to create equally uneven, problematic, development-induced displacement and dispossession along the way. This is the normalization of the ecological state on a global scale.  

Another insightful discussion in Chapter Four sheds light on how valuation techniques of land and housing compensation have led to the dismantling of rural sociality. China’s eco-developmental logics, on the one hand, mechanistically prescribe how nature should be acted on; on the other hand, they make villagers affected by ecological zoning act calculatively within the valuation framework that further perpetuates the same eco-developmental logics.

Chapter Four specifically details how volumetric valuation techniques work, including through a discussion of the calculative mindset that China’s eco-developmental logics actively cultivate among people. Villagers can negotiate sky fees (tiankongfei) for unbuilt vertical living space; subsurface housing fees (dipifei) that are compensation for the land that a house sits on; as well as transition fees (guodufei),which are housing subsidies before villagers move into permanent resettlement housing. What is useful about breaking down volumetric valuation to vertical, horizontal, and temporal modalities is that it demonstrates just how calculative, individualistic, and entrepreneurial villagers need to make themselves in order to successfully navigate the usually years-long resettlement process. For example, Mr. Zhang, who navigated the politics of compensation well and accumulated bountifully through displacement, said, “I don’t have a care in the world, I'm set for life” (119). This quote strikes me as a sign of the villagers’ aspiration to “move into riches” by being savvy actors in the politics of volumetric valuation. But this is not a game that everyone can play to their advantage. Many villagers ended up moving not into riches but down into impoverishment, as Chapters Four and Five detail ethnographically.

 If “merging multiple forms of planning into one” is not absolute enough, now volumetric politics can further deflect challenging questions about zoning, resettlement, and the engineered process of peri-urban transformation into pecuniary discussions about compensation. The politics of China’s ecological turn and its material, socio-spatial impacts on the ground are captured when Rodenbiker writes, “rural life and rural spaces didn’t simply disappear in the wake of ecological protection zoning and state efforts to urbanize rural people. Instead, volumetric politics of valuation and compensation are key to urban-rural transformational processes that include the reorganization of labor, livelihoods, and built environments. Rural spaces take on exchange value and new material forms in relation to what they once were, how they are valuated, and how rural people politically mobilize and utilize compensation capital” (128). I find this dismantling of rural sociality the most insidious and penetrating effect of China’s ecological turn. And I wonder if it is even possible to rethink and imagine a different politics of land and urban future in China, and if so, where and how to locate it.

Mi Shih is an Associate Professor at the EdwardJ. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.

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