I

wrote a brief blurb that appears on the back cover of Jesse Rodenbiker’s Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China, and it’s a pleasure to re-engage with the thought-provoking book in this forum.  Here, I mainly reflect on a few ways the book sheds light on and provokes new questions about what I have encountered in my own research related to ecology and state power in China.

My thinking about China’s Sky River project – which promised to intercept water vapor over the southern Tibetan Plateau and channel it into rain over the parched Yellow River Basin –  is inspired in part by Rodenbiker’s formulation of ecological civilization as a “socio-technical imaginary aimed at balancing economy and environment by optimizing biophysical nature” (2).  When I was asked to contribute to a special issue of the Made in China journal on “Prometheus in China,” I was struck by the strong resonances between Rodenbiker’s genealogy of “how ecology became developmental” in China, and John Dryzek’s (2013: 62) observation that “the key Promethean metaphor is mechanistic.” Ecological States argues that ecological civilization is premised on a fundamentally mechanistic approach to managing nature, which is conceptualized as a set of modular biophysical relations that can be measured, modeled, altered, and optimized for human use. The book’s first chapter traces how systems science became prominent in Chinese ecology, through techniques such as functional zoning deployed for the purpose of optimizing socio-natural systems. This argument helped me see how the assertion by its scientific champions that Sky River is a distinct concept (from atmospheric rivers) was a way to make a discursive claim that the optimization techniques used for terrestrial water could be applied in an equivalent way to the atmosphere.

Relatedly, Ecological States argues that an important aspect of China’s ecological developmental logics is the conviction that “state intervention will produce ecological equilibrium in the biophysical world” (14).  The genealogy presented in Chapter 1 makes clear that “a key goal of the Chinese state in building ecological civilization is to engineer equilibrium states in nature” (15).  This is particularly instructive when thinking about ecosystems characterized by what have been called “nonequilibrium” dynamics, such as drylands in sub-Saharan Africa or the arid cold regions of the western Tibetan Plateau. In both places, characterized by highly variable precipitation and temperature, grassland growth may be driven less strongly by herbivory and more by abiotic factors. When measures and concepts for managing ecosystems assumed to be in “equilibrium” (such as “carrying capacity”) are applied to these systems, there are often unintended ecological results, not to mention negative social consequences.

The issue of equilibrium led me to wonder how these systems scientists in China are thinking about anthropogenic climate change, which is surely something counter to “equilibrium” assumptions. Why or how does equilibrium thinking remain impervious to the realities of climate change, an issue to which China’s leaders at least give performative attention? 

The central argument of Ecological States is that ecology is fundamentally instrumental to expressions of state power. As the book points out, this is encapsulated in the National Party Congress’s plan, which asserts that ecological civilization will be obtained by 2050 – a highly symbolic year, given that the PRC’s centennial is 2049. What does it mean, though, for ecological civilization to be achieved a full 10 years before China plans to become “carbon neutral”? With all the caveats and problems of “carbon neutrality,” what could the achievement of “ecological civilization” mean if not at least that?

This is particularly curious given the clear discursive importance of carbon neutrality, such as in a September 2023 Xinhua news article announcing “China’s Tibet achieves carbon neutrality,” which stated, “The… forum on the building of a national ecological civilization highland in Tibet kicked off Sunday…. [The head of the regional government] said Tibet is able to make greater contributions to China’s dual carbon targets [of peaking and neutrality].” The piece claims that experts found that Tibet was a bigger carbon sink than they had previously realized, and then goes on to discuss massive tree planting, “desertification prevention and control” and large-scale additions and restoration of wetlands across China (including, no doubt, the newly created peri-urban wetlands that Ecological States documents).

The calculations are highly dubious, however, and what is happening on the Tibetan plateau is ecological manipulation on an astounding scale – just as the ideal of optimization based on a mechanistic model would suggest. Over the last five years, Tibetan herders on the eastern Tibetan plateau have been encouraged to substitute extensive pastoralism with raising yaks on industrial corn feed from other parts of China. Moreover, in some areas of Qinghai, state projects are applying herbicides and fertilizers on grasslands at a large scale. 

This sort of large-scale optimization logic is also at work in China’s large-scale afforestation programs, including recently an aesthetically driven effort to grow trees in Nagchu, Tibet Autonomous Region, a grassland area far above tree line. One article from June 2023 reported on efforts to plant trees in Palgon County town, which is located above 4700 meters and receives only 300 mm of annual precipitation. According to the Chinese company hired to plant the trees, “It has been proven that the cold land of Nagchu still contains the miracle of life. The reason why it has not played out is not because nature is stingy but because people have not learned to get along with the Plateau.” That is, to “get along with” the Plateau requires technological optimization – rather than centuries of indigenous knowledge and practice. 

Another very illuminating, and poignant, part of Ecological States is its opening tale of two environmental campaigns. We learn about Zhang, who labored to fill in Dianchi (Lake Dian), near Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province as part of the 1960s Learn from Dazhai campaign (while also performing this reclamation on stage in a local troupe). Then, almost half a century later, Zhang experienced the expropriation of his farmland through conversion to an aestheticized ecological protection area, as productivist logics gave way to logics of ecological construction.

Such reversals are common. Tsonyi (Shuanghu), a high-altitude region of northern Tibet, has over the past few years been the target of the “Extremely High-Altitude Ecological Resettlement” program, based on ecological rationales of grassland degradation and climate change, but also on the idea that such places are “not fit for human habitation.” The villagers have now been moved in their entirety to a resettlement site more than 700 kilometers away.  The relocation is particularly ironic in that Tsonyi was not a site of permanent settlement in the past. Less than a decade before the resettlement project began, the government criticized its historical status as a “desolate and uninhabited” area and celebrated Chinese development of the area beginning in 1976, when households were resettled there from another pastoral county. At the time, resettlement to the north was presented as a necessary and logical solution for the problem of “not enough grass for livestock in the south” and thus as beneficial to the herders. Then, as with now, “thought work” was deployed in the process of moving the herders “voluntarily.” But as state imperatives have shifted from increasing production to ecological security, development and improvement, they have been subject – like Zhang and others around Dianchi – to a new campaign that reverses the previous one.

But perhaps an even more surprising reversal we are now witnessing is what has been dubbed “tuilin huangeng.” In the Maoist period, forests were cut and grain was planted on areas suitable for such cultivation. In 2000, with the rise of the ecological state, the state launched tuigeng huanlin, variously translated as the Sloping Land Conversion Project or “Returning Farmland Restore Forest.”  But in the past couple of years, with worsening geopolitical tensions between the US and China, global grain supply shortages as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and long-term anxieties about grain security that underlie so many policies – such as the “red line” of basic agricultural land, which has been threatened by urbanization and which, as Ecological States discusses, helps explain the dramatic spatial concentration of houses on rural land – there is now a trend that has been dubbed “Returning Forest, Restore Farmland.” There are many reported cases, for example in Yunnan and Jilin, of forcible orchard removal. Officials are at pains to say that this is in fact not an official policy, but rather isolated incidents of removal of non-approved tree cover, but even so, it is difficult not to ignore the phenomenon.  Instead, Ecological States suggests we should analyze this return to a focus on agricultural land through a recalibrated and re-optimized “balance” between economy and environment, and examine how it transforms or re-inscribes state power.  

References

Dryzek, John. 2013[1997]. The Politics of the Earth: Environmental Discourses. Oxford University Press.

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Emily T. Yeh is Professor of Geography at University of Colorado Boulder. 

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