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I'm Jack Zinda, Assistant Professor 
of Global Development at Cornell,  

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and after postponing last spring, I'm delighted 
that we have Dr. Emily Yeh together with us.  

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Our co-sponsors for this talk will be are 
the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,  

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the Department of Global Development, Environment 
and Society major, and the Polson Institute  

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for Global Development and we thank them all for 
our support. In just a moment, I'm going to share  

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a link in the chat window with upcoming other 
upcoming events hosted by the East Asia Program.

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I'd like to remind you all that this event 
is being recorded. The recording will be made  

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available on the East Asia Program website and 
a link will be sent out to all who registered  

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to attend. Um after Dr. Yeh's talk, we will 
have a Q&A using the Q&A function on Zoom.  

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And now I would like to introduce our speaker, 
Dr. Emily Yeh. She's a professor of geography  

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at the University of Colorado Boulder and also 
the vice president of the American Association  

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of Geographers. She has written or co-written 
many many articles on environmental politics and  

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development on the Tibetan Plateau and her book, 
"Taming Tibet", published with Cornell University  

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Press um, sorry, her book is titled "Taming Tibet: 
Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese  

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Development". It examines state projects of 
development in Tibet from the Chinese takeover to  

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the new millennium and won the E. Gene Smith book 
prize on Inner Asia Association for Asians uh in  

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the Association for Asian Studies and it was also 
named a best international relations book of 2014  

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by foreign affairs. Um, she'll be speaking today 
on natural infrastructure in China's era of  

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ecological civilization. And uh, with that, Emily, 
I see the floor to you. Great, thank you so much.  

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Um yeah, so I would like to start by thanking 
um Jack, or John as I still think of him, Zinda,  

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as well as Amala Lane of the East Asia Program 
at Cornell for inviting me to give this talk and  

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making all of the arrangements. Um so yeah so 
as Jack said, I was supposed to actually um I  

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was supposed to actually come in the spring and 
I was going to uh give an entirely uh different  

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uh talk about Tibetan environmentalists um 
and I see a few of you in the audience who  

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know more of my Tibet work, so this is, you 
know, something uh quite different from that  

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and I see uh Julia Liu is here and Julia I 
apologize, but you've heard this talk before.  

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Anyway so uh you know thank you for showing up, 
I know it's a really busy time and people have  

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a lot of priorities pulling them in different 
directions. This talk is really still a work  

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in progress um and so I really welcome your 
comments, your suggestions, and your inputs.  

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Um and what it is is an attempt to think about how 
nature is being made into a kind of infrastructure  

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in the context of China's ecological civilization 
building campaign. Um and so I'm going to start by  

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discussing in more general terms what it might 
mean to think about nature as infrastructure,  

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what tools are used to make nature 
infrastructural, and the role that  

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natural infrastructure plays in ecological 
civilization. And then in the latter part of  

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the talk, I'm going to zoom into a couple of very 
localized studies of scenic areas, which serve as  

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examples of both infrastructural destruction and 
production in post-earthquake Sichuan Province.  

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The paper is motivated by being part of a 
China-made project at CU Boulder's Center  

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for Asian Studies and so this is kind of a loose 
collaborative project where a number of us are  

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trying to explore the domestic and international 
dimensions of China's infrastructure development  

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with this idea that there's been a kind of 
infrastructural turn in the social sciences where  

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a lot of people are thinking about infrastructure, 
but that that has been quite disconnected from  

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uh from the the China literature. Um a couple 
of other things I want to say before I start,  

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um first I uh you know a lot of I think you know 
I had presented Jack with a couple of different  

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options for talks and uh he chose this one not 
knowing what I was going to say, but a lot of this  

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work actually draws on collaborative work I've 
done earlier with him, particularly a co-authored  

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article in Geoforum and a 2016 letter in 
Science, on which he was the lead author.  

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And there's some other Cornell connections as 
well, where um I've I'm finding that my work  

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um kind of overlaps a little bit with with 
Jesse Rodenbiker's work as well and he's  

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of course a postdoc there. Second, I want to offer 
a little caveat that I think the initial poster  

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that went out um didn't very accurately maybe 
represent my take on ecological civilization,  

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so I just want to clarify up front that I have a 
pretty critical view of ecological civilization,  

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um I I'm not a cheerleader for the concept, 
so um you know uh if you were hoping to  

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hear that analytical viewpoint I I apologize for 
disappointing you uh. And then I just want to say,  

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I've done a couple of these webinars, but it's 
really weird to not see my audience, so um  

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please bear with me as I uh as I kind of uh work 
my way through that. Alright, so why think about  

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infrastructure at all? China's incredible 
pace and scale of infrastructure building,  

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both within its borders and globally with the 
Belt and Road Initiative, have attracted again  

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a lot of media attention, of course, and a lot of 
scholarly attention, but as I alluded to earlier,  

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it hasn't really, you know, been so 
present in the infrastructure studies  

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kind of uh scholarship that's come out. There was 
a big kind of handbook or guide to infrastructural  

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the infrastructural turn that had 34 chapters 
or something like this and nothing on China,  

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despite it having been called, I think quite 
accurately, the paradigmatic infrastructural  

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state, right, a state produced by and 
through infrastructure as a modern project.  

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so when most of us hear the word infrastructure, 
we think of pictures like this, we think of  

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you know highways and railroads and pipelines 
tunnels and ports and so forth uh, but uh you  

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know people who have traced its origins have shown 
how infrastructure started as a fairly narrow term  

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and has become more and more kind of plastic 
in its range of meanings. So recently,  

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some social scientists have theorized how urban 
residents themselves, like people, can become or  

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can be productively thought of as infrastructure 
because their intersections with objects,  

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practices, and with each other, act as a platform 
that support life in the city and so thinking of  

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again infrastructures as things that kind of 
support other systems or that enabled movement  

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or what have you. Scholars have also argued 
that the assent and the proliferation of  

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infrastructure as a concept in use in social 
theory, in policy, and in mainstream discourse,  

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index is a form of calculative reason, as 
well as a modernist desire to render social  

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and environmental heterogeneity manageable 
and amenable to standardized solutions.  

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So with that sort of growing plasticity, 
or extensions of conceptualizations of  

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infrastructure, it's not surprising that 
landscapes and nature itself has increasingly  

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become understood as infrastructure. So like 
dams, bridges, airports, and wastewater treatment  

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plants, wetlands, forests, and grasslands can also 
be made into objects of calculation and management  

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that are aimed at allowing them or making 
them deliver services that are deemed useful  

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for society, right, so in other words they can be 
infrastructures. The term green infrastructure,  

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which is um kind of a synonym for for natural 
infrastructure, was first introduced in the  

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United States in the 1980s in the context of 
stormwater runoff management. Subsequently,  

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green infrastructure, natural infrastructure were 
written again in the US into the Clean Water Act,  

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it started to gain a lot of popularity in 
landscape architecture, land-use planning,  

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environmental design, and natural resource 
management, as you can see from some of these  

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illustrations here. As, you know, as it started 
to grow in popularity, it also started to take  

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on a much more expansive understanding, beyond 
just sort of what to do with filtration and storm  

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water. So for example, Resources for the Future 
now defines green infrastructure projects as any  

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uh project that quote "relies on services produced 
by ecosystems". Another conservation think tank  

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defines green infrastructure as quote "the 
ecological framework for environmental  

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social and economic health, in short, our 
natural life support system." So in other words,  

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natural infrastructure has come to be 
seen more and more in terms of anything  

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that can create or harness ecosystem services 
through design and implementation approaches.  

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So the growing critical literature on 
infrastructural studies, coming from geography and  

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anthropology in particular, treat infrastructures 
both as objects of study in and of themselves, and  

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simultaneously as an analytical lens onto a range 
of social phenomena, and that can include the  

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state, governance, citizenship, corporate power, 
globalization, and what uh what not. So it's that  

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simultaneity of both infrastructure as object and 
infrastructure as analytical tool that I see is  

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marking the difference between, for example, 
a natural resource management approach and an  

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infrastructural approach to or an infrastructure 
studies approach to natural infrastructure.  

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So a resource manager might want to simply say 
"Okay, this is a piece of green infrastructure,  

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how you know um what are the biophysical 
characteristics um and how can we calculate  

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or improve the ecological services it provides," 
whereas the latter sort of retains an interest in  

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the material or biophysical characteristics, but 
also says we have to simultaneously pay attention  

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to issues, such as the political dimensions 
of how certain you know how non-human nature  

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gets mobilized in the service of supporting 
certain social activities or goals and not others,  

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what sorts of calculations have to 
be applied to make this possible,  

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how the resulting infrastructures are shaped 
by, but may also exceed the intention of their  

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designers, and how they differentially affect and 
are experienced by different groups of people.  

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So um, when I say applying an infrastructural 
lens onto green infrastructure, this means  

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asking um you know what do these what does the 
treatment of of green infrastructure say about  

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state society relationships, what might it tell 
us, for example, about ecological civilization.

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Excuse me. Um, so natural infrastructure, right, 
making natural infrastructure requires investments  

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and making investments requires calculative tools 
to justify those investments by revealing or by  

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creating economic value, or at least by promising 
to lead to better policy solutions, right,  

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towards those that are of greater value. And 
one of the most prominent calculative devices  

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that has been developed and used for the making 
of natural infrastructure is known as InVEST,  

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which is short for integrated valuation 
ecosystem services and trade-offs.  

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InVEST is a creation of the Natural Capital 
Project at Stanford and that operates as a  

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partnership with a number of organizations, 
including the Nature Conservancy at WWF, the  

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Resilience Center in Stockholm, and the Chinese 
Academy of Sciences and it's really fundamentally  

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premised on the idea that the world's ecosystems 
can be seen as capital assets. So what InVEST  

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actually is is a suite of open source, spatially 
explicit, software models uh that quantify,  

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map, and value ecosystem services with the idea 
that decision makers can then use then to make  

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decisions about trade-offs between different 
scenarios. According to one of its directors,  

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Peter Kaireva, who was a former Chief Scientist at 
the Nature Conservancy, InVEST seeks to encourage  

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governments to invest in natural infrastructure. 
So, as he puts it, quote "Governments build roads,  

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governments build dams, governments build a lot 
of things, so why shouldn't governments invest in  

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ecosystem services, the natural infrastructure, 
rather than the built infrastructure?" So,  

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as a calculative tool to facilitate investments 
into the creation of natural infrastructure,  

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InVEST works, as geographer Jessica Dempsey 
puts it, quote "as a political scientific  

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strategy to translate ecological science into 
forms that create new interests in nature",  

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right, and importantly she says at the same time 
they work as tools for depoliticization, right,  

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they render technical what are actually highly 
political interventions. And this is I think  

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very well illustrated in an article, again that um 
uh Jack wrote a rebuttal letter to and that I was  

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also part of um in 2016, but the the the article 
is is, a little clip of it is on the screen,  

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it was published in Science in 2016 and it reports 
on the first national ecosystem assessment in  

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China, which was conducted by the Chinese Ministry 
of the Environment and the Chinese Academy of  

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Sciences using InVEST, right, and covering the 
years 2000 to 2010. Um, one interesting thing  

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about this is that the uh the lead author um, 
Ouyang Zhuyin, is the Director of the Research  

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Center for Eco-environmental Sciences of the 
Chinese Academy of Sciences and the President  

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of the Ecological Society of China. He's really a 
key figure in conservation policy making in China.  

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He is said to have had a profound influence on and 
broad applications to policy making for ecosystem  

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conservation, restoration, and land management 
from the local to national scales in China.  

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In addition to being a top environmental 
scientist, he was also a student of both Wang  

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Rusong and Ma Shijun, who Jesse Rodenbiker has 
recently published on and those are two prominent  

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earth system scientists who were key figures in 
introducing um system-science approaches into  

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sustainable sustainable development in China. And 
as Jesse argues in "Making Ecology Developmental"  

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in China, that is, you know, where in some 
contexts, ecology is often sort of seen  

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as a break-on or an argument against certain 
forms of capitalist development; these figures  

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and their system science um were kind of 
central in actually making ecology align with  

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uh development within within China. And arguably 
this has um you know direct implications into  

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the ways in which ecological civilization today 
is a form of technocratic green modernization.  

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So, back to this article, they basically 
model biophysical data using InVEST  

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and they conclude that China's national 
conservation policies between 2000 and  

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2010, which include the Sloping 
Land Conversion Project, which um  

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Jack has written a lot about, the 
Natural Forest Protection Project,  

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the retire livestock and restore 
grassland and ecological migration,  

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among others, have resulted in an overall 
increase in ecosystem services, right,  

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and so they say because of China's efforts 
along these lines we have more food production,  

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more carbon sequestration, more soil retention, 
flood mitigation, water retention, and sandstorm  

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prevention. In fact, they say the only thing that 
has not improved is is habitat uh biodiversity  

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habitat. So then the authors kind of make 
this classic ecological-modernization argument  

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asserting that the modeling exercise shows that 
economic growth can coexist with the improvement  

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of ecosystem services as long as there is, quote, 
"intelligent policy design." And of course what  

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this uh does um, and again what what many people 
have written about, is it renders technical and  

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apolitical programs that have marginalized the 
people who are already the most marginalized in  

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China. So um if you look at the circle around uh 
or the the circle with the roman numeral three  

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um that is the middle of the Sanjiangyuan area 
of Qinghai, the source of the Yangtze, Yellow,  

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and Mekong rivers, where ecological migration 
has removed at least 50,000 Tibetan herders from  

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pastoral livelihoods to these new, and often 
poorly built, settlements um on the edges of  

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distant cities and you see an example of what 
that looks like on the right, right, so there's  

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been a lot of social dislocation, unemployment, 
um declining living standards, and so forth,  

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but again the making of Sanjiangyuan as a natural 
infrastructure through this ecosystem service  

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optimization effort obscures what are profoundly 
uh political consequences and again this was kind  

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of the the point of this letter uh to Science 
that um Jack and a number of us wrote. Now,  

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the reason I'm going on about this at length is 
because InVEST is not just a scholarly modeling  

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exercise, right, it's being used actively by 
China's Ministry of Environmental Protection  

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and the National Development and 
Reform Commission to create new  

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natural infrastructures in the form of what are 
called "national ecological functional zones"  

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and a new, quote, "national level ecological 
conservation red line planning process."  

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And, in fact, the authors claim that the results 
generated from this InVEST exercise have, quote,  

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put 49.4 percent of China's land area into newly 
incorporated ecosystem function conservation  

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areas. Indeed, the Natural Capital Project 
and InVEST have had much more success in  

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China than in any other country globally in 
creating interests in green infrastructure.  

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In our study of the rise of global biodiversity 
conservation, geographer Jessica Dempsey quotes  

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one interviewee as reporting excitedly, quote, 
"China now has entire provinces designated as  

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conservation provinces or development provinces 
and they are basically targeting to development  

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based on that planning and then within every 
province they have another plan that basically  

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says where activities can be done and it's all 
driven by biodiversity and ecosystem services."  

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So on the one hand, it's absolutely true that 
certain provinces in Qinghai and the Tibet  

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Autonomous Region are kind of the primary examples 
of this, where they've really been designated  

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as functioning primarily as 
providers of ecological services,  

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rather than sites of industrial development, and 
this uh relate you know this creates all sorts  

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of secondary effects on the ground- I know um a 
woman who was um having a sort of factory to have  

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women produce like handmade soap and that was 
not permitted on the grounds that this whole,  

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you know, this whole area was supposed to be 
zoned for ecological production. At the same time,  

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anyone who has spent any time in china knows that 
it's an exaggeration to think that production of  

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ecosystem services is the only, or often even the 
primary result of of um you know policy, right,  

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or that ecological services are now the 
only political economic rationality for  

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decision making at different scales. So this 
soap example is one place where it was used,  

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but often other interests take over and I'll 
get back to that point in my case studies.  

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Nevertheless, it's also the case that InVEST 
the InVEST tool is more popular in China in  

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actual policy or purported policy than 
elsewhere. So to quote Dempsey, again,  

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quote that "the political scientific strategy 
of InVEST might be more effective in a decidedly  

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illiberal state is worth noting," right, there 
are fewer interests to manage and negotiate among.

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So even before this, InVEST-informed 
national ecosystem assessment,  

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China had already become a global showcase 
for certain types of natural infrastructure,  

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particularly through what's called its sponge 
cities program, which is an initiative for  

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cities to lessen urban floods by using dispersed 
wetland and other green landscapes, rather than  

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traditional centralized storm storm water drainage 
pipes. So this has been very rapidly disseminated  

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throughout the country with a goal that all 
cities will will become sponge cities, but I want  

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to argue that in these new efforts to delimit and 
implement national ecological functional zones and  

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ecological conservation red lines, also sometimes 
called ecological red lines, as you see here,  

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natural infrastructure is being conceptualized at 
a much larger scale of the nation state. So you  

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know, in the US with green infrastructure and with 
sponge cities, it's very much at the urban scale  

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that's at work, but with this new emphasis on red 
lines um, we really have a conceptual enframing  

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of nothing short of the entire national territory, 
right, as an object of ecosystem service  

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optimization and here I'm drawing on Timothy 
Mitchell's use of enframing to refer to a method  

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of dividing up space and containing, right, and it 
operates by conjuring up a sort of neutral surface  

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or volume called space, right, again 
across the entire national territory. So,  

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one of the um schemes um, and there's lots 
of different forms of enframing, one of them,  

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the major function-oriented zone planning, 
was introduced in the 11th five-year plan  

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and it divided all of China into four types 
of zones. This is separate from the national  

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ecological function zones and those are also 
separate from ecological conservation red lines.  

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So the newest policy, red lines, is supposed 
to be declared in coordination with major  

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function oriented zones and also to encompass 
existing protected areas of various types.  

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Um so so you know, they're supposed to 
coordinate between different designations  

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and also act kind of like a red line of a 
minimum area, though in fact so far you know  

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trying to figure out what's actually going on 
on the ground, it seems that they muddle the  

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already very complicated panoply of existing 
and overlapping and sometimes conflicting

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designations. Uh but why highlight 
these red lines? Well, they were  

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written into China's newly revised 
Environmental Protection Law in 2015,  

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and in 2017, the Party Central Committee and 
the State Council issued a document declaring  

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that the exact spatial boundaries of ecological 
red lines must be completed for all provinces  

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by 2020. So in 2018, Sichuan Province had 
established red lines accounting for about 30  

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percent of the area of the province, and and you 
can see a little bit about that map of, you know,  

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where those red lines are uh in in the two clips 
from the document I've got here on the slide,  

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and as of 2019 more than a quarter of China's 
land area has been earmarked to be in red lines.  

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Government documents, uh academic 
articles by China-based scientists,  

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and at least one article purportedly written by 
Xi Jinping himself in Qiushi, which is of course  

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00:25:00,160 --> 00:25:07,200
the the um the party's uh theoretical uh journal, 
makes clear that ecological red lines, along with  

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ecological functional zones, are integral to 
the broader project of ecological civilization.

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So, what exactly is ecological civilization 
and how should we understand the natural  

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00:25:22,320 --> 00:25:29,520
infrastructure being created under its sign? I 
think most many people here already know a lot  

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about this, but as a sort of brief review, 
ecological civilization Shengtai Wenming  

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was first introduced as an academic term by 
a Chinese agricultural economist in 1987.  

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It really entered national discourse, or 
national political discourse, when Hu Jintao  

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00:25:45,840 --> 00:25:52,240
endorsed it in 2007, and of course it's been 
elevated to great prominence under Xi Jinping.  

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It was enshrined in the CCP Constitution in 
2012 and the Chinese Constitution in 2018.  

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Under Xi, of course, it's frequently coupled 
with the "China Dream", right, "Zhongguo Meng",  

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it's frequently coupled with the building 
of the new era of national rejuvenation and  

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the idea of building a beautiful China. It's 
also very frequently addressed together with  

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Xi Jinping's so-called "two mountains 
theory", right, which is on top here,  

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which is that clear waters and green mountains 
are as valuable as gold and silver mountains.  

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China scholars have called it, quote, "an 
ideological framework for guiding the future  

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of Chinese politics and society," it's been 
called a symbolic legitimacy a form of symbolic  

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legitimation for the party state, a political 
framework, and a socio-technical imaginary.  

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As with other civilizations that came 
before, a spiritual, material, and socialist,  

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it calls for the guidance and alteration of 
human behavior towards particular governmental  

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ends. There are lively, if circumscribed, debates 
within China about what ecological civilization  

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should actually mean, but most observers um 
agree, at least from the outside, that it's  

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really a statist ideology, um right, that it 
draws on pretty selective and reductionist and  

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actually contested interpretations of China's 
traditional philosophies (Taoism, Confucianism)  

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while maintaining a long-standing focus 
on economic growth and on the need for  

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scientific and technological solutions to 
ecological problems. It's also really replaced  

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sustainable development. So in the 90s, uh 2000s, 
sustainable development was very popular as a term  

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and it's kind of been overshadowed by ecological 
civilization um and what that does is it Sinicizes  

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environmentalism, right, it frees China 
from a trajectory of western societies  

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and allows China to position itself as a 
global leader. It's been marked, of course,  

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by this decidedly authoritarian turn in China's 
environmental governance, characterized by  

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military metaphors and campaign-style enforcement. 
What I want to point out is that, more concretely,  

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the implementation of reforms aimed at achieving 
ecological civilization that began in 2015  

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have entailed centralization, 
bureaucratic mobilization,  

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public supervision, a lot more ecological and 
environmental performance targets for officials,  

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and importantly, it also kicked into gear a series 
of centrally organized environmental protection  

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supervision and inspection teams, right, that 
started going from the center to the provinces in  

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the name of ecological civilization to carry out 
campaign-style enforcement in multiple provinces,  

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leading to the punishment of 
large numbers of officials.  

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So by 2018, these uh ecological civilization 
inspection teams had reportedly punished more  

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than 29,000 companies, 18,000 officials, and 
led to the detention of over 1,500 individuals.

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Along with um, you know, punishment and 
uh yeah of companies and uh detention of  

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00:29:18,480 --> 00:29:26,000
some officials, has come a tremendous amount 
of dismantling and destruction of existing  

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built infrastructure. So some news reports uh 
provide examples, such as the dismantling of 50%  

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00:29:33,920 --> 00:29:40,320
of Shandong Province's chemical industrial 
parks, hotels, oil refineries, processing sites,  

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golf courses, and also pig raising operations.

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So I think it's hard, you know, I I don't 
argue against the dismantling of illegal  

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or environmentally destructive industrial and 
commercial operations, again, like sitting here  

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00:29:55,760 --> 00:30:01,120
in the US, watching our environmental corporate 
in regulations being weakened, um you know,  

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00:30:02,400 --> 00:30:06,720
holding environmentally destructive 
corporations uh accountable sounds uh  

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00:30:06,720 --> 00:30:13,280
quite good, but not surprisingly, in China these 
have not been the only targets of enforcement.  

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So, one example in 2016 is the banning of 
small-scale pig farming in most rural areas,  

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leading to the forcible demolition of thousands 
of household pig farms and, as a result,  

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00:30:26,640 --> 00:30:32,000
a direct result, the further concentration of 
agribusiness capital, right, in the name of  

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00:30:32,000 --> 00:30:39,280
environmental protection. So we know that actually 
highly concentrated um you know factory farming is  

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00:30:39,280 --> 00:30:43,840
actually extremely environmental environmentally 
damaging, but that's also what's been happening  

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in the name of ecological civilization. In 
another case in Guangdong Province central  

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00:30:49,760 --> 00:30:53,600
level inspections targeted illegally 
constructed residential districts.  

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00:30:54,560 --> 00:30:59,760
Households that failed to move out within three 
days had their water and electricity cut off,  

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00:30:59,760 --> 00:31:05,360
which is, we can think of as a form of 
infrastructural attack, as uh anthropologist  

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00:31:05,360 --> 00:31:10,240
Julie Chu has argued, right, where where 
infrastructure is used to force resettlement,  

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00:31:10,240 --> 00:31:15,600
right, this is a tactic that is frequently used 
across China in urban real estate development.  

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00:31:16,720 --> 00:31:22,240
And indeed, for several decades the creation 
of new built infrastructure in China uh,  

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00:31:22,240 --> 00:31:28,480
in Chinese cities, has been predicated on 
the creation of an enormous amount of ruin,  

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00:31:28,480 --> 00:31:35,280
rubble, and waste, right, that's how real estate 
production has happened. And what I want to  

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00:31:35,280 --> 00:31:40,240
kind of argue is that, like the creation of 
built infrastructure, the creation of certain  

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00:31:40,240 --> 00:31:46,960
forms of abstract, natural infrastructure also 
has been predicated on creating rubble and waste.  

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00:31:47,840 --> 00:31:53,280
And here I draw on anthropologist Gastón 
Gordillo's study of rubble, right, which he  

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00:31:53,280 --> 00:32:01,360
argues is a potent lens through which to, quote, 
"examine space negatively by way of the places  

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00:32:01,360 --> 00:32:07,360
that were negated to create the geographies of the 
present." So what what gets negated in this new  

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00:32:07,360 --> 00:32:13,760
round of creation of infrastructure, now natural 
infrastructure. He describes what David Harvey  

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00:32:13,760 --> 00:32:19,840
calls creative destruction uh of capitalism, 
but he calls it instead productive destruction,  

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00:32:19,840 --> 00:32:26,400
right, to emphasize the ways in which capitalism 
produces through processes of ruination, right,  

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00:32:26,400 --> 00:32:31,840
so so to sort of um not emphasis emphasize the 
sort of creative part, but the destructive part.  

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00:32:32,560 --> 00:32:37,760
And he also draws in Ann Stoler's 
concept of imperial disregard, that is,  

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00:32:37,760 --> 00:32:44,400
the ways in which certain types of destruction 
um can be affectively neutralized, right, because  

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00:32:44,400 --> 00:32:53,040
there is a refusal to take notice or an attitude 
of an inattention, where the elite do not have to  

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00:32:54,240 --> 00:33:01,520
take regard for the destruction that underpins 
the creation of the new. So in theory,  

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00:33:01,520 --> 00:33:06,000
if we if we want to think about the destructive 
production of built infrastructure that takes  

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00:33:06,000 --> 00:33:13,600
place under the sign of ecological civilization, 
it's not um a straightforward it's it's not really  

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00:33:13,600 --> 00:33:18,160
well understood in the straightforward terms of 
conventional capitalist profit making in the way  

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00:33:18,160 --> 00:33:23,520
that it is for real estate. Uh instead, we could 
argue that the creation of natural infrastructure,  

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00:33:23,520 --> 00:33:27,760
of ecosystem services, is meant instead 
to maintain the conditions of possibility  

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00:33:27,760 --> 00:33:32,240
for the whole uh capitalist-value 
creation process to continue at all.

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00:33:35,040 --> 00:33:43,040
So while I was working, I was on sabbatical in 
Chengdu from 2018 to 2019 and I was um involved  

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00:33:43,040 --> 00:33:49,440
in a small project that was supposed to be about 
post-earthquake livelihoods in Sichuan and I  

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00:33:49,440 --> 00:33:55,200
stumbled upon what I'm currently thinking of as 
the destructive production of built infrastructure  

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00:33:55,200 --> 00:34:00,160
in the name of creating and improving natural 
infrastructure in the form of two scenic areas.  

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00:34:01,120 --> 00:34:06,480
And the destruction that I will talk about in my 
two case studies were directly associated with  

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00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:12,000
environmental inspections that were implemented 
as part of the ecological civilization campaign.  

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00:34:13,120 --> 00:34:17,200
But, like other forms of destructive 
production, they also end up leading to  

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00:34:17,200 --> 00:34:23,600
profits for some and losses for others. 
So turning to the two case studies,  

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00:34:24,800 --> 00:34:32,080
uh the first case is from a village that I 
will call Summit Village as a clear pseudonym  

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00:34:32,640 --> 00:34:40,720
um it is in Longmenshan town, which is in 
Pengzhou, which is a um a county-level uh  

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00:34:40,720 --> 00:34:46,480
city in Chengdu, uh so the map on the left 
shows I this yeah this is not necessary for  

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00:34:46,480 --> 00:34:55,040
this audience, but Chengdu and then where 
Pengzhou is on the northern tip of of  

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00:34:56,480 --> 00:35:02,960
Chengdu. Uh so the town is in the Longmenshan 
mountain range, which it was near the earth near  

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00:35:02,960 --> 00:35:09,520
the epicenter of the 2008 windfarm earthquake, 
and the Post Earthquake Reconstruction Plan,  

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00:35:10,240 --> 00:35:14,480
which was ratified within three months 
of the quake, called for tourism to be  

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00:35:14,480 --> 00:35:20,880
the pioneer industry throughout the earthquake 
zone. At the same time, the Longmenshan range  

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00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:27,040
has also been designated now as one of two 
ecological belts of the city of Chengdu. So,  

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00:35:27,040 --> 00:35:34,960
the photo on the right is um a picture I took 
from the Chengdu Planning Exhibition Hall and  

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00:35:34,960 --> 00:35:39,680
you can see that that Chengdu is now supposed to 
have two ecological belts, of which this is one,  

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00:35:40,400 --> 00:35:45,520
and they are supposed to have the primary 
function of conservation and ecotourism.  

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00:35:46,720 --> 00:35:52,960
Uh in 2018, Chengdu also unveiled a new 
urban master plan that's encapsulated  

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00:35:52,960 --> 00:35:58,240
in the slogan, quote, "extend to the east, expand 
to the south, control the west, upgrade the north,  

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00:35:58,240 --> 00:36:02,880
and optimize the center," which again is sort 
of this deepening of function orientation  

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00:36:02,880 --> 00:36:09,840
us and it specifically assigns the 
Longmenshan area to manifest Xi Jinping's  

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00:36:09,840 --> 00:36:17,120
two mountains theory of ecological civilization, 
right, the silver and silver gold mountain theory.  

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00:36:19,040 --> 00:36:27,680
So, summit village is a mountainous village in 
this town; until the establishment of what I will  

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00:36:27,680 --> 00:36:33,440
call the "summit mountain scenic area" in 1986, 
the villagers were reliant on timber for their  

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00:36:33,440 --> 00:36:41,280
livelihoods. In 1989, the scenic area was promoted 
from a municipal level to a provincial level um  

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00:36:42,240 --> 00:36:47,600
a scenic area and logging was restricted. So at 
that time, in 1989, the villagers became involved  

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00:36:47,600 --> 00:36:53,840
in tourism, uh they started opening nongjiale 
or farm guest houses for their livelihoods.  

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00:36:54,480 --> 00:36:59,920
This became even more important after uh Tuigeng 
Huanling, where the sloping land conversion  

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00:36:59,920 --> 00:37:06,320
project began in 2000, and that project led to the 
reforestation of about 90 percent of the village's  

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00:37:06,320 --> 00:37:14,240
farmland. So farming income very much was replaced 
by the operations of nongjiale. The area started  

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00:37:14,240 --> 00:37:19,600
to become really popular with retirees from 
Chengdu, it's called kind of the air conditioner  

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00:37:19,600 --> 00:37:26,960
of Chengdu, right, and people from Chengdu or 
the the sort of you know uh more urbanized area  

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00:37:26,960 --> 00:37:32,480
of Chengdu and other cities would come um spend 
several months here in the summer to escape from  

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00:37:32,480 --> 00:37:39,360
the heat. And so these evolved over time from 
rather simple and modest houses to very elaborate  

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00:37:39,360 --> 00:37:45,920
and expansive two-to-three-floor buildings, which 
many villagers took on significant debts to build.  

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00:37:47,600 --> 00:37:53,120
But by the time the earthquake struck, tourism 
constituted more than 80 of the household income  

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00:37:53,120 --> 00:37:57,840
in this village and many villagers had taken on 
very substantial loans, which they had not yet  

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00:37:57,840 --> 00:38:05,520
uh paid back. Up until the earthquake, the the 
summit mountain scenic area had been operated by  

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00:38:05,520 --> 00:38:11,120
the Pengzhou County Tourism Bureau, which sold 
the entrance tickets. Now the Pengzhou County  

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00:38:11,120 --> 00:38:17,680
Government had sought soon after the establishment 
of the of the provincial level scenic area  

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00:38:17,680 --> 00:38:24,400
to upgrade it to a national level scenic area, 
right, we see these kinds of moves all the time in  

370
00:38:25,520 --> 00:38:30,640
Chinese tourism, again something that Jack has 
written about. Right and so they try to establish  

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00:38:30,640 --> 00:38:35,840
this national level scenic area with expanded 
boundaries and a new name, the Longmenshan  

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00:38:35,840 --> 00:38:41,600
National Scenic Area. The state council approved 
the application, but the provincial level  

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00:38:41,600 --> 00:38:48,960
departments never completed or submitted a master 
plan for approval as required by law, which led to  

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00:38:48,960 --> 00:38:56,240
a very ambiguous um legal status for the scenic 
area, which becomes important later on. Uh so  

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00:38:56,240 --> 00:39:04,640
in the photos here on the left this is just this 
is one hamlet in um in this village where or you  

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00:39:04,640 --> 00:39:08,960
know a developer had had sort of built these new 
houses right before the earthquake struck and then  

377
00:39:08,960 --> 00:39:14,960
they all got destroyed and um they had to move 
these were not uh people don't live here anymore  

378
00:39:15,520 --> 00:39:21,200
and then the other photo is is a photograph 
from lower lower down in this village.

379
00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:29,680
So the 2008 earthquake destroyed about 90 percent 
of the houses in the village. It also destroyed  

380
00:39:29,680 --> 00:39:36,160
the two sites for which the scenic area had been 
most famous. Without the without those scenic  

381
00:39:36,160 --> 00:39:40,960
sites or scenic spots the County Tourism Bureau 
simply gave up, they abandoned the scenic area,  

382
00:39:41,760 --> 00:39:46,800
they just you know completely left. The 
villagers were left with no visitors  

383
00:39:47,360 --> 00:39:53,840
and thus no incomes because they had become 
so dependent on these nongjiales. As a result,  

384
00:39:53,840 --> 00:39:59,920
many residents spent the initial years after 
the quake undertaking labor migration. However,  

385
00:39:59,920 --> 00:40:05,760
in 2012, a town leader encouraged the villagers 
to return to rebuild their houses and livelihoods,  

386
00:40:06,560 --> 00:40:10,480
but the lack of income, due to the 
absence of tourism, remained an immense  

387
00:40:10,480 --> 00:40:16,480
challenge. Um and these are just photos of some 
resettlement sites that have since been built  

388
00:40:16,480 --> 00:40:21,920
for people who have not rebuilt their own uh 
own houses, these are quite small compared to  

389
00:40:23,280 --> 00:40:29,920
uh the nongjiales that have been rebuilt. So in 
2014, the party secretary of the village mobilized  

390
00:40:29,920 --> 00:40:36,080
members of the the two highest altitude production 
teams, the ones closest to the scenic parts,  

391
00:40:36,080 --> 00:40:42,400
to develop a new scenic spot. They found the 
picturesque spot, which they say was in their  

392
00:40:42,400 --> 00:40:48,080
collective forest uh which had not been affected 
by the earthquake or by subsequent debris flow  

393
00:40:48,080 --> 00:40:55,120
and which had not been in the boundaries of the 
provincial level summit mountain scenic area. They  

394
00:40:55,120 --> 00:41:01,040
this spot was in the boundaries of the national 
level scenic area, the Longmenshan Scenic Area,  

395
00:41:01,040 --> 00:41:06,080
but village leaders very carefully studied the 
national regulations and determined it not to have  

396
00:41:06,080 --> 00:41:11,440
legal status, given that a master plan had never 
been submitted and approved as required by law,  

397
00:41:11,440 --> 00:41:17,200
nor had villagers signed on to the plan. 
The villagers uh not very creatively renamed  

398
00:41:17,200 --> 00:41:22,880
the spot Wolonggu and developed it for 
tourism. So they registered a new company,  

399
00:41:22,880 --> 00:41:28,640
uh 300 village households invested in it with 
more than 10 million reminbi of registered capital  

400
00:41:29,200 --> 00:41:35,200
and the village company built a new road to this 
newly opened scenic spots, they built paths,  

401
00:41:35,200 --> 00:41:42,800
pavilions, toilets, and a wastewater treatment 
facility, as well as hiring 30 villagers  

402
00:41:43,600 --> 00:41:49,920
as employees. The village company was again quite 
careful to not sell tickets because that could  

403
00:41:49,920 --> 00:41:56,000
have provoked some legal question, instead they 
charged a 10 renminbi parking fee per vehicle  

404
00:41:56,000 --> 00:42:02,160
and as cleaning fee per person. Now this quickly 
became wildly popular, it drew tens of thousands  

405
00:42:02,160 --> 00:42:08,000
of visitors every day, including many who came 
once more to stay in the rebuilt nongjiales,  

406
00:42:08,880 --> 00:42:15,840
so from 2015 to 2017 there were reportedly 
about 700,000 visitors per year in the village,  

407
00:42:16,480 --> 00:42:21,280
bringing four to six million renminbi to the 
village, right, not including the income brought  

408
00:42:21,280 --> 00:42:26,080
to individual households with nongjiala's and 
this again prompted people to start to reinvest.  

409
00:42:26,960 --> 00:42:31,600
And the Pengzhou city government at the time 
appeared to be very supportive of their efforts.  

410
00:42:31,600 --> 00:42:36,640
On a number of occasions deputy mayors 
and the party secretary visited and we  

411
00:42:36,640 --> 00:42:41,920
I found a number of um newspaper articles 
where they fully affirmed the construction  

412
00:42:41,920 --> 00:42:46,160
of the scenic spots and sort of held 
up this village as a model for others.

413
00:42:48,480 --> 00:42:54,080
Now all of this changed very abruptly. On 
august 20th, 2017, the Pengzhou government  

414
00:42:54,080 --> 00:42:59,920
declared the operation illegal, shut it down, 
posted security guards to block further entrance  

415
00:42:59,920 --> 00:43:06,160
and you can see a notice of shutdown and 
then the you can see the gate there and  

416
00:43:06,160 --> 00:43:11,840
so not only were the pavilions and pathways 
but the toilet facilities were also dismantled.  

417
00:43:12,480 --> 00:43:19,040
The sudden about face of the municipal government 
in its stance on Wolonggu was the result of the  

418
00:43:19,040 --> 00:43:23,760
Central Fifth Environmental Inspection Group, 
which conducted its investigations in Sichuan  

419
00:43:23,760 --> 00:43:31,120
Province for a month, starting August 7th, 2017, 
filing 8,966 reports of environmental problems,  

420
00:43:31,120 --> 00:43:36,720
including Wolonggu on the grounds of illegal 
construction. With the closure of the scenic spot,  

421
00:43:36,720 --> 00:43:41,760
the village company's earnings dropped to zero and 
household income decreased by 70 to 80 percent,  

422
00:43:41,760 --> 00:43:46,480
as guests once again didn't come to stay 
at their nongjiale, right, with nothing  

423
00:43:46,480 --> 00:43:52,480
no scenic spot to visit. However, and here's 
where you know what happens on the ground gets  

424
00:43:52,480 --> 00:43:57,200
quite complicated and and there's more going on 
than the production of natural infrastructure,  

425
00:43:57,200 --> 00:44:02,720
the shutdown of Wolonggu did not end plans for 
tourism, instead the Pengzhou government um  

426
00:44:04,160 --> 00:44:10,480
turned the management of this scenic spot over to 
a state-owned company of the Pengzhou Municipality  

427
00:44:10,480 --> 00:44:15,600
Tourism Bureau. The village invested over had 
invested over half a million yuan in a wastewater  

428
00:44:15,600 --> 00:44:21,280
treatment plant capable of treating about 50 
tons of water per hour and the county tourism  

429
00:44:21,280 --> 00:44:26,960
company simply took it over with no compensation 
to the villagers. So villagers, not surprisingly,  

430
00:44:26,960 --> 00:44:31,440
interpret this as clear evidence that the reason 
for the shutdown was not environmental protection  

431
00:44:32,080 --> 00:44:36,240
and the production of ecological values, but 
rather that the government had become jealous  

432
00:44:36,240 --> 00:44:39,920
of their success in raising money and wanted 
those profits for the government instead.  

433
00:44:40,960 --> 00:44:46,080
That is, in this case, rather than qualitatively 
new forms of natural infrastructure,  

434
00:44:46,080 --> 00:44:51,840
in the sense of providing new ecological services 
as an abstract infrastructure of state building,  

435
00:44:51,840 --> 00:44:56,480
the central environmental inspection 
team instead provided an opportunity for  

436
00:44:56,480 --> 00:45:01,680
the local state to appropriate villagers own 
income generation through a scenic area form,  

437
00:45:01,680 --> 00:45:06,960
right, as a sort of minimally built minimally 
built infrastructure as a commercial venue.

438
00:45:10,480 --> 00:45:16,400
A similar set of dynamics have also shaped 
Taoping Village in Wenchuan County in Aba  

439
00:45:16,400 --> 00:45:21,920
prefecture, which is just west of Chengdu 
Municipality. This village is the site of  

440
00:45:21,920 --> 00:45:27,200
the Panda Scenic Spot, which was first 
established in 1999 by an investor from Chengdu.  

441
00:45:28,000 --> 00:45:34,080
So this scenic spot also was located in the upper 
forested area of the village on the boundary of  

442
00:45:34,080 --> 00:45:40,240
the buffer and core zones of the Wolong nature 
reserve. The Wolong Nature Reserve had of course  

443
00:45:40,240 --> 00:45:46,880
first been established in 1963 and was expanded 
in 1975. And the 1975 expansion incorporated  

444
00:45:46,880 --> 00:45:50,640
collective forests that had previously only 
been under the management of the village.

445
00:45:52,880 --> 00:45:58,160
Like many villages in this area, including the 
previous one, this village largely relied on  

446
00:45:58,160 --> 00:46:03,120
agriculture until the implementation of Tuigeng 
Huanling, or the Sloping Land Conversion Project,  

447
00:46:03,120 --> 00:46:08,240
which resulted in more than three quarters of uh 
the household farmland being planted by trees,  

448
00:46:08,240 --> 00:46:14,240
leaving families with an average of you know 
about 0.7 mu of farmland per household. So  

449
00:46:14,240 --> 00:46:19,760
fortunately for the households in this village, 
right when uh the Sloping Land Conversion Project  

450
00:46:19,760 --> 00:46:28,320
was implemented. this investor came in and um 
and started to establish the panda scenic spot.

451
00:46:35,920 --> 00:46:42,080
So, given its location on the boundary of the 
buffer and core zone, where construction in the  

452
00:46:42,080 --> 00:46:46,720
wallowing nature reserve was not actually supposed 
to be allowed the construction of the scenic spot  

453
00:46:46,720 --> 00:46:53,040
by this investor had to require special permission 
from the Provincial Forestry Department and indeed  

454
00:46:53,040 --> 00:46:58,800
the Provincial Forestry Department in 1999 issued 
a special memorandum allowing the investor to  

455
00:46:58,800 --> 00:47:04,960
construct the scenic area, which included several 
hotels and the scenic area featured horse rides,  

456
00:47:04,960 --> 00:47:10,480
rafting, zip-lines, camping, a little 
mini train ride for three kilometers,  

457
00:47:10,480 --> 00:47:16,560
and hiking opportunities. The construction of the 
scenic spot also brought a well-paved road to the  

458
00:47:16,560 --> 00:47:24,320
village, which you can see in this picture, and 
so villagers started to you know take up income  

459
00:47:24,320 --> 00:47:31,520
earning opportunities such as carrying you know 
tourists up on wooden sedans, carrying packs for  

460
00:47:31,520 --> 00:47:37,360
rafters, guiding horses, and running barbecues. 
And as with many other places, villagers also  

461
00:47:37,360 --> 00:47:42,560
began to turn their houses into nongjiale 
for the tourists visiting the scenic area.  

462
00:47:44,240 --> 00:47:50,640
Now despite its proximity to the earthquake 
epicenter, the village was not very severely  

463
00:47:50,640 --> 00:47:55,440
affected and the main hotel of the scenic 
area actually stood in place after the quake.  

464
00:47:56,640 --> 00:48:01,840
Nevertheless, as part of the recovery effort, 
the county purchased the scenic spot from the  

465
00:48:01,840 --> 00:48:08,240
investor and spent significant funds on its 
reconstruction. Also as part of this whole  

466
00:48:08,240 --> 00:48:15,680
suite of post-earthquake measures, the National 
Tourism Administration gave the title of quintuple  

467
00:48:15,680 --> 00:48:22,560
A special tourist attractions, right, five A's to 
a number of sites in Wenchuan, including this one,  

468
00:48:22,560 --> 00:48:27,120
right, and this is supposed to indicate China's 
most important and best maintained attractions.  

469
00:48:27,680 --> 00:48:33,680
So so after the earthquake this county government 
enterprise started to operate this Panda Scenic  

470
00:48:33,680 --> 00:48:40,160
Area as part of this nationally recognized you 
know 'quintuple A' site and this is an official  

471
00:48:40,160 --> 00:48:47,920
map from that time and and on this map the scenic 
spot is described as, quote, "an important part  

472
00:48:47,920 --> 00:48:52,880
of the Wolong National Nature Reserve," so it's 
actually seen as part of the nature of protection.  

473
00:48:53,600 --> 00:49:03,440
And as of 2017, 77 out of 101 households in 
the villages were operating nongjiale. However,  

474
00:49:03,440 --> 00:49:09,360
in 2017, the scenic spot was abruptly closed 
as a result of environmental inspections. Due  

475
00:49:09,360 --> 00:49:14,400
to its location on the border of the buffer and 
core zones of the Wolong National Nature Reserve,  

476
00:49:14,400 --> 00:49:18,960
where such construction and commercial activity 
were never supposed to be permitted and if you see  

477
00:49:18,960 --> 00:49:25,520
this hotel it's pretty outrageously large um it 
is it has a very big footprint, right, and so  

478
00:49:25,520 --> 00:49:31,280
it it was the Provincial Forestry Department that 
had allowed this in 1999. Of course when it was  

479
00:49:31,280 --> 00:49:35,760
closed down in 2017, the Provincial Forestry 
Department was never held accountable for  

480
00:49:35,760 --> 00:49:41,760
having given permission for this. Um all of 
the built infrastructure in the scenic spot,  

481
00:49:41,760 --> 00:49:47,040
except for this hotel uh, was which was deemed 
too large to actually move without causing  

482
00:49:47,040 --> 00:49:52,160
even more damage, was dismantled and removed. 
So all the train tracks and the other hotels  

483
00:49:52,160 --> 00:50:00,320
and um uh zip-lines and and whatnot. The abrupt 
closure and dismantling of the scenic spot was  

484
00:50:00,320 --> 00:50:04,080
quite shocking to the villagers, they 
described it as having happened overnight,  

485
00:50:04,880 --> 00:50:09,600
according to one village leader he said you know 
many cried when they heard the news because they  

486
00:50:09,600 --> 00:50:12,720
realized they had no way to recover the 
loans that they had taken out to build  

487
00:50:12,720 --> 00:50:17,440
and expand their nongjiale and so village 
income fell by more than half right away.  

488
00:50:19,120 --> 00:50:26,560
Now this closure of the scenic site coincided 
with the end of the two phases of subsidies for  

489
00:50:26,560 --> 00:50:31,200
the Sloping Land Conversion Project and was 
followed almost immediately by the village  

490
00:50:31,200 --> 00:50:36,320
leaders discovery that their entire village 
had been slated for inclusion into the newly  

491
00:50:36,320 --> 00:50:42,080
uh declared Giant Panda National Park right 
which is supposed to span Sichuan, Gansu and  

492
00:50:42,080 --> 00:50:47,200
Shanxi provinces and cover an area triple the 
size of the US's Yellowstone National Park.  

493
00:50:48,240 --> 00:50:52,160
Now at the time of this surprise discovery, 
the village leaders had been in the process  

494
00:50:52,160 --> 00:50:56,880
of negotiating with a company for rafting 
operations outside of the core in the buffer  

495
00:50:56,880 --> 00:51:01,600
areas of the Wolong nature reserve in a bid to 
try to bring tourists to the village again in  

496
00:51:01,600 --> 00:51:07,440
the wake of the scenic spot closure and they had 
reached an agreement with a company to develop a  

497
00:51:07,440 --> 00:51:11,440
new rafting operation to bring tourists back 
to their nongjiala, their farm guest houses,  

498
00:51:12,000 --> 00:51:16,080
but as they plan to move forward the county 
government informed them that, at least as of  

499
00:51:16,080 --> 00:51:20,560
2019, and I don't think it's changed since then, 
rafting would not be allowed inside the national  

500
00:51:20,560 --> 00:51:25,680
park and they also talked about how you know they 
were brought to a meeting and basically told "sign  

501
00:51:25,680 --> 00:51:31,360
this paper that says you are in the park and you 
know whether you sign it or not uh is not going to  

502
00:51:31,360 --> 00:51:36,560
make any difference about whether your village is 
in the park, so you better sign it because you'll  

503
00:51:36,560 --> 00:51:42,240
just make trouble for yourself if you don't." 
Now unusually, the village leaders here, unlike  

504
00:51:42,240 --> 00:51:47,280
in many many parts of China, don't blame local 
officials, but rather Xi Jinping himself, right,  

505
00:51:47,280 --> 00:51:52,960
along with his ecological civilization drive and 
his two mountain theory, which they particularly  

506
00:51:52,960 --> 00:51:58,800
uh call out for, in their words, making 
peasants the last of the last in China today.

507
00:52:01,840 --> 00:52:07,680
So to wrap up um you know, as the US withdraws 
ever more completely, though hopefully  

508
00:52:07,680 --> 00:52:12,880
not permanently, from all forms of global 
environmental cooperation, never mind leadership,  

509
00:52:12,880 --> 00:52:18,000
it's hardly surprising that China's ecological 
civilization model of authoritarian green  

510
00:52:18,000 --> 00:52:23,760
development has gained considerable traction. 
Ecological civilization is now regularly touted  

511
00:52:23,760 --> 00:52:28,880
in the pages of prestigious scientific journals, 
as well as the halls of the United Nations  

512
00:52:28,880 --> 00:52:35,120
as a model for other countries to emulate and 
indeed, you know, from my personal perspective,  

513
00:52:35,120 --> 00:52:39,680
in comparison with the Trump regime's denial 
of climate science, the attention to the  

514
00:52:39,680 --> 00:52:46,080
production of natural infrastructure to create 
ecosystem services has much to recommend it. Um  

515
00:52:47,040 --> 00:52:52,960
there it is hard to argue against the shutting 
down of illegal oil refineries or the enforcement  

516
00:52:52,960 --> 00:52:57,520
even of long-standing restrictions on building 
inside nature reserves for Panda Habitat.  

517
00:52:58,400 --> 00:53:03,680
At the same time, however, the cases of the two 
villages in Pengzhou and Wanchuan, Sichuan are  

518
00:53:03,680 --> 00:53:09,040
cautionary tales and not at all exceptional 
ones about what gets turned into rubble in  

519
00:53:09,040 --> 00:53:13,120
the name of ecological civilization, 
right. In post-earthquake Sichuan,  

520
00:53:13,120 --> 00:53:19,200
what we see is a shift in the state's interest 
from the production of built infrastructure  

521
00:53:19,200 --> 00:53:24,800
to support livelihoods after the disaster to, 
not very many years later, sort of forgetting  

522
00:53:24,800 --> 00:53:30,480
about that and turning to the destruction of most 
built infrastructure, except for the ones that  

523
00:53:30,480 --> 00:53:36,400
the local state wants to expropriate for itself, 
right, for the production of an abstract national  

524
00:53:36,400 --> 00:53:42,160
natural infrastructure. So unfortunately the 
demolition of built infrastructure that occurs  

525
00:53:42,160 --> 00:53:48,240
in the process of setting aside zones for 
ecosystem services, right, whether scenic areas,  

526
00:53:48,240 --> 00:53:53,840
ecological functional zones, or red lines, end up 
serving the interest of centralized state power  

527
00:53:54,480 --> 00:53:59,680
and the urban consuming classes, while 
the resulting rubble and the concomitant  

528
00:53:59,680 --> 00:54:04,720
deprivation of access to peasants livelihood 
resources are the subject of what Stoller calls  

529
00:54:04,720 --> 00:54:10,320
"imperial disregard," there is a refusal to regard 
them in the pursuit of ecological civilization.  

530
00:54:11,200 --> 00:54:15,520
At the same time, however, it's clear that the 
intention to set aside ecological red lines  

531
00:54:15,520 --> 00:54:21,360
does not mean that China has seamlessly become 
an idealized ecological state. Local, political,  

532
00:54:21,360 --> 00:54:27,600
economic interests, as always, allow powerful 
actors to simply expropriate entrepreneurial,  

533
00:54:27,600 --> 00:54:32,880
ecological, and aesthetic resources from 
villagers, in some cases without any material  

534
00:54:32,880 --> 00:54:38,000
or biophys you know changes in the material or 
biophysical characteristics or qualities of the  

535
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:44,480
landscape. So returning to the question of the 
infrastructural turn, what I've argued is that  

536
00:54:44,480 --> 00:54:51,760
using infrastructure as an analytic can help focus 
our attention on the socio-political relations  

537
00:54:51,760 --> 00:54:56,560
around the concept of natural infrastructure 
that has otherwise been rendered technical.  

538
00:54:57,440 --> 00:55:01,360
And finally, thinking about the 
ways in which, as many have argued,  

539
00:55:01,360 --> 00:55:05,600
different types of infrastructure are 
associated with different temporalities,  

540
00:55:05,600 --> 00:55:10,800
I suggest that in ecological civilization, the 
infrastructural time of the village, right, with  

541
00:55:10,800 --> 00:55:16,000
its sort of slow accretion, the destruction from 
the earthquake and then the slow accretion once  

542
00:55:16,000 --> 00:55:23,200
more has really been displaced by a national scale 
infrastructural time, which is a developmentalist,  

543
00:55:23,200 --> 00:55:30,880
linear, smooth temporality that's oriented 
towards a statist future. So that is all  

544
00:55:30,880 --> 00:55:37,920
from my presentation, I'm going to unshare my 
screen and see if we can have a discussion.

545
00:55:41,760 --> 00:55:48,160
Um thank you so much Emily, so now 
the for for the QnA, if you move your  

546
00:55:48,160 --> 00:55:53,680
mouse uh if you move your mouse around you'll see 
down at the bottom of the zoom screen a QnA icon,  

547
00:55:54,320 --> 00:55:58,560
please enter your questions into 
that and Professor Yeh will be  

548
00:55:58,560 --> 00:56:03,600
taking her own questions for the next 
uh well, however long we have questions.

549
00:56:10,240 --> 00:56:15,440
I suppose since there aren't yeah well I don't 
know who's allowed to talk and who's not, you  

550
00:56:15,440 --> 00:56:29,840
could either type them in or if hand 
raising works that that works too, I guess.

551
00:56:31,920 --> 00:56:34,240
Okay there's a hand up from Juliet.

552
00:56:37,680 --> 00:56:44,840
I don't see Juliet on my screen 
it's very strange but uh ...

553
00:56:49,760 --> 00:56:57,120
Hi, oh Juliet, go ahead please. Oh, me first, 
thank you um Kristen Stable to the University  

554
00:56:57,120 --> 00:57:02,720
of Buffalo, it was a really interesting talk. I 
have to admit I signed up because of the original  

555
00:57:02,720 --> 00:57:07,520
description because I was really curious to 
hear how you were going to explain this Chinese  

556
00:57:07,520 --> 00:57:13,200
government's great commitment to this and uh but 
but you know I I'm not sure how that description  

557
00:57:13,200 --> 00:57:20,640
got into your talk but I was really glad I I came 
anyway and my question is so in China very packed  

558
00:57:20,640 --> 00:57:26,080
Chinese cities like with the Xinjiang Cun and 
stuff you know there's a there's a an argument  

559
00:57:26,080 --> 00:57:31,600
for getting rid of them based on health, based 
on quality of life, that sort of thing and I'm  

560
00:57:31,600 --> 00:57:36,960
kind of curious if you see that if what are the 
significant differences between this kind of  

561
00:57:36,960 --> 00:57:43,920
infrastructural development based on environmental 
issues environmental justifications versus quality  

562
00:57:43,920 --> 00:57:51,600
of life, versus safety, those justifications, 
thank you. That's a really good question um  

563
00:57:53,440 --> 00:58:08,640
yeah I I haven't myself done much on the Xinjiang 
Cun so um I think it matters a lot whether um  

564
00:58:12,400 --> 00:58:17,360
you know I think the two things that are 
involved here that may not be involved there  

565
00:58:17,360 --> 00:58:21,840
are a loss of access to livelihoods.

566
00:58:24,240 --> 00:58:28,880
And in some cases, not so much the ones 
I I talked about here in particular,  

567
00:58:28,880 --> 00:58:34,480
but you can definitely see them in other 
places, kind of a a physical resettlement,  

568
00:58:34,480 --> 00:58:39,120
so I'm not sure if the redevelopment that 
you're talking about is of the type where  

569
00:58:39,120 --> 00:58:44,080
they're actually moving people or just- I 
know there's a move to urban regeneration  

570
00:58:44,880 --> 00:58:48,560
uh kind of urban renewal as well which I 
think is slightly different and I'm not  

571
00:58:48,560 --> 00:58:53,520
is that more along what you're talking about? 
Or is it more we need these people to um

572
00:58:56,320 --> 00:59:01,520
sort of stay in this place, but but live in 
different kinds of buildings? Well I think both  

573
00:59:01,520 --> 00:59:08,960
happen, but there definitely is relocation for for 
a reason for justification being for quality of  

574
00:59:08,960 --> 00:59:16,480
of life, like you know uh uh Shanghai Gone, Qin 
Shao's book about the destruction of but I think  

575
00:59:16,480 --> 00:59:20,560
it also happens that some people are able to stay 
and I think that's more likely down in southern  

576
00:59:20,560 --> 00:59:26,960
Chinese cities where the village has a stronger 
corporate identity and more legal legal clout.

577
00:59:28,560 --> 00:59:38,480
Um yeah, I guess I mean there's all sorts of 
resettlement and concentration um and removal  

578
00:59:38,480 --> 00:59:44,320
and consolidation happening everywhere. I do think 
southern, you know, I do think like a lot of what  

579
00:59:44,320 --> 00:59:52,560
happens in Shenzhen there is a lot more village 
yeah there's village corporations that have much  

580
00:59:52,560 --> 01:00:02,720
more strength than in the case of Sichuan, um 
you know the other thing that I see a lot in  

581
01:00:05,040 --> 01:00:08,320
in areas around these villages, but 
not in these particular villages,  

582
01:00:08,320 --> 01:00:16,560
is consolidation for you know, the idea of not 
wasting land and that's ultimately driven by kind  

583
01:00:16,560 --> 01:00:20,320
of environmental logic too, right, it's like 
we're running out of farmland, so we have to  

584
01:00:20,320 --> 01:00:26,160
have a red line and so, but you can trade and 
so in order to create that more farmland, you  

585
01:00:26,160 --> 01:00:31,360
take this IDD of everyone and you can turn that 
into farmland, right, so there is this sort of uh  

586
01:00:32,720 --> 01:00:36,640
you know red line for farmland 
that has a somewhat environmental  

587
01:00:36,640 --> 01:00:47,920
argument to it too. Um yeah, I mean in these 
cases, in these particular cases of scenic areas,  

588
01:00:47,920 --> 01:00:56,960
there's not much justification going on other 
than environmental and that, you know, there's no  

589
01:00:56,960 --> 01:01:03,520
arguments being made about health or even much 
development. That's, again, different from  

590
01:01:04,560 --> 01:01:10,240
um like in the in the Tibetan 
resettlement case where  

591
01:01:12,000 --> 01:01:20,880
there's also this idea that people need to be 
removed so that the grasslands can can perform  

592
01:01:20,880 --> 01:01:26,880
their ecological services better um and there 
there's a sort of layered like, well this is  

593
01:01:26,880 --> 01:01:30,720
good for these backwards people who wander around 
with their livestock and by putting them into  

594
01:01:31,280 --> 01:01:35,520
these urban settlements they'll become 
more developed. Um in these particular  

595
01:01:35,520 --> 01:01:42,000
cases so so I think I I think the the drive 
to um ecological services can intersect with  

596
01:01:42,000 --> 01:01:45,840
all these other kinds of rationales, in these 
particular cases around Chengdu it was really  

597
01:01:47,600 --> 01:01:56,800
really just you know ecological civilization means 
we have to do these things and therefore um these  

598
01:01:56,800 --> 01:02:01,920
activities that have been going on so far are not 
acceptable uh anymore. I think I lost the threat  

599
01:02:01,920 --> 01:02:07,680
of your question so if I didn't answer it very 
well please... No thank you that's great. Juliet  

600
01:02:07,680 --> 01:02:14,800
had had something, sorry Juliet. Yeah no no I was 
my zoom shut down and then opened again I think  

601
01:02:14,800 --> 01:02:19,840
when the speaker or when everything was switched 
over and um I just wanted to flag for also the  

602
01:02:19,840 --> 01:02:24,080
person that is for Amala, who's organizing 
that, I don't think it's possible now to add  

603
01:02:24,080 --> 01:02:28,880
open questions so if people start generating 
questions I don't know if they can add them,  

604
01:02:28,880 --> 01:02:35,120
but maybe it's just me um but my question was um 
was that I think that in in analyses especially of  

605
01:02:35,120 --> 01:02:40,400
China's environmental uh approaches, there's some 
cynicism and I think it's correct cynicism, that  

606
01:02:40,400 --> 01:02:46,080
um everything is about power, everything is about 
state power versus um certain individual actors  

607
01:02:46,080 --> 01:02:51,600
ability to profit and that's your story lends 
to that in a way that I think is nuanced and  

608
01:02:51,600 --> 01:02:56,320
and well argued, but is there are there ways 
in which culture and ecological civilization  

609
01:02:56,320 --> 01:03:04,000
and specifically, you know the fact that villagers 
can get together and formulate their own idea the,  

610
01:03:04,000 --> 01:03:08,640
for me what was so interesting about the story is 
that it's it's cases of villages coming together  

611
01:03:08,640 --> 01:03:14,720
and themselves kind of defining what how how 
the place that they live in is ecological or is  

612
01:03:14,720 --> 01:03:19,360
attractive and scenic, and do you see 
like kind of cultural attitudes shifting  

613
01:03:19,920 --> 01:03:25,920
um along with kind of the scramble to make um 
money and to garner political power through this  

614
01:03:26,800 --> 01:03:32,400
this bigger strategy of ecological civilization, 
or is it just cynically kind of money in politics?

615
01:03:37,760 --> 01:03:38,640
That's a great question.

616
01:03:42,960 --> 01:03:49,840
I do see a lot of people who buy into ecological 
civilization and I think there have been some  

617
01:03:49,840 --> 01:03:56,240
surveys um, you know, about about the term 
ecological civilization as well, where um  

618
01:03:57,440 --> 01:04:05,840
urban residents uh and some rural villagers 
do kind of align with various parts of it.  

619
01:04:05,840 --> 01:04:09,680
I think the idea that there needs to be 
environmental protection is actually quite  

620
01:04:11,440 --> 01:04:17,920
quite well accepted and more accepted 
than here, you know what I mean? um  

621
01:04:19,680 --> 01:04:27,120
le and then like with with Tibetans, again who I 
know better than these I I've done a lot more with  

622
01:04:27,120 --> 01:04:33,040
them than than with these villagers near uh near 
Chengdu, although I I agree with you you know,  

623
01:04:33,040 --> 01:04:38,800
these people were very proactive about learning 
the law and articulating like what was beautiful  

624
01:04:38,800 --> 01:04:45,120
about their own place um uh so I I think that 
kind of bottom-up agency happens a lot, I think  

625
01:04:45,120 --> 01:04:49,280
you know the people I'm familiar with, 
more in Tibetan rural areas, are also  

626
01:04:50,720 --> 01:05:00,880
very um active in thinking about the need for 
some sort of ecological future, right, but um  

627
01:05:00,880 --> 01:05:09,600
and working pretty hard to try to align their ways 
of being and and uh their idea of what a beautiful  

628
01:05:09,600 --> 01:05:14,560
cultural landscape is with the state's discourse 
of ecological civilization to sort of use it  

629
01:05:14,560 --> 01:05:22,320
agentively. Um I think I'm also just like 
attracted to discontent or something because I  

630
01:05:22,320 --> 01:05:28,720
I a lot of, you know, these in these two villages 
villages in particular people were really upset  

631
01:05:28,720 --> 01:05:32,880
like they were they were really mad 
um about what was happening to them.

632
01:05:32,880 --> 01:05:42,400
Um so they saw ecological civilization quite 
cynically as a state project, but that didn't mean  

633
01:05:42,960 --> 01:05:49,440
that they weren't in some cases, you know, in some 
ways proud of the fact that there are wild animals  

634
01:05:49,440 --> 01:05:56,480
right that live near to to where they're 
where they live um. So I think I think  

635
01:05:57,920 --> 01:06:07,120
I think there's both going on um, I think yeah 
just that the way the past few years have gotten  

636
01:06:07,120 --> 01:06:13,760
much more authoritarian has not helped these rural  

637
01:06:13,760 --> 01:06:20,480
places. I I do think a lot of urban residents 
are quite on board with ecological civilization.

638
01:06:22,720 --> 01:06:25,520
Could I just say something? I'm glad 
to see that more people are showing up,  

639
01:06:25,520 --> 01:06:32,000
I think we have a small enough group that if you 
wish to turn on your video it's probably fine  

640
01:06:32,000 --> 01:06:38,560
um and also as uh yeah, as Juliet noted, it 
seems like the QnA function isn't actually  

641
01:06:39,120 --> 01:06:44,080
operating, so raise the raised hand function or 
raising the hand on your screen is probably a  

642
01:06:44,080 --> 01:06:49,920
great idea and I see Magnus you have 
your hand up so let you take off.

643
01:06:51,200 --> 01:07:02,240
Oh thank you. Thank you for the very interesting 
talk. I was very curious about um the historical,  

644
01:07:03,120 --> 01:07:11,120
looking-back that you also um gave us a little 
bit about, and um I was curious about how  

645
01:07:12,160 --> 01:07:17,680
the people who invented this term "ecological 
civilization", you mentioned that they it has  

646
01:07:17,680 --> 01:07:24,320
supplanted the term sustainable development, I 
think you mentioned that that was because it um  

647
01:07:25,360 --> 01:07:30,240
it's a nativization, it's this this 
ecological civilization is a Chinese-invented  

648
01:07:31,200 --> 01:07:37,680
term, so it allows for staking something 
out that's not connected to somebody else's  

649
01:07:39,040 --> 01:07:45,920
concept, if I understood it correctly, and 
so I'm I'm curious about how the people who  

650
01:07:46,480 --> 01:07:49,840
came up with this term and the the politicians,  

651
01:07:50,800 --> 01:07:56,720
the political figures who use it um, 
how they reconcile this notion with the  

652
01:07:58,720 --> 01:08:04,960
the devastation environmental devastation that's 
been going on for centuries and centuries in  

653
01:08:04,960 --> 01:08:10,640
china. I mean the massive deforestation, 
all of that, which doesn't go well with  

654
01:08:12,080 --> 01:08:18,640
this idea, I understand, as being part of 
this that China was always ecological and  

655
01:08:20,480 --> 01:08:27,120
always an ecological civilization. I I'm 
curious if you can say something about how um  

656
01:08:28,240 --> 01:08:39,360
how this environmental history of China is talked 
about, how that's talked about by these these  

657
01:08:39,360 --> 01:08:47,200
proponents of Chinese ecological civilization. 
Uh I'm I I want to add as a footnote that um  

658
01:08:47,840 --> 01:08:52,400
I'm asking also because I had this strange 
experience: a couple years ago I hosted a  

659
01:08:52,400 --> 01:09:03,840
Chinese-visiting scholar who was very keen 
on trying to write for American journals  

660
01:09:05,760 --> 01:09:13,920
to to to sort of augment his publication record 
and um he showed me um he wrote up a manuscript  

661
01:09:13,920 --> 01:09:22,000
which was about ecological civilization and 
um that was the first time I had ever heard of  

662
01:09:22,000 --> 01:09:28,880
this term, I had never come across this before, 
and uh it was a little bit out of the blue for me  

663
01:09:28,880 --> 01:09:35,520
because I I tried to ask this scholar can you 
define it a little more and he had great trouble  

664
01:09:35,520 --> 01:09:41,360
defining it and later I realized that this is 
something that's always an edict coming from above  

665
01:09:41,360 --> 01:09:46,080
and and it lands in the lab of academics and then 
they have to go and write papers about it and  

666
01:09:46,080 --> 01:09:51,920
probably that's what happened to my my friend 
that he felt obliged to write on this topic  

667
01:09:52,640 --> 01:09:59,840
and he had actually not been thinking very 
much about what it really um what it really um  

668
01:10:01,200 --> 01:10:09,520
would mean and he also was struggling with 
this um uh problem of how to reconcile  

669
01:10:10,480 --> 01:10:17,600
the pretty horrific environmental history 
that is part of of Chinese history uh  

670
01:10:18,480 --> 01:10:25,280
with this notion of of China somehow being 
uh naturally an ecological civilization.  

671
01:10:26,480 --> 01:10:30,800
Yeah that's a great question I know and I I 
would love to hear actually what other people,  

672
01:10:30,800 --> 01:10:35,360
I know Jack has written about ecological 
civilization as well, my understanding  

673
01:10:35,360 --> 01:10:40,720
is uh that the people who champion it, and 
now it's become such a political term right,  

674
01:10:41,280 --> 01:10:48,160
uh they don't they don't acknowledge that you 
know what Mark Elvin calls the 3,000 years of  

675
01:10:48,160 --> 01:10:56,400
lack of sustainability, right, they they very 
much um selectively look back at certain things  

676
01:10:56,400 --> 01:11:05,920
um from Confucius and from Daoism and say, you 
know, look at that that shows that we've always  

677
01:11:05,920 --> 01:11:10,480
been aligned with this um I mean I think 
certain elements of the recent socialist  

678
01:11:10,480 --> 01:11:16,080
past are just sort of said, well, those were 
mistakes right but we've gotten over it um

679
01:11:18,560 --> 01:11:21,440
yeah I don't really have a great 
answer for that because I I  

680
01:11:22,320 --> 01:11:30,000
I don't see a lot of substance in it. I mean I 
think some of the earlier writings are sort of  

681
01:11:30,880 --> 01:11:37,840
maybe arguing for an ecological civilization, 
rather than necessarily just asserting that  

682
01:11:37,840 --> 01:11:43,760
we're always already ecological, but rather, this 
is something that we need to do and so that's  

683
01:11:43,760 --> 01:11:49,280
kind of also the civilizational aspect of it, we 
need to make people behave in certain ways, guided  

684
01:11:49,280 --> 01:11:53,920
by the party, right, that will make us ecological 
and we can look back at these antecedents,  

685
01:11:53,920 --> 01:12:01,600
but I think when it becomes a sort of "we were 
always like this" um it's really a sort of  

686
01:12:02,880 --> 01:12:09,040
nationalist China on the global stage, you know, 
China as a global leader move, rather than any  

687
01:12:09,040 --> 01:12:14,960
serious look at environmental history, but again 
I I'd love to I'd love to hear what other people  

688
01:12:16,240 --> 01:12:21,840
think of that or whether anyone has encountered 
anything more critical because because I haven't.  

689
01:12:24,880 --> 01:12:25,520
Jack, have you?

690
01:12:26,720 --> 01:12:34,080
Um from within China, no. Yeah um I mean I think 
like one thing I guess just the one thing that I  

691
01:12:34,080 --> 01:12:40,400
add to that is that I mean there is a, right, like 
like they sort of like retake a certain version  

692
01:12:40,400 --> 01:12:44,400
of Marxian historiography and say there was 
primitive civilization, agricultural civilization,  

693
01:12:44,400 --> 01:12:49,200
industrial civilization, and now we have 
ecological civilization. And industrial  

694
01:12:49,200 --> 01:12:55,440
civilization was environmentally disastrous and it 
was because of that linear teleological advance,  

695
01:12:56,160 --> 01:13:00,480
um you know and you know, and so they can say 
that you know I guess we had to pollute first  

696
01:13:00,480 --> 01:13:05,920
and clean up later, but now we're in the business 
of cleaning up yeah, so. I I think you're right,  

697
01:13:05,920 --> 01:13:11,680
it does there's a stage, right, and Jesse's 
work shows this um, but there's also this like,

698
01:13:14,320 --> 01:13:23,920
you know, very Chinese national pride look we can 
point back to our ancient philosophies to support  

699
01:13:24,560 --> 01:13:30,880
what we're doing now, so it's a little bit of both 
of those. Yeah well and it's and it's there's a  

700
01:13:30,880 --> 01:13:35,520
clear contradiction where the history, you know, 
like the teleological approach says that this is  

701
01:13:35,520 --> 01:13:40,640
a universal unnecessary project, but at the same 
time, there's all this stuff saying that this is  

702
01:13:40,640 --> 01:13:43,920
China's national destiny and it can only 
happen in China because of the leadership  

703
01:13:43,920 --> 01:13:48,960
of the Chinese Communist Party and other kinds 
of things and it's also just a rubric for all  

704
01:13:48,960 --> 01:13:54,800
the policies that happen to already be coming 
through, I will stop there this is not my show.  

705
01:13:55,760 --> 01:14:02,160
Thank you, Martin. We've got a hand up from uh 
Ren-Huang Paul Chong. Okay I can only see half the  

706
01:14:02,160 --> 01:14:06,400
hand, so I know Martin had one and then someone 
else had one, so whoever wants to go first.  

707
01:14:08,400 --> 01:14:15,040
Who is who is who is on first well I'll say my 
my quick question and that is, you know, I'm I  

708
01:14:15,040 --> 01:14:22,640
am I'm 78 now, I'm a senior scholar, I guess 
uh I I grew up in a time when there's lots of  

709
01:14:22,640 --> 01:14:28,640
discussion of population growth and the need to 
sustain to get a sustainable level of population  

710
01:14:29,200 --> 01:14:36,000
and in fact undeveloped population and I'm 
just curious as to whether in ecological,  

711
01:14:37,120 --> 01:14:44,160
the human being is any way in any way the number 
of human beings is in any way thought of as a  

712
01:14:44,160 --> 01:14:54,560
portion of the ecological uh uh equation that 
has to be uh con considered. I know in in in the  

713
01:14:54,560 --> 01:15:00,560
initial books on ecology that's a clear 
the clear uh a clear uh area of discussion  

714
01:15:01,360 --> 01:15:08,720
um then Do you mean in china or in general? I mean 
in China because they're using the word ecology  

715
01:15:08,720 --> 01:15:13,760
and ecological they've got to consider the 
effects of, I don't mean just industrial change in  

716
01:15:13,760 --> 01:15:22,240
pollution but I uh, and that's clearly an issue, 
but simply the pressure of growth in population on  

717
01:15:22,880 --> 01:15:28,160
and the number of people. Some people have 
talked about that in terms of urban versus rural,  

718
01:15:28,160 --> 01:15:33,200
some people are talk, I guess you've made 
some reference to it when you talk about the  

719
01:15:33,200 --> 01:15:39,520
decrease in farmland um and therefore the 
need to consider crop production and food  

720
01:15:39,520 --> 01:15:44,800
production things of that sort. Yeah I mean 
I guess I have a couple things um you know uh  

721
01:15:44,800 --> 01:15:51,840
I think anyway I mean so china has, of course, 
had a one child policy for a very long time,  

722
01:15:52,480 --> 01:15:59,040
but uh somewhat ironically, um right 
now it's really trying to encourage  

723
01:15:59,040 --> 01:16:05,840
uh people to, as you know they've loosened that 
because they have a real demographic crisis,  

724
01:16:06,560 --> 01:16:12,960
right, in terms of there's not going to be 
enough laborers to or yeah to support all of the  

725
01:16:14,240 --> 01:16:21,920
retired people uh because of so many years of 
a pretty drastic um one child policy, and so uh  

726
01:16:23,280 --> 01:16:28,720
no you know populate like strict population 
control is not part of ecological civilization  

727
01:16:28,720 --> 01:16:35,440
because of this demographic economic crisis. I 
guess I would also say from you know stepping back  

728
01:16:35,440 --> 01:16:41,760
from just China that um you know many scholars 
have pointed to not population numbers, but  

729
01:16:41,760 --> 01:16:50,400
consumption, as sort of being right the uh more at 
the root of our ecological crises, that it is um  

730
01:16:50,960 --> 01:16:58,000
the disproportionate over-consumption of certain 
parts of the world population and not so much  

731
01:16:58,720 --> 01:17:03,760
you know the problem is over there with those, 
you know, developing countries that have too  

732
01:17:03,760 --> 01:17:08,960
many people, right, that's a that's a pretty 
problematic framing, but I think China's uh you  

733
01:17:08,960 --> 01:17:14,880
know China's approach right now is that they're 
going full steam ahead for for uh consumption,  

734
01:17:14,880 --> 01:17:21,280
right, except they are doing something about 
um you know climate change, we can talk about  

735
01:17:21,280 --> 01:17:30,560
some problems with that, but um but population 
control right now is not a big issue because of  

736
01:17:30,560 --> 01:17:37,280
the unintended effects of many decades and also 
just in terms of the urbanization issue you know  

737
01:17:37,280 --> 01:17:43,840
a lot of the urbanization is happening because 
of real estate, right, it's happening because um  

738
01:17:46,240 --> 01:17:52,320
in the current stage of capitalism a lot of 
capital a lot of economic growth is being  

739
01:17:52,320 --> 01:18:03,440
driven by urbanization and by and many governments 
rely on the revenue from real estate development  

740
01:18:03,440 --> 01:18:10,160
for their uh for their continued operation, and 
so that is happening, you know, and that pushes  

741
01:18:10,160 --> 01:18:14,800
against ecological civilization too, right, so 
there's all these ways in which we have a set  

742
01:18:14,800 --> 01:18:18,960
of ideals of ecological civilization and then 
the political economic realities of capitalist  

743
01:18:18,960 --> 01:18:24,000
accumulation kind of get in the way of that. 
Another good example of that is just with um  

744
01:18:24,720 --> 01:18:31,040
you know with uh with climate change where, again, 
like, you know China has a much better plan than  

745
01:18:31,040 --> 01:18:35,440
the US, clearly, at least China is paying 
attention to climate change, on the other  

746
01:18:35,440 --> 01:18:44,320
hand even as it's investing in a lot of renewable 
energies um it's also building coal-fired power  

747
01:18:44,320 --> 01:18:49,360
plants like mad, right, there's already an 
over capacity of coal-fired power plants and  

748
01:18:49,360 --> 01:18:54,480
they keep adding and adding and adding them, as 
well as funding them overseas, why because they  

749
01:18:55,200 --> 01:19:01,520
would be in a severe over because of um because 
of over-accumulation of capital and that capital  

750
01:19:01,520 --> 01:19:07,920
needs somewhere to go, right, and so those things 
are happening at the same time as ecological  

751
01:19:07,920 --> 01:19:12,240
civilization is coming in and they don't 
always align, in fact, they often don't align.

752
01:19:14,320 --> 01:19:18,720
Okay, oh sorry. Someone else yeah 
someone else had their hands up tonight.  

753
01:19:18,720 --> 01:19:25,280
Yeah so we have uh Ren-Huang Paul Chung and 
then Lourdes Casanova and then Qing Chu.

754
01:19:25,280 --> 01:19:31,280
Oh yeah, I just wanted to ask like the concept of 
ecological civilization, how is it do you see it  

755
01:19:31,280 --> 01:19:38,800
being say like adopted by governments in Southeast 
Asia and how how is this concept of ecological  

756
01:19:38,800 --> 01:19:46,080
civilization like in the context of the world 
initiatives? That's a really fantastic question  

757
01:19:46,720 --> 01:19:54,240
um I know I've seen a lot of um increasingly 
like publications in Science and Nature,  

758
01:19:54,240 --> 01:19:58,720
right, where where Chinese scientists 
are saying ecological civilization  

759
01:19:58,720 --> 01:20:03,840
it's not just for China, China can lead 
the world in this, I see it a lot in  

760
01:20:05,520 --> 01:20:12,080
the idea of the Green Belt and Road. I don't know 
um this would be, it would be great if someone  

761
01:20:12,080 --> 01:20:17,520
like Julia or or others know whether it's been 
taken up by those government, that I don't know  

762
01:20:17,520 --> 01:20:23,760
but I think it certainly has that potential uh 
because it's been it's been championed so much  

763
01:20:23,760 --> 01:20:28,960
and again like the UN has very much championed 
it, but I I don't know about specific countries  

764
01:20:28,960 --> 01:20:33,280
there's also you know along with the taking 
up of the Belt and Road, I think there's also  

765
01:20:33,920 --> 01:20:39,200
um some growing skepticism, right, there's 
like the attraction of the Belt and Road  

766
01:20:39,200 --> 01:20:50,800
and then there's also certainly civil society um 
awareness of some of its drawbacks too. Thank you.

767
01:20:53,920 --> 01:20:57,520
Yeah if anyone knows if there's specific 
countries that have taken it up, I'd be-  

768
01:20:58,640 --> 01:21:02,560
okay Juliet says I hear Green Belt and 
Road, but not ecological civilization.

769
01:21:04,880 --> 01:21:08,240
Maybe the civilization is a 
little too much for people,  

770
01:21:08,240 --> 01:21:13,920
right, it's a very it's a very you know there's a 
lot of, it's a very Chinese kind of term, right,  

771
01:21:13,920 --> 01:21:16,640
you had spiritual civilization, 
you had socialist civilization,  

772
01:21:16,640 --> 01:21:21,680
right, so so it has certain cultural resonances 
that may not play very well in other places.

773
01:21:25,120 --> 01:21:27,840
Okay

774
01:21:31,760 --> 01:21:32,560
I think you're next.

775
01:21:35,760 --> 01:21:36,400
I can't hear.

776
01:21:38,960 --> 01:21:42,880
This is are you frozen it looks like 
Lourdes Casanova may be freezing up.  

777
01:21:43,600 --> 01:21:45,760
Yeah oh there you oh we can hear you now.

778
01:21:51,360 --> 01:21:58,080
If you could hear me, could you please ask your 
question? Oh she looks like we just lost her  

779
01:22:00,560 --> 01:22:05,120
um, then I guess Xin Shu you could you ask 
and hopefully we'll have that asker reappear.

780
01:22:08,000 --> 01:22:16,080
Okay, thank you. Um, I really enjoyed the 
talk uh I have uh well, originally one  

781
01:22:16,080 --> 01:22:23,760
one question, but I was also striked by the 
uh the term uh, or the comment on the this  

782
01:22:23,760 --> 01:22:29,840
basically the concept of ecological 
civilization, well uh in Chinese  

783
01:22:29,840 --> 01:22:36,240
definitely it's a Shengtai Wenming, right, 
but the Chinese official uh translation,  

784
01:22:37,200 --> 01:22:43,280
English translation, of this phrase actually 
it's not civilization, it's ecological  

785
01:22:43,840 --> 01:22:49,520
advancement or ecological progress. I 
found that you know quite interesting,  

786
01:22:49,520 --> 01:22:55,120
I don't know if you have any you know insight on 
that, but my main question is really about the  

787
01:22:56,800 --> 01:23:05,840
the law of uh state, particularly, the 
change dynamics of the central, local  

788
01:23:06,720 --> 01:23:14,400
governmental relations uh against the backdrop of 
Xi Jinping's uh centralization of power, right, so  

789
01:23:15,440 --> 01:23:21,120
I mean this this is basically I mean as 
we all know it's really very critical  

790
01:23:21,120 --> 01:23:28,400
when it comes to the uh environmental protection 
or sustainable development of ecological  

791
01:23:29,200 --> 01:23:35,600
uh civilization, whatever you call it, 
I mean the how you really uh implement  

792
01:23:36,560 --> 01:23:43,840
the policies uh, you know, made, right, but 
before Xi Jinping, I mean for political scientists  

793
01:23:43,840 --> 01:23:49,920
usually they they look at Chinese political 
system they still think this is authoritarian,  

794
01:23:49,920 --> 01:23:55,520
but they developed, so called, the 
fragmented or sovereigntarianism  

795
01:23:55,520 --> 01:24:05,840
framework to make sense of the increasingly uh 
pluralistic policy process in which there's other  

796
01:24:05,840 --> 01:24:12,560
actors right, even you know, some are state 
or others from civil society or from society  

797
01:24:13,280 --> 01:24:20,320
and then they end here the policy process 
and so-called the policy entrepreneurs  

798
01:24:21,040 --> 01:24:30,720
to shape or to, you know, compete uh to shape the 
policy. Well with Xi Jinping's re-centralization  

799
01:24:30,720 --> 01:24:37,760
effort, I think you kind of touch upon the 
the change relationship between the central  

800
01:24:37,760 --> 01:24:44,240
and the local governments, right, particularly 
your your case studies, I mean the uh the last  

801
01:24:44,240 --> 01:24:48,800
case uh to the very end, you said I 
mean, the villagers, basically they don't  

802
01:24:50,000 --> 01:24:59,280
blame the their local uh government, but Xi 
Jinping, right, so my question is really uh giving  

803
01:24:59,280 --> 01:25:05,920
I think this is quite interesting because, on the 
one hand, when when the uh authoritarian framework  

804
01:25:06,800 --> 01:25:12,480
was really fragmented to the extent that 
the local leaders may do whatever they like,  

805
01:25:14,080 --> 01:25:20,640
ignoring the, you know, even the very serious 
policies state parliament I mean national policy,  

806
01:25:22,000 --> 01:25:30,320
but now with the more relentlessly implemented 
centralized control, actually have to  

807
01:25:30,320 --> 01:25:37,680
do whatever Xi Jinping or, you know, the centrally 
the central government want them to do, but  

808
01:25:37,680 --> 01:25:45,360
I wonder it's still a space 
here for the local government to

809
01:25:47,680 --> 01:25:57,360
negotiate for some for their local interests, or 
there's ways they may, on the one hand pretend  

810
01:25:57,360 --> 01:26:05,120
to do whatever they have to or do whatever they 
have to do anyway, on the other, still try their  

811
01:26:05,120 --> 01:26:14,240
best to play their role to to suit the local 
condition, particularly the kind of I think the  

812
01:26:15,280 --> 01:26:22,400
vested interest between the local leaders or local 
politicians and maybe the development, you know,  

813
01:26:23,120 --> 01:26:29,520
the the capitalists or or the the interest 
groups, as well as the, you know, the local people  

814
01:26:29,520 --> 01:26:37,280
so or basically no it's simply just uh oh always 
I mean the top-down kind of story, Xi Jinping  

815
01:26:37,920 --> 01:26:43,920
it's like an emperor, I mean can control and then 
everyone had to do this, there's very little room  

816
01:26:43,920 --> 01:26:49,520
for not only I mean we are not talking about 
civil society, but here just local government.  

817
01:26:49,520 --> 01:26:55,520
So that's my main question, thank you. 
Yeah thank you, I uh that's a great um and  

818
01:26:55,520 --> 01:27:02,400
and uh complicated question, I don't think, so 
first, I was very surprised when these people,  

819
01:27:03,280 --> 01:27:07,760
this village party secretary actually went 
straight for Xi Jinping and said, you know it's  

820
01:27:07,760 --> 01:27:12,800
his fault, like I have never heard that before, 
I've always heard, you know, Xi Jinping is great,  

821
01:27:12,800 --> 01:27:17,280
but it's the local leaders, right, the more 
typical story, so I was very surprised to hear  

822
01:27:17,280 --> 01:27:24,320
that. I don't think all uh space for maneuver 
for local governments has gone away, I think  

823
01:27:24,320 --> 01:27:34,480
it's still there um I just think it's less than it 
was before, right, I think that that um you know

824
01:27:38,000 --> 01:27:47,840
yeah I I mean the space for negotiation has 
undoubtedly shrunk um, this kind of campaign  

825
01:27:47,840 --> 01:27:54,960
style implementation where they don't trust the 
province to do the job, right, they have to like  

826
01:27:54,960 --> 01:28:03,280
take people from the center and go to these places 
is an indication of you know this, you know,  

827
01:28:05,040 --> 01:28:10,160
Xi Jinping wanted wanting to be the 
emperor or whatever. That said you know,  

828
01:28:10,160 --> 01:28:15,520
China has had a negotiated, fragmented, 
authoritarian state system for a very long time,  

829
01:28:15,520 --> 01:28:21,040
I don't think that has disappeared. Um I just 
think it has, you know, another example um you  

830
01:28:21,040 --> 01:28:25,520
know and of course there's all different levels of 
local right and so so there's all different levels  

831
01:28:25,520 --> 01:28:31,280
of politics at play, but one really interesting 
thing I heard about this Panda National Park um,  

832
01:28:32,560 --> 01:28:41,200
which was difficult to to dig too much into, 
but um you know, I had heard that the provinces  

833
01:28:41,200 --> 01:28:46,960
were sort of told you're going to get, you know, 
they all the provinces thought that they had some  

834
01:28:46,960 --> 01:28:52,320
subsidies coming to them and so they tried to play 
the system when they were asked by the central  

835
01:28:52,320 --> 01:28:57,520
government "well how many more hectares of land 
should be in this park?", right, and so they all,  

836
01:28:58,400 --> 01:29:04,080
trying to play the system as they always did, 
over-reported or or reported a large number and  

837
01:29:04,080 --> 01:29:10,080
then they were told um well you're not going to 
get any subsidies, but you have to implement it,  

838
01:29:10,080 --> 01:29:14,880
right, so then they were really very upset and 
there's a lot of I think tension between Sichuan  

839
01:29:14,880 --> 01:29:21,040
province and the center around the Panda National 
Park, so I don't again I don't I don't think the  

840
01:29:21,040 --> 01:29:26,960
fact that they were kind of trying to strategize 
to give a large number to get more subsidies  

841
01:29:26,960 --> 01:29:30,640
shows that there's agency, the fact that you 
know the center is trying to not pay them  

842
01:29:31,680 --> 01:29:36,560
shows some tension, I don't know how that's going 
to play out in the end, yeah so so I think both  

843
01:29:36,560 --> 01:29:41,680
of those things are happening there's this like 
increasing authoritarianism and negotiation is  

844
01:29:41,680 --> 01:29:45,920
not it's not dead, right, it's it would be 
hard to imagine that happening completely.  

845
01:29:47,680 --> 01:29:52,080
Thank you so much, what's your sense of 
the Chinese official translation- Excuse  

846
01:29:52,080 --> 01:29:58,560
me, Excuse me. Sorry yes, John let me let me 
actually, I have seen ecological civilization  

847
01:29:58,560 --> 01:30:04,320
a lot in English, so I'm quite curious that 
it's not translated that way? I wonder if some  

848
01:30:04,320 --> 01:30:10,720
people are starting to translate it as something 
else because they realize, you know, that it has  

849
01:30:10,720 --> 01:30:17,200
certain connotations in English that may not match 
very well, but I have certainly seen ecological  

850
01:30:17,200 --> 01:30:22,080
civilization in some official documents too, 
so so yeah that's all I have to say about that.  

851
01:30:23,680 --> 01:30:28,800
My apologies for the interruption, so we were we 
were past six o'clock but uh Professor Yeh has  

852
01:30:28,800 --> 01:30:33,760
great uh has kindly offered to stand to finish 
just a couple more questions, we have two hands  

853
01:30:33,760 --> 01:30:41,760
already up please be economical in asking 
your questions and uh thanks everybody. Hi,  

854
01:30:41,760 --> 01:30:48,720
so my name is Lourdes Casanova and I'm from the 
School of Management, my question so one question  

855
01:30:48,720 --> 01:30:54,080
in one comment, first thank you very much for your 
very interesting presentation, I was not aware  

856
01:30:54,640 --> 01:31:01,600
that China was developing and at the same time to 
remain ecological, which usually doesn't happen,  

857
01:31:01,600 --> 01:31:09,040
much most countries while they develop they cause 
tremendous environmental uh damage, and then  

858
01:31:09,040 --> 01:31:18,320
my question is if you could comment on GEIDCO, 
G-E-I-D-C-O, that's the project of the like the  

859
01:31:18,320 --> 01:31:26,400
world-wide web, so the electricity worldwide web, 
so the idea is that state-grid would connect the  

860
01:31:26,400 --> 01:31:34,240
electricity grids of all over the world with the 
intention to manage the solar panels and the way  

861
01:31:34,240 --> 01:31:43,080
and winter farms and coal and electricity 
and nuclear nuclear and hydroelectrical dams,  

862
01:31:43,840 --> 01:31:49,360
so could you please comment on that because 
definitely it's a major major project for  

863
01:31:49,360 --> 01:31:56,640
the world and it's already happening, so they are 
already connecting Mongolia, Russia, Cambodia and  

864
01:31:56,640 --> 01:32:04,000
others. Um yeah so to the first point, I I guess I 
just want to clarify a little bit that um uh, you  

865
01:32:04,000 --> 01:32:09,040
know, for a long time China's stance was, we're 
developing so we're not going to take care of the  

866
01:32:09,040 --> 01:32:14,240
environment, that's a Western capitalist bourgeois 
thing, right, that from the 1970s until later on  

867
01:32:14,240 --> 01:32:19,280
you know for a couple decades, now China very 
much is taking on the mantle of global leadership  

868
01:32:19,840 --> 01:32:23,600
in environmental protection, so that's 
what ecological civilization is all about,  

869
01:32:23,600 --> 01:32:27,920
that's not to say that there's not still 
a lot, an awful lot, of really terrible  

870
01:32:28,480 --> 01:32:34,720
environmental problems happening both in terms 
of industrial pollution and other uh types of  

871
01:32:34,720 --> 01:32:39,200
environmental problems, and also that many of 
china's environmental solutions really cause  

872
01:32:39,200 --> 01:32:44,240
further problems, um I I have to apologize, 
I I really don't know anything about GEIDCO,  

873
01:32:44,880 --> 01:32:51,600
so pardon my ignorance. I want to say one 
thing about um, you know, the grid is um  

874
01:32:52,560 --> 01:32:59,520
it's highly political in China, at least, 
um and certainly what you have right now  

875
01:32:59,520 --> 01:33:07,200
is um a lot of uh renewable energies that are 
being developed, not connected to the grid,  

876
01:33:07,200 --> 01:33:12,960
or they are connected to the grid but they 
are severely curtailed because they because  

877
01:33:12,960 --> 01:33:20,720
coal-fired power plants um they need to they are 
they are privileged in terms of being allowed to  

878
01:33:20,720 --> 01:33:25,280
generate a certain amount of electricity, 
there is an oversupply of electricity,  

879
01:33:25,280 --> 01:33:31,280
so there's lots and lots of energy both coal-fired 
and renewable being produced in China right now  

880
01:33:31,280 --> 01:33:37,520
um that is simply not even used right, so again 
there's a there's a big kind of political economy  

881
01:33:37,520 --> 01:33:41,200
question there but I don't know anything 
about GEIDCO and I I apologize for that.

882
01:33:44,000 --> 01:33:50,840
There was one- Okay and last 
we have oh we have Kan Yuan.  

883
01:33:51,840 --> 01:34:00,240
Uh can you hear me? Yeah I yeah first yeah thank 
you, it was really interesting talk um, and to me  

884
01:34:00,240 --> 01:34:07,120
the questions like I think China is really uh has 
a unique history and also developed really fast  

885
01:34:07,680 --> 01:34:13,920
well, a lot of, I think the UK is like the I can 
understand the villagers who are upset, but if it  

886
01:34:13,920 --> 01:34:19,840
seems to me they didn't follow the law the rule to 
begin with, right, so they tried to play the game,  

887
01:34:19,840 --> 01:34:25,040
you know, I think, so I'm just trying to step back 
if you know something in the US like if Ithaca  

888
01:34:25,040 --> 01:34:31,200
would decide who the local people decide to, you 
know, benefit from the waterfalls locally and we  

889
01:34:31,200 --> 01:34:36,960
start something without what would all happen and 
the other thing and you know I think the tension  

890
01:34:36,960 --> 01:34:43,280
um between the local government and the state 
government that has been there uh almost all  

891
01:34:43,280 --> 01:34:50,160
the time, but I think it's more, um how can I say, 
so because I would love another project about uh  

892
01:34:51,200 --> 01:34:55,520
uh who to get a switch and we did a 
survey about the Chinese people I think  

893
01:34:56,240 --> 01:35:00,400
you mentioned they blame local government, 
but not the central government, it seems the  

894
01:35:00,400 --> 01:35:06,320
tension is always there, but then I think about 
to what extent that when we interpret results from  

895
01:35:06,320 --> 01:35:11,440
China we have to take into consideration 
uh you know the unique Chinese history,  

896
01:35:11,440 --> 01:35:16,640
things are changing so fast, and what happened 
on the ground it actually outpaced the rule  

897
01:35:16,640 --> 01:35:22,240
uh you know laid out by the government and also 
you know the tension between their different  

898
01:35:22,240 --> 01:35:28,880
layers of authority and that's actually to me is 
universal so for example tension between US state  

899
01:35:28,880 --> 01:35:33,920
versus central government, or even at Cornell, 
you know, department college and university level  

900
01:35:33,920 --> 01:35:39,760
each layer has its own interest. The tension, you 
know, so some sometimes I feel like the tension,  

901
01:35:40,320 --> 01:35:46,480
you know, you observe in China, it can 
be, you know, anywhere. Yeah, so I'd like,  

902
01:35:46,480 --> 01:35:50,960
thank you for that question, I have two comments 
to it. One um, so in these two cases, right,  

903
01:35:50,960 --> 01:35:55,440
it's not the villagers who didn't follow the 
rules, it's the county government um so in the  

904
01:35:55,440 --> 01:36:01,040
first place, the county government uh wanted to 
make it a national level scenic area, but they  

905
01:36:01,040 --> 01:36:08,480
never followed through on their legal obligations 
um, but uh so they didn't have a plan, they didn't  

906
01:36:08,480 --> 01:36:13,760
do any village consultation, but they insisted 
that something that is actually legally not  

907
01:36:15,440 --> 01:36:22,000
not clear, or really not viable from the 
point of view from the law, was in place.  

908
01:36:23,360 --> 01:36:28,960
In the second case, uh it was the the county 
force, the Provincial Forestry Bureau, that gave  

909
01:36:28,960 --> 01:36:35,600
an investor a businessman permission to build, 
right, so in both cases, it is not villagers  

910
01:36:35,600 --> 01:36:39,920
who didn't follow the rules, it is actually 
the government. But the but the government  

911
01:36:40,480 --> 01:36:45,920
or the Provincial Forestry Bureau are not held 
accountable, it's the villagers who are held  

912
01:36:45,920 --> 01:36:51,840
accountable, right, so that's kind of the what I'm 
pointing out to um and yeah like there's conflicts  

913
01:36:51,840 --> 01:36:56,720
everywhere, there's tensions everywhere, I don't 
think villagers always do the right thing from the  

914
01:36:56,720 --> 01:37:05,440
the point of view of the environment, what I'm 
trying to step back and say is that um certain  

915
01:37:05,440 --> 01:37:10,960
actors end up being held into account and certain 
priorities, in this case, a sort of national  

916
01:37:10,960 --> 01:37:19,200
developmentalist vision, is takes priority over a 
village sense of time and justice, right, so that  

917
01:37:19,200 --> 01:37:25,280
ultimately what ends up happening aligns with a 
sort of statist view, not with the village view  

918
01:37:26,240 --> 01:37:32,240
um from from a more abstract infrastructural 
perspective and I just think yeah so so um  

919
01:37:32,240 --> 01:37:41,760
I'm not I'm not trying to say villagers are 
environmental angels or um they always do  

920
01:37:41,760 --> 01:37:49,440
something from an abstract, right point of view, 
but who gets who gets held to what standards,  

921
01:37:49,440 --> 01:37:53,840
right, and with what effects and who benefits from 
that is is kind of what I'm trying to point out.

922
01:37:58,480 --> 01:38:06,160
Well, thank you everybody for such wonderful 
questions and to um Emily for such a wonderful  

923
01:38:06,160 --> 01:38:13,440
presentation and and answers, we do have another 
presentation uh by Bin Xu uh coming up next week  

924
01:38:13,440 --> 01:38:20,160
on um sent-down youth and their memories of the 
Maoist era and we hope to see you all there. Yeah,  

925
01:38:20,160 --> 01:38:24,720
thank you everyone for the questions, I really 
uh they were very thought provoking and and I'll  

926
01:38:24,720 --> 01:38:29,840
keep thinking about them going forward 
so thanks so much for this opportunity.