I'm Jack Zinda, Assistant Professor of Global Development at Cornell,
and after postponing last spring, I'm delighted that we have Dr. Emily Yeh together with us.
Our co-sponsors for this talk will be are the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,
the Department of Global Development, Environment and Society major, and the Polson Institute
for Global Development and we thank them all for our support. In just a moment, I'm going to share
a link in the chat window with upcoming other upcoming events hosted by the East Asia Program.
I'd like to remind you all that this event is being recorded. The recording will be made
available on the East Asia Program website and a link will be sent out to all who registered
to attend. Um after Dr. Yeh's talk, we will have a Q&A using the Q&A function on Zoom.
And now I would like to introduce our speaker, Dr. Emily Yeh. She's a professor of geography
at the University of Colorado Boulder and also the vice president of the American Association
of Geographers. She has written or co-written many many articles on environmental politics and
development on the Tibetan Plateau and her book, "Taming Tibet", published with Cornell University
Press um, sorry, her book is titled "Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese
Development". It examines state projects of development in Tibet from the Chinese takeover to
the new millennium and won the E. Gene Smith book prize on Inner Asia Association for Asians uh in
the Association for Asian Studies and it was also named a best international relations book of 2014
by foreign affairs. Um, she'll be speaking today on natural infrastructure in China's era of
ecological civilization. And uh, with that, Emily, I see the floor to you. Great, thank you so much.
Um yeah, so I would like to start by thanking um Jack, or John as I still think of him, Zinda,
as well as Amala Lane of the East Asia Program at Cornell for inviting me to give this talk and
making all of the arrangements. Um so yeah so as Jack said, I was supposed to actually um I
was supposed to actually come in the spring and I was going to uh give an entirely uh different
uh talk about Tibetan environmentalists um and I see a few of you in the audience who
know more of my Tibet work, so this is, you know, something uh quite different from that
and I see uh Julia Liu is here and Julia I apologize, but you've heard this talk before.
Anyway so uh you know thank you for showing up, I know it's a really busy time and people have
a lot of priorities pulling them in different directions. This talk is really still a work
in progress um and so I really welcome your comments, your suggestions, and your inputs.
Um and what it is is an attempt to think about how nature is being made into a kind of infrastructure
in the context of China's ecological civilization building campaign. Um and so I'm going to start by
discussing in more general terms what it might mean to think about nature as infrastructure,
what tools are used to make nature infrastructural, and the role that
natural infrastructure plays in ecological civilization. And then in the latter part of
the talk, I'm going to zoom into a couple of very localized studies of scenic areas, which serve as
examples of both infrastructural destruction and production in post-earthquake Sichuan Province.
The paper is motivated by being part of a China-made project at CU Boulder's Center
for Asian Studies and so this is kind of a loose collaborative project where a number of us are
trying to explore the domestic and international dimensions of China's infrastructure development
with this idea that there's been a kind of infrastructural turn in the social sciences where
a lot of people are thinking about infrastructure, but that that has been quite disconnected from
uh from the the China literature. Um a couple of other things I want to say before I start,
um first I uh you know a lot of I think you know I had presented Jack with a couple of different
options for talks and uh he chose this one not knowing what I was going to say, but a lot of this
work actually draws on collaborative work I've done earlier with him, particularly a co-authored
article in Geoforum and a 2016 letter in Science, on which he was the lead author.
And there's some other Cornell connections as well, where um I've I'm finding that my work
um kind of overlaps a little bit with with Jesse Rodenbiker's work as well and he's
of course a postdoc there. Second, I want to offer a little caveat that I think the initial poster
that went out um didn't very accurately maybe represent my take on ecological civilization,
so I just want to clarify up front that I have a pretty critical view of ecological civilization,
um I I'm not a cheerleader for the concept, so um you know uh if you were hoping to
hear that analytical viewpoint I I apologize for disappointing you uh. And then I just want to say,
I've done a couple of these webinars, but it's really weird to not see my audience, so um
please bear with me as I uh as I kind of uh work my way through that. Alright, so why think about
infrastructure at all? China's incredible pace and scale of infrastructure building,
both within its borders and globally with the Belt and Road Initiative, have attracted again
a lot of media attention, of course, and a lot of scholarly attention, but as I alluded to earlier,
it hasn't really, you know, been so present in the infrastructure studies
kind of uh scholarship that's come out. There was a big kind of handbook or guide to infrastructural
the infrastructural turn that had 34 chapters or something like this and nothing on China,
despite it having been called, I think quite accurately, the paradigmatic infrastructural
state, right, a state produced by and through infrastructure as a modern project.
so when most of us hear the word infrastructure, we think of pictures like this, we think of
you know highways and railroads and pipelines tunnels and ports and so forth uh, but uh you
know people who have traced its origins have shown how infrastructure started as a fairly narrow term
and has become more and more kind of plastic in its range of meanings. So recently,
some social scientists have theorized how urban residents themselves, like people, can become or
can be productively thought of as infrastructure because their intersections with objects,
practices, and with each other, act as a platform that support life in the city and so thinking of
again infrastructures as things that kind of support other systems or that enabled movement
or what have you. Scholars have also argued that the assent and the proliferation of
infrastructure as a concept in use in social theory, in policy, and in mainstream discourse,
index is a form of calculative reason, as well as a modernist desire to render social
and environmental heterogeneity manageable and amenable to standardized solutions.
So with that sort of growing plasticity, or extensions of conceptualizations of
infrastructure, it's not surprising that landscapes and nature itself has increasingly
become understood as infrastructure. So like dams, bridges, airports, and wastewater treatment
plants, wetlands, forests, and grasslands can also be made into objects of calculation and management
that are aimed at allowing them or making them deliver services that are deemed useful
for society, right, so in other words they can be infrastructures. The term green infrastructure,
which is um kind of a synonym for for natural infrastructure, was first introduced in the
United States in the 1980s in the context of stormwater runoff management. Subsequently,
green infrastructure, natural infrastructure were written again in the US into the Clean Water Act,
it started to gain a lot of popularity in landscape architecture, land-use planning,
environmental design, and natural resource management, as you can see from some of these
illustrations here. As, you know, as it started to grow in popularity, it also started to take
on a much more expansive understanding, beyond just sort of what to do with filtration and storm
water. So for example, Resources for the Future now defines green infrastructure projects as any
uh project that quote "relies on services produced by ecosystems". Another conservation think tank
defines green infrastructure as quote "the ecological framework for environmental
social and economic health, in short, our natural life support system." So in other words,
natural infrastructure has come to be seen more and more in terms of anything
that can create or harness ecosystem services through design and implementation approaches.
So the growing critical literature on infrastructural studies, coming from geography and
anthropology in particular, treat infrastructures both as objects of study in and of themselves, and
simultaneously as an analytical lens onto a range of social phenomena, and that can include the
state, governance, citizenship, corporate power, globalization, and what uh what not. So it's that
simultaneity of both infrastructure as object and infrastructure as analytical tool that I see is
marking the difference between, for example, a natural resource management approach and an
infrastructural approach to or an infrastructure studies approach to natural infrastructure.
So a resource manager might want to simply say "Okay, this is a piece of green infrastructure,
how you know um what are the biophysical characteristics um and how can we calculate
or improve the ecological services it provides," whereas the latter sort of retains an interest in
the material or biophysical characteristics, but also says we have to simultaneously pay attention
to issues, such as the political dimensions of how certain you know how non-human nature
gets mobilized in the service of supporting certain social activities or goals and not others,
what sorts of calculations have to be applied to make this possible,
how the resulting infrastructures are shaped by, but may also exceed the intention of their
designers, and how they differentially affect and are experienced by different groups of people.
So um, when I say applying an infrastructural lens onto green infrastructure, this means
asking um you know what do these what does the treatment of of green infrastructure say about
state society relationships, what might it tell us, for example, about ecological civilization.
Excuse me. Um, so natural infrastructure, right, making natural infrastructure requires investments
and making investments requires calculative tools to justify those investments by revealing or by
creating economic value, or at least by promising to lead to better policy solutions, right,
towards those that are of greater value. And one of the most prominent calculative devices
that has been developed and used for the making of natural infrastructure is known as InVEST,
which is short for integrated valuation ecosystem services and trade-offs.
InVEST is a creation of the Natural Capital Project at Stanford and that operates as a
partnership with a number of organizations, including the Nature Conservancy at WWF, the
Resilience Center in Stockholm, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences and it's really fundamentally
premised on the idea that the world's ecosystems can be seen as capital assets. So what InVEST
actually is is a suite of open source, spatially explicit, software models uh that quantify,
map, and value ecosystem services with the idea that decision makers can then use then to make
decisions about trade-offs between different scenarios. According to one of its directors,
Peter Kaireva, who was a former Chief Scientist at the Nature Conservancy, InVEST seeks to encourage
governments to invest in natural infrastructure. So, as he puts it, quote "Governments build roads,
governments build dams, governments build a lot of things, so why shouldn't governments invest in
ecosystem services, the natural infrastructure, rather than the built infrastructure?" So,
as a calculative tool to facilitate investments into the creation of natural infrastructure,
InVEST works, as geographer Jessica Dempsey puts it, quote "as a political scientific
strategy to translate ecological science into forms that create new interests in nature",
right, and importantly she says at the same time they work as tools for depoliticization, right,
they render technical what are actually highly political interventions. And this is I think
very well illustrated in an article, again that um uh Jack wrote a rebuttal letter to and that I was
also part of um in 2016, but the the the article is is, a little clip of it is on the screen,
it was published in Science in 2016 and it reports on the first national ecosystem assessment in
China, which was conducted by the Chinese Ministry of the Environment and the Chinese Academy of
Sciences using InVEST, right, and covering the years 2000 to 2010. Um, one interesting thing
about this is that the uh the lead author um, Ouyang Zhuyin, is the Director of the Research
Center for Eco-environmental Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the President
of the Ecological Society of China. He's really a key figure in conservation policy making in China.
He is said to have had a profound influence on and broad applications to policy making for ecosystem
conservation, restoration, and land management from the local to national scales in China.
In addition to being a top environmental scientist, he was also a student of both Wang
Rusong and Ma Shijun, who Jesse Rodenbiker has recently published on and those are two prominent
earth system scientists who were key figures in introducing um system-science approaches into
sustainable sustainable development in China. And as Jesse argues in "Making Ecology Developmental"
in China, that is, you know, where in some contexts, ecology is often sort of seen
as a break-on or an argument against certain forms of capitalist development; these figures
and their system science um were kind of central in actually making ecology align with
uh development within within China. And arguably this has um you know direct implications into
the ways in which ecological civilization today is a form of technocratic green modernization.
So, back to this article, they basically model biophysical data using InVEST
and they conclude that China's national conservation policies between 2000 and
2010, which include the Sloping Land Conversion Project, which um
Jack has written a lot about, the Natural Forest Protection Project,
the retire livestock and restore grassland and ecological migration,
among others, have resulted in an overall increase in ecosystem services, right,
and so they say because of China's efforts along these lines we have more food production,
more carbon sequestration, more soil retention, flood mitigation, water retention, and sandstorm
prevention. In fact, they say the only thing that has not improved is is habitat uh biodiversity
habitat. So then the authors kind of make this classic ecological-modernization argument
asserting that the modeling exercise shows that economic growth can coexist with the improvement
of ecosystem services as long as there is, quote, "intelligent policy design." And of course what
this uh does um, and again what what many people have written about, is it renders technical and
apolitical programs that have marginalized the people who are already the most marginalized in
China. So um if you look at the circle around uh or the the circle with the roman numeral three
um that is the middle of the Sanjiangyuan area of Qinghai, the source of the Yangtze, Yellow,
and Mekong rivers, where ecological migration has removed at least 50,000 Tibetan herders from
pastoral livelihoods to these new, and often poorly built, settlements um on the edges of
distant cities and you see an example of what that looks like on the right, right, so there's
been a lot of social dislocation, unemployment, um declining living standards, and so forth,
but again the making of Sanjiangyuan as a natural infrastructure through this ecosystem service
optimization effort obscures what are profoundly uh political consequences and again this was kind
of the the point of this letter uh to Science that um Jack and a number of us wrote. Now,
the reason I'm going on about this at length is because InVEST is not just a scholarly modeling
exercise, right, it's being used actively by China's Ministry of Environmental Protection
and the National Development and Reform Commission to create new
natural infrastructures in the form of what are called "national ecological functional zones"
and a new, quote, "national level ecological conservation red line planning process."
And, in fact, the authors claim that the results generated from this InVEST exercise have, quote,
put 49.4 percent of China's land area into newly incorporated ecosystem function conservation
areas. Indeed, the Natural Capital Project and InVEST have had much more success in
China than in any other country globally in creating interests in green infrastructure.
In our study of the rise of global biodiversity conservation, geographer Jessica Dempsey quotes
one interviewee as reporting excitedly, quote, "China now has entire provinces designated as
conservation provinces or development provinces and they are basically targeting to development
based on that planning and then within every province they have another plan that basically
says where activities can be done and it's all driven by biodiversity and ecosystem services."
So on the one hand, it's absolutely true that certain provinces in Qinghai and the Tibet
Autonomous Region are kind of the primary examples of this, where they've really been designated
as functioning primarily as providers of ecological services,
rather than sites of industrial development, and this uh relate you know this creates all sorts
of secondary effects on the ground- I know um a woman who was um having a sort of factory to have
women produce like handmade soap and that was not permitted on the grounds that this whole,
you know, this whole area was supposed to be zoned for ecological production. At the same time,
anyone who has spent any time in china knows that it's an exaggeration to think that production of
ecosystem services is the only, or often even the primary result of of um you know policy, right,
or that ecological services are now the only political economic rationality for
decision making at different scales. So this soap example is one place where it was used,
but often other interests take over and I'll get back to that point in my case studies.
Nevertheless, it's also the case that InVEST the InVEST tool is more popular in China in
actual policy or purported policy than elsewhere. So to quote Dempsey, again,
quote that "the political scientific strategy of InVEST might be more effective in a decidedly
illiberal state is worth noting," right, there are fewer interests to manage and negotiate among.
So even before this, InVEST-informed national ecosystem assessment,
China had already become a global showcase for certain types of natural infrastructure,
particularly through what's called its sponge cities program, which is an initiative for
cities to lessen urban floods by using dispersed wetland and other green landscapes, rather than
traditional centralized storm storm water drainage pipes. So this has been very rapidly disseminated
throughout the country with a goal that all cities will will become sponge cities, but I want
to argue that in these new efforts to delimit and implement national ecological functional zones and
ecological conservation red lines, also sometimes called ecological red lines, as you see here,
natural infrastructure is being conceptualized at a much larger scale of the nation state. So you
know, in the US with green infrastructure and with sponge cities, it's very much at the urban scale
that's at work, but with this new emphasis on red lines um, we really have a conceptual enframing
of nothing short of the entire national territory, right, as an object of ecosystem service
optimization and here I'm drawing on Timothy Mitchell's use of enframing to refer to a method
of dividing up space and containing, right, and it operates by conjuring up a sort of neutral surface
or volume called space, right, again across the entire national territory. So,
one of the um schemes um, and there's lots of different forms of enframing, one of them,
the major function-oriented zone planning, was introduced in the 11th five-year plan
and it divided all of China into four types of zones. This is separate from the national
ecological function zones and those are also separate from ecological conservation red lines.
So the newest policy, red lines, is supposed to be declared in coordination with major
function oriented zones and also to encompass existing protected areas of various types.
Um so so you know, they're supposed to coordinate between different designations
and also act kind of like a red line of a minimum area, though in fact so far you know
trying to figure out what's actually going on on the ground, it seems that they muddle the
already very complicated panoply of existing and overlapping and sometimes conflicting
designations. Uh but why highlight these red lines? Well, they were
written into China's newly revised Environmental Protection Law in 2015,
and in 2017, the Party Central Committee and the State Council issued a document declaring
that the exact spatial boundaries of ecological red lines must be completed for all provinces
by 2020. So in 2018, Sichuan Province had established red lines accounting for about 30
percent of the area of the province, and and you can see a little bit about that map of, you know,
where those red lines are uh in in the two clips from the document I've got here on the slide,
and as of 2019 more than a quarter of China's land area has been earmarked to be in red lines.
Government documents, uh academic articles by China-based scientists,
and at least one article purportedly written by Xi Jinping himself in Qiushi, which is of course
the the um the party's uh theoretical uh journal, makes clear that ecological red lines, along with
ecological functional zones, are integral to the broader project of ecological civilization.
So, what exactly is ecological civilization and how should we understand the natural
infrastructure being created under its sign? I think most many people here already know a lot
about this, but as a sort of brief review, ecological civilization Shengtai Wenming
was first introduced as an academic term by a Chinese agricultural economist in 1987.
It really entered national discourse, or national political discourse, when Hu Jintao
endorsed it in 2007, and of course it's been elevated to great prominence under Xi Jinping.
It was enshrined in the CCP Constitution in 2012 and the Chinese Constitution in 2018.
Under Xi, of course, it's frequently coupled with the "China Dream", right, "Zhongguo Meng",
it's frequently coupled with the building of the new era of national rejuvenation and
the idea of building a beautiful China. It's also very frequently addressed together with
Xi Jinping's so-called "two mountains theory", right, which is on top here,
which is that clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver mountains.
China scholars have called it, quote, "an ideological framework for guiding the future
of Chinese politics and society," it's been called a symbolic legitimacy a form of symbolic
legitimation for the party state, a political framework, and a socio-technical imaginary.
As with other civilizations that came before, a spiritual, material, and socialist,
it calls for the guidance and alteration of human behavior towards particular governmental
ends. There are lively, if circumscribed, debates within China about what ecological civilization
should actually mean, but most observers um agree, at least from the outside, that it's
really a statist ideology, um right, that it draws on pretty selective and reductionist and
actually contested interpretations of China's traditional philosophies (Taoism, Confucianism)
while maintaining a long-standing focus on economic growth and on the need for
scientific and technological solutions to ecological problems. It's also really replaced
sustainable development. So in the 90s, uh 2000s, sustainable development was very popular as a term
and it's kind of been overshadowed by ecological civilization um and what that does is it Sinicizes
environmentalism, right, it frees China from a trajectory of western societies
and allows China to position itself as a global leader. It's been marked, of course,
by this decidedly authoritarian turn in China's environmental governance, characterized by
military metaphors and campaign-style enforcement. What I want to point out is that, more concretely,
the implementation of reforms aimed at achieving ecological civilization that began in 2015
have entailed centralization, bureaucratic mobilization,
public supervision, a lot more ecological and environmental performance targets for officials,
and importantly, it also kicked into gear a series of centrally organized environmental protection
supervision and inspection teams, right, that started going from the center to the provinces in
the name of ecological civilization to carry out campaign-style enforcement in multiple provinces,
leading to the punishment of large numbers of officials.
So by 2018, these uh ecological civilization inspection teams had reportedly punished more
than 29,000 companies, 18,000 officials, and led to the detention of over 1,500 individuals.
Along with um, you know, punishment and uh yeah of companies and uh detention of
some officials, has come a tremendous amount of dismantling and destruction of existing
built infrastructure. So some news reports uh provide examples, such as the dismantling of 50%
of Shandong Province's chemical industrial parks, hotels, oil refineries, processing sites,
golf courses, and also pig raising operations.
So I think it's hard, you know, I I don't argue against the dismantling of illegal
or environmentally destructive industrial and commercial operations, again, like sitting here
in the US, watching our environmental corporate in regulations being weakened, um you know,
holding environmentally destructive corporations uh accountable sounds uh
quite good, but not surprisingly, in China these have not been the only targets of enforcement.
So, one example in 2016 is the banning of small-scale pig farming in most rural areas,
leading to the forcible demolition of thousands of household pig farms and, as a result,
a direct result, the further concentration of agribusiness capital, right, in the name of
environmental protection. So we know that actually highly concentrated um you know factory farming is
actually extremely environmental environmentally damaging, but that's also what's been happening
in the name of ecological civilization. In another case in Guangdong Province central
level inspections targeted illegally constructed residential districts.
Households that failed to move out within three days had their water and electricity cut off,
which is, we can think of as a form of infrastructural attack, as uh anthropologist
Julie Chu has argued, right, where where infrastructure is used to force resettlement,
right, this is a tactic that is frequently used across China in urban real estate development.
And indeed, for several decades the creation of new built infrastructure in China uh,
in Chinese cities, has been predicated on the creation of an enormous amount of ruin,
rubble, and waste, right, that's how real estate production has happened. And what I want to
kind of argue is that, like the creation of built infrastructure, the creation of certain
forms of abstract, natural infrastructure also has been predicated on creating rubble and waste.
And here I draw on anthropologist Gastón Gordillo's study of rubble, right, which he
argues is a potent lens through which to, quote, "examine space negatively by way of the places
that were negated to create the geographies of the present." So what what gets negated in this new
round of creation of infrastructure, now natural infrastructure. He describes what David Harvey
calls creative destruction uh of capitalism, but he calls it instead productive destruction,
right, to emphasize the ways in which capitalism produces through processes of ruination, right,
so so to sort of um not emphasis emphasize the sort of creative part, but the destructive part.
And he also draws in Ann Stoler's concept of imperial disregard, that is,
the ways in which certain types of destruction um can be affectively neutralized, right, because
there is a refusal to take notice or an attitude of an inattention, where the elite do not have to
take regard for the destruction that underpins the creation of the new. So in theory,
if we if we want to think about the destructive production of built infrastructure that takes
place under the sign of ecological civilization, it's not um a straightforward it's it's not really
well understood in the straightforward terms of conventional capitalist profit making in the way
that it is for real estate. Uh instead, we could argue that the creation of natural infrastructure,
of ecosystem services, is meant instead to maintain the conditions of possibility
for the whole uh capitalist-value creation process to continue at all.
So while I was working, I was on sabbatical in Chengdu from 2018 to 2019 and I was um involved
in a small project that was supposed to be about post-earthquake livelihoods in Sichuan and I
stumbled upon what I'm currently thinking of as the destructive production of built infrastructure
in the name of creating and improving natural infrastructure in the form of two scenic areas.
And the destruction that I will talk about in my two case studies were directly associated with
environmental inspections that were implemented as part of the ecological civilization campaign.
But, like other forms of destructive production, they also end up leading to
profits for some and losses for others. So turning to the two case studies,
uh the first case is from a village that I will call Summit Village as a clear pseudonym
um it is in Longmenshan town, which is in Pengzhou, which is a um a county-level uh
city in Chengdu, uh so the map on the left shows I this yeah this is not necessary for
this audience, but Chengdu and then where Pengzhou is on the northern tip of of
Chengdu. Uh so the town is in the Longmenshan mountain range, which it was near the earth near
the epicenter of the 2008 windfarm earthquake, and the Post Earthquake Reconstruction Plan,
which was ratified within three months of the quake, called for tourism to be
the pioneer industry throughout the earthquake zone. At the same time, the Longmenshan range
has also been designated now as one of two ecological belts of the city of Chengdu. So,
the photo on the right is um a picture I took from the Chengdu Planning Exhibition Hall and
you can see that that Chengdu is now supposed to have two ecological belts, of which this is one,
and they are supposed to have the primary function of conservation and ecotourism.
Uh in 2018, Chengdu also unveiled a new urban master plan that's encapsulated
in the slogan, quote, "extend to the east, expand to the south, control the west, upgrade the north,
and optimize the center," which again is sort of this deepening of function orientation
us and it specifically assigns the Longmenshan area to manifest Xi Jinping's
two mountains theory of ecological civilization, right, the silver and silver gold mountain theory.
So, summit village is a mountainous village in this town; until the establishment of what I will
call the "summit mountain scenic area" in 1986, the villagers were reliant on timber for their
livelihoods. In 1989, the scenic area was promoted from a municipal level to a provincial level um
a scenic area and logging was restricted. So at that time, in 1989, the villagers became involved
in tourism, uh they started opening nongjiale or farm guest houses for their livelihoods.
This became even more important after uh Tuigeng Huanling, where the sloping land conversion
project began in 2000, and that project led to the reforestation of about 90 percent of the village's
farmland. So farming income very much was replaced by the operations of nongjiale. The area started
to become really popular with retirees from Chengdu, it's called kind of the air conditioner
of Chengdu, right, and people from Chengdu or the the sort of you know uh more urbanized area
of Chengdu and other cities would come um spend several months here in the summer to escape from
the heat. And so these evolved over time from rather simple and modest houses to very elaborate
and expansive two-to-three-floor buildings, which many villagers took on significant debts to build.
But by the time the earthquake struck, tourism constituted more than 80 of the household income
in this village and many villagers had taken on very substantial loans, which they had not yet
uh paid back. Up until the earthquake, the the summit mountain scenic area had been operated by
the Pengzhou County Tourism Bureau, which sold the entrance tickets. Now the Pengzhou County
Government had sought soon after the establishment of the of the provincial level scenic area
to upgrade it to a national level scenic area, right, we see these kinds of moves all the time in
Chinese tourism, again something that Jack has written about. Right and so they try to establish
this national level scenic area with expanded boundaries and a new name, the Longmenshan
National Scenic Area. The state council approved the application, but the provincial level
departments never completed or submitted a master plan for approval as required by law, which led to
a very ambiguous um legal status for the scenic area, which becomes important later on. Uh so
in the photos here on the left this is just this is one hamlet in um in this village where or you
know a developer had had sort of built these new houses right before the earthquake struck and then
they all got destroyed and um they had to move these were not uh people don't live here anymore
and then the other photo is is a photograph from lower lower down in this village.
So the 2008 earthquake destroyed about 90 percent of the houses in the village. It also destroyed
the two sites for which the scenic area had been most famous. Without the without those scenic
sites or scenic spots the County Tourism Bureau simply gave up, they abandoned the scenic area,
they just you know completely left. The villagers were left with no visitors
and thus no incomes because they had become so dependent on these nongjiales. As a result,
many residents spent the initial years after the quake undertaking labor migration. However,
in 2012, a town leader encouraged the villagers to return to rebuild their houses and livelihoods,
but the lack of income, due to the absence of tourism, remained an immense
challenge. Um and these are just photos of some resettlement sites that have since been built
for people who have not rebuilt their own uh own houses, these are quite small compared to
uh the nongjiales that have been rebuilt. So in 2014, the party secretary of the village mobilized
members of the the two highest altitude production teams, the ones closest to the scenic parts,
to develop a new scenic spot. They found the picturesque spot, which they say was in their
collective forest uh which had not been affected by the earthquake or by subsequent debris flow
and which had not been in the boundaries of the provincial level summit mountain scenic area. They
this spot was in the boundaries of the national level scenic area, the Longmenshan Scenic Area,
but village leaders very carefully studied the national regulations and determined it not to have
legal status, given that a master plan had never been submitted and approved as required by law,
nor had villagers signed on to the plan. The villagers uh not very creatively renamed
the spot Wolonggu and developed it for tourism. So they registered a new company,
uh 300 village households invested in it with more than 10 million reminbi of registered capital
and the village company built a new road to this newly opened scenic spots, they built paths,
pavilions, toilets, and a wastewater treatment facility, as well as hiring 30 villagers
as employees. The village company was again quite careful to not sell tickets because that could
have provoked some legal question, instead they charged a 10 renminbi parking fee per vehicle
and as cleaning fee per person. Now this quickly became wildly popular, it drew tens of thousands
of visitors every day, including many who came once more to stay in the rebuilt nongjiales,
so from 2015 to 2017 there were reportedly about 700,000 visitors per year in the village,
bringing four to six million renminbi to the village, right, not including the income brought
to individual households with nongjiala's and this again prompted people to start to reinvest.
And the Pengzhou city government at the time appeared to be very supportive of their efforts.
On a number of occasions deputy mayors and the party secretary visited and we
I found a number of um newspaper articles where they fully affirmed the construction
of the scenic spots and sort of held up this village as a model for others.
Now all of this changed very abruptly. On august 20th, 2017, the Pengzhou government
declared the operation illegal, shut it down, posted security guards to block further entrance
and you can see a notice of shutdown and then the you can see the gate there and
so not only were the pavilions and pathways but the toilet facilities were also dismantled.
The sudden about face of the municipal government in its stance on Wolonggu was the result of the
Central Fifth Environmental Inspection Group, which conducted its investigations in Sichuan
Province for a month, starting August 7th, 2017, filing 8,966 reports of environmental problems,
including Wolonggu on the grounds of illegal construction. With the closure of the scenic spot,
the village company's earnings dropped to zero and household income decreased by 70 to 80 percent,
as guests once again didn't come to stay at their nongjiale, right, with nothing
no scenic spot to visit. However, and here's where you know what happens on the ground gets
quite complicated and and there's more going on than the production of natural infrastructure,
the shutdown of Wolonggu did not end plans for tourism, instead the Pengzhou government um
turned the management of this scenic spot over to a state-owned company of the Pengzhou Municipality
Tourism Bureau. The village invested over had invested over half a million yuan in a wastewater
treatment plant capable of treating about 50 tons of water per hour and the county tourism
company simply took it over with no compensation to the villagers. So villagers, not surprisingly,
interpret this as clear evidence that the reason for the shutdown was not environmental protection
and the production of ecological values, but rather that the government had become jealous
of their success in raising money and wanted those profits for the government instead.
That is, in this case, rather than qualitatively new forms of natural infrastructure,
in the sense of providing new ecological services as an abstract infrastructure of state building,
the central environmental inspection team instead provided an opportunity for
the local state to appropriate villagers own income generation through a scenic area form,
right, as a sort of minimally built minimally built infrastructure as a commercial venue.
A similar set of dynamics have also shaped Taoping Village in Wenchuan County in Aba
prefecture, which is just west of Chengdu Municipality. This village is the site of
the Panda Scenic Spot, which was first established in 1999 by an investor from Chengdu.
So this scenic spot also was located in the upper forested area of the village on the boundary of
the buffer and core zones of the Wolong nature reserve. The Wolong Nature Reserve had of course
first been established in 1963 and was expanded in 1975. And the 1975 expansion incorporated
collective forests that had previously only been under the management of the village.
Like many villages in this area, including the previous one, this village largely relied on
agriculture until the implementation of Tuigeng Huanling, or the Sloping Land Conversion Project,
which resulted in more than three quarters of uh the household farmland being planted by trees,
leaving families with an average of you know about 0.7 mu of farmland per household. So
fortunately for the households in this village, right when uh the Sloping Land Conversion Project
was implemented. this investor came in and um and started to establish the panda scenic spot.
So, given its location on the boundary of the buffer and core zone, where construction in the
wallowing nature reserve was not actually supposed to be allowed the construction of the scenic spot
by this investor had to require special permission from the Provincial Forestry Department and indeed
the Provincial Forestry Department in 1999 issued a special memorandum allowing the investor to
construct the scenic area, which included several hotels and the scenic area featured horse rides,
rafting, zip-lines, camping, a little mini train ride for three kilometers,
and hiking opportunities. The construction of the scenic spot also brought a well-paved road to the
village, which you can see in this picture, and so villagers started to you know take up income
earning opportunities such as carrying you know tourists up on wooden sedans, carrying packs for
rafters, guiding horses, and running barbecues. And as with many other places, villagers also
began to turn their houses into nongjiale for the tourists visiting the scenic area.
Now despite its proximity to the earthquake epicenter, the village was not very severely
affected and the main hotel of the scenic area actually stood in place after the quake.
Nevertheless, as part of the recovery effort, the county purchased the scenic spot from the
investor and spent significant funds on its reconstruction. Also as part of this whole
suite of post-earthquake measures, the National Tourism Administration gave the title of quintuple
A special tourist attractions, right, five A's to a number of sites in Wenchuan, including this one,
right, and this is supposed to indicate China's most important and best maintained attractions.
So so after the earthquake this county government enterprise started to operate this Panda Scenic
Area as part of this nationally recognized you know 'quintuple A' site and this is an official
map from that time and and on this map the scenic spot is described as, quote, "an important part
of the Wolong National Nature Reserve," so it's actually seen as part of the nature of protection.
And as of 2017, 77 out of 101 households in the villages were operating nongjiale. However,
in 2017, the scenic spot was abruptly closed as a result of environmental inspections. Due
to its location on the border of the buffer and core zones of the Wolong National Nature Reserve,
where such construction and commercial activity were never supposed to be permitted and if you see
this hotel it's pretty outrageously large um it is it has a very big footprint, right, and so
it it was the Provincial Forestry Department that had allowed this in 1999. Of course when it was
closed down in 2017, the Provincial Forestry Department was never held accountable for
having given permission for this. Um all of the built infrastructure in the scenic spot,
except for this hotel uh, was which was deemed too large to actually move without causing
even more damage, was dismantled and removed. So all the train tracks and the other hotels
and um uh zip-lines and and whatnot. The abrupt closure and dismantling of the scenic spot was
quite shocking to the villagers, they described it as having happened overnight,
according to one village leader he said you know many cried when they heard the news because they
realized they had no way to recover the loans that they had taken out to build
and expand their nongjiale and so village income fell by more than half right away.
Now this closure of the scenic site coincided with the end of the two phases of subsidies for
the Sloping Land Conversion Project and was followed almost immediately by the village
leaders discovery that their entire village had been slated for inclusion into the newly
uh declared Giant Panda National Park right which is supposed to span Sichuan, Gansu and
Shanxi provinces and cover an area triple the size of the US's Yellowstone National Park.
Now at the time of this surprise discovery, the village leaders had been in the process
of negotiating with a company for rafting operations outside of the core in the buffer
areas of the Wolong nature reserve in a bid to try to bring tourists to the village again in
the wake of the scenic spot closure and they had reached an agreement with a company to develop a
new rafting operation to bring tourists back to their nongjiala, their farm guest houses,
but as they plan to move forward the county government informed them that, at least as of
2019, and I don't think it's changed since then, rafting would not be allowed inside the national
park and they also talked about how you know they were brought to a meeting and basically told "sign
this paper that says you are in the park and you know whether you sign it or not uh is not going to
make any difference about whether your village is in the park, so you better sign it because you'll
just make trouble for yourself if you don't." Now unusually, the village leaders here, unlike
in many many parts of China, don't blame local officials, but rather Xi Jinping himself, right,
along with his ecological civilization drive and his two mountain theory, which they particularly
uh call out for, in their words, making peasants the last of the last in China today.
So to wrap up um you know, as the US withdraws ever more completely, though hopefully
not permanently, from all forms of global environmental cooperation, never mind leadership,
it's hardly surprising that China's ecological civilization model of authoritarian green
development has gained considerable traction. Ecological civilization is now regularly touted
in the pages of prestigious scientific journals, as well as the halls of the United Nations
as a model for other countries to emulate and indeed, you know, from my personal perspective,
in comparison with the Trump regime's denial of climate science, the attention to the
production of natural infrastructure to create ecosystem services has much to recommend it. Um
there it is hard to argue against the shutting down of illegal oil refineries or the enforcement
even of long-standing restrictions on building inside nature reserves for Panda Habitat.
At the same time, however, the cases of the two villages in Pengzhou and Wanchuan, Sichuan are
cautionary tales and not at all exceptional ones about what gets turned into rubble in
the name of ecological civilization, right. In post-earthquake Sichuan,
what we see is a shift in the state's interest from the production of built infrastructure
to support livelihoods after the disaster to, not very many years later, sort of forgetting
about that and turning to the destruction of most built infrastructure, except for the ones that
the local state wants to expropriate for itself, right, for the production of an abstract national
natural infrastructure. So unfortunately the demolition of built infrastructure that occurs
in the process of setting aside zones for ecosystem services, right, whether scenic areas,
ecological functional zones, or red lines, end up serving the interest of centralized state power
and the urban consuming classes, while the resulting rubble and the concomitant
deprivation of access to peasants livelihood resources are the subject of what Stoller calls
"imperial disregard," there is a refusal to regard them in the pursuit of ecological civilization.
At the same time, however, it's clear that the intention to set aside ecological red lines
does not mean that China has seamlessly become an idealized ecological state. Local, political,
economic interests, as always, allow powerful actors to simply expropriate entrepreneurial,
ecological, and aesthetic resources from villagers, in some cases without any material
or biophys you know changes in the material or biophysical characteristics or qualities of the
landscape. So returning to the question of the infrastructural turn, what I've argued is that
using infrastructure as an analytic can help focus our attention on the socio-political relations
around the concept of natural infrastructure that has otherwise been rendered technical.
And finally, thinking about the ways in which, as many have argued,
different types of infrastructure are associated with different temporalities,
I suggest that in ecological civilization, the infrastructural time of the village, right, with
its sort of slow accretion, the destruction from the earthquake and then the slow accretion once
more has really been displaced by a national scale infrastructural time, which is a developmentalist,
linear, smooth temporality that's oriented towards a statist future. So that is all
from my presentation, I'm going to unshare my screen and see if we can have a discussion.
Um thank you so much Emily, so now the for for the QnA, if you move your
mouse uh if you move your mouse around you'll see down at the bottom of the zoom screen a QnA icon,
please enter your questions into that and Professor Yeh will be
taking her own questions for the next uh well, however long we have questions.
I suppose since there aren't yeah well I don't know who's allowed to talk and who's not, you
could either type them in or if hand raising works that that works too, I guess.
Okay there's a hand up from Juliet.
I don't see Juliet on my screen it's very strange but uh ...
Hi, oh Juliet, go ahead please. Oh, me first, thank you um Kristen Stable to the University
of Buffalo, it was a really interesting talk. I have to admit I signed up because of the original
description because I was really curious to hear how you were going to explain this Chinese
government's great commitment to this and uh but but you know I I'm not sure how that description
got into your talk but I was really glad I I came anyway and my question is so in China very packed
Chinese cities like with the Xinjiang Cun and stuff you know there's a there's a an argument
for getting rid of them based on health, based on quality of life, that sort of thing and I'm
kind of curious if you see that if what are the significant differences between this kind of
infrastructural development based on environmental issues environmental justifications versus quality
of life, versus safety, those justifications, thank you. That's a really good question um
yeah I I haven't myself done much on the Xinjiang Cun so um I think it matters a lot whether um
you know I think the two things that are involved here that may not be involved there
are a loss of access to livelihoods.
And in some cases, not so much the ones I I talked about here in particular,
but you can definitely see them in other places, kind of a a physical resettlement,
so I'm not sure if the redevelopment that you're talking about is of the type where
they're actually moving people or just- I know there's a move to urban regeneration
uh kind of urban renewal as well which I think is slightly different and I'm not
is that more along what you're talking about? Or is it more we need these people to um
sort of stay in this place, but but live in different kinds of buildings? Well I think both
happen, but there definitely is relocation for for a reason for justification being for quality of
of life, like you know uh uh Shanghai Gone, Qin Shao's book about the destruction of but I think
it also happens that some people are able to stay and I think that's more likely down in southern
Chinese cities where the village has a stronger corporate identity and more legal legal clout.
Um yeah, I guess I mean there's all sorts of resettlement and concentration um and removal
and consolidation happening everywhere. I do think southern, you know, I do think like a lot of what
happens in Shenzhen there is a lot more village yeah there's village corporations that have much
more strength than in the case of Sichuan, um you know the other thing that I see a lot in
in areas around these villages, but not in these particular villages,
is consolidation for you know, the idea of not wasting land and that's ultimately driven by kind
of environmental logic too, right, it's like we're running out of farmland, so we have to
have a red line and so, but you can trade and so in order to create that more farmland, you
take this IDD of everyone and you can turn that into farmland, right, so there is this sort of uh
you know red line for farmland that has a somewhat environmental
argument to it too. Um yeah, I mean in these cases, in these particular cases of scenic areas,
there's not much justification going on other than environmental and that, you know, there's no
arguments being made about health or even much development. That's, again, different from
um like in the in the Tibetan resettlement case where
there's also this idea that people need to be removed so that the grasslands can can perform
their ecological services better um and there there's a sort of layered like, well this is
good for these backwards people who wander around with their livestock and by putting them into
these urban settlements they'll become more developed. Um in these particular
cases so so I think I I think the the drive to um ecological services can intersect with
all these other kinds of rationales, in these particular cases around Chengdu it was really
really just you know ecological civilization means we have to do these things and therefore um these
activities that have been going on so far are not acceptable uh anymore. I think I lost the threat
of your question so if I didn't answer it very well please... No thank you that's great. Juliet
had had something, sorry Juliet. Yeah no no I was my zoom shut down and then opened again I think
when the speaker or when everything was switched over and um I just wanted to flag for also the
person that is for Amala, who's organizing that, I don't think it's possible now to add
open questions so if people start generating questions I don't know if they can add them,
but maybe it's just me um but my question was um was that I think that in in analyses especially of
China's environmental uh approaches, there's some cynicism and I think it's correct cynicism, that
um everything is about power, everything is about state power versus um certain individual actors
ability to profit and that's your story lends to that in a way that I think is nuanced and
and well argued, but is there are there ways in which culture and ecological civilization
and specifically, you know the fact that villagers can get together and formulate their own idea the,
for me what was so interesting about the story is that it's it's cases of villages coming together
and themselves kind of defining what how how the place that they live in is ecological or is
attractive and scenic, and do you see like kind of cultural attitudes shifting
um along with kind of the scramble to make um money and to garner political power through this
this bigger strategy of ecological civilization, or is it just cynically kind of money in politics?
That's a great question.
I do see a lot of people who buy into ecological civilization and I think there have been some
surveys um, you know, about about the term ecological civilization as well, where um
urban residents uh and some rural villagers do kind of align with various parts of it.
I think the idea that there needs to be environmental protection is actually quite
quite well accepted and more accepted than here, you know what I mean? um
le and then like with with Tibetans, again who I know better than these I I've done a lot more with
them than than with these villagers near uh near Chengdu, although I I agree with you you know,
these people were very proactive about learning the law and articulating like what was beautiful
about their own place um uh so I I think that kind of bottom-up agency happens a lot, I think
you know the people I'm familiar with, more in Tibetan rural areas, are also
very um active in thinking about the need for some sort of ecological future, right, but um
and working pretty hard to try to align their ways of being and and uh their idea of what a beautiful
cultural landscape is with the state's discourse of ecological civilization to sort of use it
agentively. Um I think I'm also just like attracted to discontent or something because I
I a lot of, you know, these in these two villages villages in particular people were really upset
like they were they were really mad um about what was happening to them.
Um so they saw ecological civilization quite cynically as a state project, but that didn't mean
that they weren't in some cases, you know, in some ways proud of the fact that there are wild animals
right that live near to to where they're where they live um. So I think I think
I think there's both going on um, I think yeah just that the way the past few years have gotten
much more authoritarian has not helped these rural
places. I I do think a lot of urban residents are quite on board with ecological civilization.
Could I just say something? I'm glad to see that more people are showing up,
I think we have a small enough group that if you wish to turn on your video it's probably fine
um and also as uh yeah, as Juliet noted, it seems like the QnA function isn't actually
operating, so raise the raised hand function or raising the hand on your screen is probably a
great idea and I see Magnus you have your hand up so let you take off.
Oh thank you. Thank you for the very interesting talk. I was very curious about um the historical,
looking-back that you also um gave us a little bit about, and um I was curious about how
the people who invented this term "ecological civilization", you mentioned that they it has
supplanted the term sustainable development, I think you mentioned that that was because it um
it's a nativization, it's this this ecological civilization is a Chinese-invented
term, so it allows for staking something out that's not connected to somebody else's
concept, if I understood it correctly, and so I'm I'm curious about how the people who
came up with this term and the the politicians,
the political figures who use it um, how they reconcile this notion with the
the devastation environmental devastation that's been going on for centuries and centuries in
china. I mean the massive deforestation, all of that, which doesn't go well with
this idea, I understand, as being part of this that China was always ecological and
always an ecological civilization. I I'm curious if you can say something about how um
how this environmental history of China is talked about, how that's talked about by these these
proponents of Chinese ecological civilization. Uh I'm I I want to add as a footnote that um
I'm asking also because I had this strange experience: a couple years ago I hosted a
Chinese-visiting scholar who was very keen on trying to write for American journals
to to to sort of augment his publication record and um he showed me um he wrote up a manuscript
which was about ecological civilization and um that was the first time I had ever heard of
this term, I had never come across this before, and uh it was a little bit out of the blue for me
because I I tried to ask this scholar can you define it a little more and he had great trouble
defining it and later I realized that this is something that's always an edict coming from above
and and it lands in the lab of academics and then they have to go and write papers about it and
probably that's what happened to my my friend that he felt obliged to write on this topic
and he had actually not been thinking very much about what it really um what it really um
would mean and he also was struggling with this um uh problem of how to reconcile
the pretty horrific environmental history that is part of of Chinese history uh
with this notion of of China somehow being uh naturally an ecological civilization.
Yeah that's a great question I know and I I would love to hear actually what other people,
I know Jack has written about ecological civilization as well, my understanding
is uh that the people who champion it, and now it's become such a political term right,
uh they don't they don't acknowledge that you know what Mark Elvin calls the 3,000 years of
lack of sustainability, right, they they very much um selectively look back at certain things
um from Confucius and from Daoism and say, you know, look at that that shows that we've always
been aligned with this um I mean I think certain elements of the recent socialist
past are just sort of said, well, those were mistakes right but we've gotten over it um
yeah I don't really have a great answer for that because I I
I don't see a lot of substance in it. I mean I think some of the earlier writings are sort of
maybe arguing for an ecological civilization, rather than necessarily just asserting that
we're always already ecological, but rather, this is something that we need to do and so that's
kind of also the civilizational aspect of it, we need to make people behave in certain ways, guided
by the party, right, that will make us ecological and we can look back at these antecedents,
but I think when it becomes a sort of "we were always like this" um it's really a sort of
nationalist China on the global stage, you know, China as a global leader move, rather than any
serious look at environmental history, but again I I'd love to I'd love to hear what other people
think of that or whether anyone has encountered anything more critical because because I haven't.
Jack, have you?
Um from within China, no. Yeah um I mean I think like one thing I guess just the one thing that I
add to that is that I mean there is a, right, like like they sort of like retake a certain version
of Marxian historiography and say there was primitive civilization, agricultural civilization,
industrial civilization, and now we have ecological civilization. And industrial
civilization was environmentally disastrous and it was because of that linear teleological advance,
um you know and you know, and so they can say that you know I guess we had to pollute first
and clean up later, but now we're in the business of cleaning up yeah, so. I I think you're right,
it does there's a stage, right, and Jesse's work shows this um, but there's also this like,
you know, very Chinese national pride look we can point back to our ancient philosophies to support
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
clear contradiction where the history, you know, like the teleological approach says that this is
a universal unnecessary project, but at the same time, there's all this stuff saying that this is
China's national destiny and it can only happen in China because of the leadership
of the Chinese Communist Party and other kinds of things and it's also just a rubric for all
the policies that happen to already be coming through, I will stop there this is not my show.
Thank you, Martin. We've got a hand up from uh Ren-Huang Paul Chong. Okay I can only see half the
hand, so I know Martin had one and then someone else had one, so whoever wants to go first.
Who is who is who is on first well I'll say my my quick question and that is, you know, I'm I
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
discussion of population growth and the need to sustain to get a sustainable level of population
and in fact undeveloped population and I'm just curious as to whether in ecological,
the human being is any way in any way the number of human beings is in any way thought of as a
portion of the ecological uh uh equation that has to be uh con considered. I know in in in the
initial books on ecology that's a clear the clear uh a clear uh area of discussion
um then Do you mean in china or in general? I mean in China because they're using the word ecology
and ecological they've got to consider the effects of, I don't mean just industrial change in
pollution but I uh, and that's clearly an issue, but simply the pressure of growth in population on
and the number of people. Some people have talked about that in terms of urban versus rural,
some people are talk, I guess you've made some reference to it when you talk about the
decrease in farmland um and therefore the need to consider crop production and food
production things of that sort. Yeah I mean I guess I have a couple things um you know uh
I think anyway I mean so china has, of course, had a one child policy for a very long time,
but uh somewhat ironically, um right now it's really trying to encourage
uh people to, as you know they've loosened that because they have a real demographic crisis,
right, in terms of there's not going to be enough laborers to or yeah to support all of the
retired people uh because of so many years of a pretty drastic um one child policy, and so uh
no you know populate like strict population control is not part of ecological civilization
because of this demographic economic crisis. I guess I would also say from you know stepping back
from just China that um you know many scholars have pointed to not population numbers, but
consumption, as sort of being right the uh more at the root of our ecological crises, that it is um
the disproportionate over-consumption of certain parts of the world population and not so much
you know the problem is over there with those, you know, developing countries that have too
many people, right, that's a that's a pretty problematic framing, but I think China's uh you
know China's approach right now is that they're going full steam ahead for for uh consumption,
right, except they are doing something about um you know climate change, we can talk about
some problems with that, but um but population control right now is not a big issue because of
the unintended effects of many decades and also just in terms of the urbanization issue you know
a lot of the urbanization is happening because of real estate, right, it's happening because um
in the current stage of capitalism a lot of capital a lot of economic growth is being
driven by urbanization and by and many governments rely on the revenue from real estate development
for their uh for their continued operation, and so that is happening, you know, and that pushes
against ecological civilization too, right, so there's all these ways in which we have a set
of ideals of ecological civilization and then the political economic realities of capitalist
accumulation kind of get in the way of that. Another good example of that is just with um
you know with uh with climate change where, again, like, you know China has a much better plan than
the US, clearly, at least China is paying attention to climate change, on the other
hand even as it's investing in a lot of renewable energies um it's also building coal-fired power
plants like mad, right, there's already an over capacity of coal-fired power plants and
they keep adding and adding and adding them, as well as funding them overseas, why because they
would be in a severe over because of um because of over-accumulation of capital and that capital
needs somewhere to go, right, and so those things are happening at the same time as ecological
civilization is coming in and they don't always align, in fact, they often don't align.
Okay, oh sorry. Someone else yeah someone else had their hands up tonight.
Yeah so we have uh Ren-Huang Paul Chung and then Lourdes Casanova and then Qing Chu.
Oh yeah, I just wanted to ask like the concept of ecological civilization, how is it do you see it
being say like adopted by governments in Southeast Asia and how how is this concept of ecological
civilization like in the context of the world initiatives? That's a really fantastic question
um I know I've seen a lot of um increasingly like publications in Science and Nature,
right, where where Chinese scientists are saying ecological civilization
it's not just for China, China can lead the world in this, I see it a lot in
the idea of the Green Belt and Road. I don't know um this would be, it would be great if someone
like Julia or or others know whether it's been taken up by those government, that I don't know
but I think it certainly has that potential uh because it's been it's been championed so much
and again like the UN has very much championed it, but I I don't know about specific countries
there's also you know along with the taking up of the Belt and Road, I think there's also
um some growing skepticism, right, there's like the attraction of the Belt and Road
and then there's also certainly civil society um awareness of some of its drawbacks too. Thank you.
Yeah if anyone knows if there's specific countries that have taken it up, I'd be-
okay Juliet says I hear Green Belt and Road, but not ecological civilization.
Maybe the civilization is a little too much for people,
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,
you had spiritual civilization, you had socialist civilization,
right, so so it has certain cultural resonances that may not play very well in other places.
Okay
I think you're next.
I can't hear.
This is are you frozen it looks like Lourdes Casanova may be freezing up.
Yeah oh there you oh we can hear you now.
If you could hear me, could you please ask your question? Oh she looks like we just lost her
um, then I guess Xin Shu you could you ask and hopefully we'll have that asker reappear.
Okay, thank you. Um, I really enjoyed the talk uh I have uh well, originally one
one question, but I was also striked by the uh the term uh, or the comment on the this
basically the concept of ecological civilization, well uh in Chinese
definitely it's a Shengtai Wenming, right, but the Chinese official uh translation,
English translation, of this phrase actually it's not civilization, it's ecological
advancement or ecological progress. I found that you know quite interesting,
I don't know if you have any you know insight on that, but my main question is really about the
the law of uh state, particularly, the change dynamics of the central, local
governmental relations uh against the backdrop of Xi Jinping's uh centralization of power, right, so
I mean this this is basically I mean as we all know it's really very critical
when it comes to the uh environmental protection or sustainable development of ecological
uh civilization, whatever you call it, I mean the how you really uh implement
the policies uh, you know, made, right, but before Xi Jinping, I mean for political scientists
usually they they look at Chinese political system they still think this is authoritarian,
but they developed, so called, the fragmented or sovereigntarianism
framework to make sense of the increasingly uh pluralistic policy process in which there's other
actors right, even you know, some are state or others from civil society or from society
and then they end here the policy process and so-called the policy entrepreneurs
to shape or to, you know, compete uh to shape the policy. Well with Xi Jinping's re-centralization
effort, I think you kind of touch upon the the change relationship between the central
and the local governments, right, particularly your your case studies, I mean the uh the last
case uh to the very end, you said I mean, the villagers, basically they don't
blame the their local uh government, but Xi Jinping, right, so my question is really uh giving
I think this is quite interesting because, on the one hand, when when the uh authoritarian framework
was really fragmented to the extent that the local leaders may do whatever they like,
ignoring the, you know, even the very serious policies state parliament I mean national policy,
but now with the more relentlessly implemented centralized control, actually have to
do whatever Xi Jinping or, you know, the centrally the central government want them to do, but
I wonder it's still a space here for the local government to
negotiate for some for their local interests, or there's ways they may, on the one hand pretend
to do whatever they have to or do whatever they have to do anyway, on the other, still try their
best to play their role to to suit the local condition, particularly the kind of I think the
vested interest between the local leaders or local politicians and maybe the development, you know,
the the capitalists or or the the interest groups, as well as the, you know, the local people
so or basically no it's simply just uh oh always I mean the top-down kind of story, Xi Jinping
it's like an emperor, I mean can control and then everyone had to do this, there's very little room
for not only I mean we are not talking about civil society, but here just local government.
So that's my main question, thank you. Yeah thank you, I uh that's a great um and
and uh complicated question, I don't think, so first, I was very surprised when these people,
this village party secretary actually went straight for Xi Jinping and said, you know it's
his fault, like I have never heard that before, I've always heard, you know, Xi Jinping is great,
but it's the local leaders, right, the more typical story, so I was very surprised to hear
that. I don't think all uh space for maneuver for local governments has gone away, I think
it's still there um I just think it's less than it was before, right, I think that that um you know
yeah I I mean the space for negotiation has undoubtedly shrunk um, this kind of campaign
style implementation where they don't trust the province to do the job, right, they have to like
take people from the center and go to these places is an indication of you know this, you know,
Xi Jinping wanted wanting to be the emperor or whatever. That said you know,
China has had a negotiated, fragmented, authoritarian state system for a very long time,
I don't think that has disappeared. Um I just think it has, you know, another example um you
know and of course there's all different levels of local right and so so there's all different levels
of politics at play, but one really interesting thing I heard about this Panda National Park um,
which was difficult to to dig too much into, but um you know, I had heard that the provinces
were sort of told you're going to get, you know, they all the provinces thought that they had some
subsidies coming to them and so they tried to play the system when they were asked by the central
government "well how many more hectares of land should be in this park?", right, and so they all,
trying to play the system as they always did, over-reported or or reported a large number and
then they were told um well you're not going to get any subsidies, but you have to implement it,
right, so then they were really very upset and there's a lot of I think tension between Sichuan
province and the center around the Panda National Park, so I don't again I don't I don't think the
fact that they were kind of trying to strategize to give a large number to get more subsidies
shows that there's agency, the fact that you know the center is trying to not pay them
shows some tension, I don't know how that's going to play out in the end, yeah so so I think both
of those things are happening there's this like increasing authoritarianism and negotiation is
not it's not dead, right, it's it would be hard to imagine that happening completely.
Thank you so much, what's your sense of the Chinese official translation- Excuse
me, Excuse me. Sorry yes, John let me let me actually, I have seen ecological civilization
a lot in English, so I'm quite curious that it's not translated that way? I wonder if some
people are starting to translate it as something else because they realize, you know, that it has
certain connotations in English that may not match very well, but I have certainly seen ecological
civilization in some official documents too, so so yeah that's all I have to say about that.
My apologies for the interruption, so we were we were past six o'clock but uh Professor Yeh has
great uh has kindly offered to stand to finish just a couple more questions, we have two hands
already up please be economical in asking your questions and uh thanks everybody. Hi,
so my name is Lourdes Casanova and I'm from the School of Management, my question so one question
in one comment, first thank you very much for your very interesting presentation, I was not aware
that China was developing and at the same time to remain ecological, which usually doesn't happen,
much most countries while they develop they cause tremendous environmental uh damage, and then
my question is if you could comment on GEIDCO, G-E-I-D-C-O, that's the project of the like the
world-wide web, so the electricity worldwide web, so the idea is that state-grid would connect the
electricity grids of all over the world with the intention to manage the solar panels and the way
and winter farms and coal and electricity and nuclear nuclear and hydroelectrical dams,
so could you please comment on that because definitely it's a major major project for
the world and it's already happening, so they are already connecting Mongolia, Russia, Cambodia and
others. Um yeah so to the first point, I I guess I just want to clarify a little bit that um uh, you
know, for a long time China's stance was, we're developing so we're not going to take care of the
environment, that's a Western capitalist bourgeois thing, right, that from the 1970s until later on
you know for a couple decades, now China very much is taking on the mantle of global leadership
in environmental protection, so that's what ecological civilization is all about,
that's not to say that there's not still a lot, an awful lot, of really terrible
environmental problems happening both in terms of industrial pollution and other uh types of
environmental problems, and also that many of china's environmental solutions really cause
further problems, um I I have to apologize, I I really don't know anything about GEIDCO,
so pardon my ignorance. I want to say one thing about um, you know, the grid is um
it's highly political in China, at least, um and certainly what you have right now
is um a lot of uh renewable energies that are being developed, not connected to the grid,
or they are connected to the grid but they are severely curtailed because they because
coal-fired power plants um they need to they are they are privileged in terms of being allowed to
generate a certain amount of electricity, there is an oversupply of electricity,
so there's lots and lots of energy both coal-fired and renewable being produced in China right now
um that is simply not even used right, so again there's a there's a big kind of political economy
question there but I don't know anything about GEIDCO and I I apologize for that.
There was one- Okay and last we have oh we have Kan Yuan.
Uh can you hear me? Yeah I yeah first yeah thank you, it was really interesting talk um, and to me
the questions like I think China is really uh has a unique history and also developed really fast
well, a lot of, I think the UK is like the I can understand the villagers who are upset, but if it
seems to me they didn't follow the law the rule to begin with, right, so they tried to play the game,
you know, I think, so I'm just trying to step back if you know something in the US like if Ithaca
would decide who the local people decide to, you know, benefit from the waterfalls locally and we
start something without what would all happen and the other thing and you know I think the tension
um between the local government and the state government that has been there uh almost all
the time, but I think it's more, um how can I say, so because I would love another project about uh
uh who to get a switch and we did a survey about the Chinese people I think
you mentioned they blame local government, but not the central government, it seems the
tension is always there, but then I think about to what extent that when we interpret results from
China we have to take into consideration uh you know the unique Chinese history,
things are changing so fast, and what happened on the ground it actually outpaced the rule
uh you know laid out by the government and also you know the tension between their different
layers of authority and that's actually to me is universal so for example tension between US state
versus central government, or even at Cornell, you know, department college and university level
each layer has its own interest. The tension, you know, so some sometimes I feel like the tension,
you know, you observe in China, it can be, you know, anywhere. Yeah, so I'd like,
thank you for that question, I have two comments to it. One um, so in these two cases, right,
it's not the villagers who didn't follow the rules, it's the county government um so in the
first place, the county government uh wanted to make it a national level scenic area, but they
never followed through on their legal obligations um, but uh so they didn't have a plan, they didn't
do any village consultation, but they insisted that something that is actually legally not
not clear, or really not viable from the point of view from the law, was in place.
In the second case, uh it was the the county force, the Provincial Forestry Bureau, that gave
an investor a businessman permission to build, right, so in both cases, it is not villagers
who didn't follow the rules, it is actually the government. But the but the government
or the Provincial Forestry Bureau are not held accountable, it's the villagers who are held
accountable, right, so that's kind of the what I'm pointing out to um and yeah like there's conflicts
everywhere, there's tensions everywhere, I don't think villagers always do the right thing from the
the point of view of the environment, what I'm trying to step back and say is that um certain
actors end up being held into account and certain priorities, in this case, a sort of national
developmentalist vision, is takes priority over a village sense of time and justice, right, so that
ultimately what ends up happening aligns with a sort of statist view, not with the village view
um from from a more abstract infrastructural perspective and I just think yeah so so um
I'm not I'm not trying to say villagers are environmental angels or um they always do
something from an abstract, right point of view, but who gets who gets held to what standards,
right, and with what effects and who benefits from that is is kind of what I'm trying to point out.
Well, thank you everybody for such wonderful questions and to um Emily for such a wonderful
presentation and and answers, we do have another presentation uh by Bin Xu uh coming up next week
on um sent-down youth and their memories of the Maoist era and we hope to see you all there. Yeah,
thank you everyone for the questions, I really uh they were very thought provoking and and I'll
keep thinking about them going forward so thanks so much for this opportunity.