For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the “Greening the Motherland” campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, 2025) explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present.

Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas. Combining literary, historical, and environmental studies approaches, he shows that these ideas acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li historicizes authoritarian environmentalism and probes the global-local dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China's growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation.

Cheng Li is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University, specializing in modern Chinese environmental literature, film, science fiction, and history. He is a literary scholar and a cultural historian. His research focuses on cultural history, ecocriticism, and infrastructure.

Yadong Li is an anthropologist-in-training. He is a PhD candidate of Socio-cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. More details about his scholarship and research interests can be found here.

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