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Cheng Li, "Contested Environmentalisms: Trees and the Making of Modern China" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we will discuss a really interesting and timely book that follows Trees in Modern China, quite literally about trees and relevant media material, as well as activities from Republic in China's Arbor Day and afforestation campaigns conducted by the communists, all the way to contemporary projects like one of the world's largest e commerce companies, Alibaba's Ant Forest. Along the way, the new book today shows how trees in China have become powerful metaphors and mediators through which people imagine nationality, citizenship, sovereignty, ethnic relations and environmental futures today. I'm very glad to have the author, Dr. Li Cheng, with us today. So, Cheng, welcome to the New Books in Chinese Studies.
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D
Thank you very much for having me.
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C
Thank you. The book we will be discussing today is Contested Environmentalism, Trees and the Making of Modern China, published by Stanford University Press in 2025. Our guest today, Li Cheng, is assistant professor of Chinese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University. He works on modern Chinese literature, film, science fiction and history. His studies sit at the intersection of environmental history, cultural studies and the question of identity and contemporary China. So, first of all, Chung, could you briefly introduce yourself to our audience in your own words? How did you come to the project on this very interesting thing about trees and modern China? And what broader question environmental humanities and Chinese studies have shaped your work across archives, literature and other material?
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D
Once again, thank you very much for having me. I'm Literary scholar and cultural historian in modern China. And I actually feel the environmental problem is actually one of the most pressing issues facing China. In order to understand the rise of China, the environmental is definitely one of the most important piece for us to understand. Especially China became a more and more important role in the contemporary technological breakthrough and also the green energy. I think one of the starting points of this project can trace back to 2014 when I was a graduate school student at Madison, Wisconsin. So I was writing a paper on tree planting in the borderland. I was thinking about how the tree planting has ever started in modern China. To my great surprise, when we top of the Mao era, most people will think about the gridley forward, tree cutting and famine. But I came across very different documents when I was reading through. I was finding oh, the Great Leap Forward actually have a lot of tree planting initiatives. So I was trying to tracing back how this sort of counterintuitive story started. And that begins this 10 year long book project tracing back to 2014. I think if I want to answer your question, how this book relates to China studies. First of all, I want to say environmentalism has a lot of deep relationship to the tree planting across the world. In either the British or French empire, the tree planting has deeply associated with the rise of green imperialism in a lot of environmental historians works, including Richard Grove. The second layer of the research is how environmentalism shapes Chinese nation building, separate formation. I tend to regard tree planting not only as a physical exercises, but also to present a positive image of modern China to build a strengthened social relationship and also cultivate kind of active citizenship and egalitarian society. In this way, tree planting goes beyond the physical activity itself, has a lot of symbolic culture and political implications. I think the third layer of my book was trying to answer another question. How can we compare in contrast especially authoritarian environmentalism versus democratic environmentalism? How can we historicize the authoritarian environmentalisms?
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C
Excellent. Thank you for sharing all this thought during your early, very pragmatic, very realistic concerns about Chinese society, like environmental problems. But also this project is based on the questions based on your literature reading. It's just fascinating for our graduate student to understand how a fascinating project begins. And particularly I really like the title of the book, you know, Contested Environmentalisms. And I think the two keywords were here. You know, the first is contested, second is environmentalism. So we will start our conversation with these two keywords. So I'm very curious about the origin story of the term contested in your title. So did you begin this project already convinced that tree planting in modern China was a deeply contested field? Or did this sense of context emerge gradually out of concrete research questions or archival puzzles during your literature reading?
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D
Actually, to be really honest, at the beginning when I read this book, I read this actually a term paper. All the content chapter from chapter one to chapter five coming from my graduate school works mostly at Yale. So when I first wrote my term paper, I have no clue what I'm going to write about. I was just to collect materials and try to find the argument. The more I study the I found there is a different type of environmental issues has evolved across time and space. For example, I talked about the chapter on Mount Era tree planting that tree planting can be oppressive endeavor at that moment I have a strong sense actually there is a clash between different forms of environmental ideas across different groups. However, we have to mention when I started the first chapter Chapter 1 on Arbor Day when I first started I truly want to trace the inbound ideas in republican era that is beginning of 20th century. I found Lin Daoyang the first forester advocate at Yale and went back to promote tree planting. He graduated from Yale in 2014 with a Master degree of Forestry and came back to China to promote environmental law and environmental practices to help the founding of Arbor Day in 1916. When I first touched his archive at Yale, I was very amazed about his endeavor. And then I would think about what he can do, what his ideas have evolved across time and space. To put a very different way, when I go to the archives to touch his documents, not only tree planting but also he was calling the Chinese to fight against the Japanese during the Second World War, I found this is a real human, this is a real person. And tree planting is actually part of his endeavor for national survival. At the beginning of 20th century I was so excited I realized I should trace his work across a century. The more I study of his legacy, the more I realize there are a lot of different formats or representations of environmentalism. That's why once the more research I do, the more I found there are different forms of environmentalism for our audience. If you have very limited time, I want to summarize writes what I've written regarding different forms of environmentalism. The first chapter I talk about the real tree planting versus symbolic jester during the Arbor Day at the beginning of 20th century in the Republican era. The second chapter I talk about a debate between the different environmental scientists, the foresters and hydrologists have different understandings of nature and even to define nature that is dynamic versus static. The third chapter I talk about the so called universal ideas of tree planting versus localized and ethnic understandings of tree planting in the Mao era in environmental films. In the fourth chapter I concerned I studied the Romantic versus militarized understanding of nature in Mao era fictions and the fifth chapter, a Topoli native versus foreign understandings of nature in 98's literary works. And the final chapter I was talking about the cell phone app Ant forest that was made by Alibaba and it tried to integrate the socialist mass mobilization versus the capitalist money making endeavor. So I think lots of this works this type of different representations, contestations it highly relevant to many topics mobilization, political legitimacy, scientific reasoning, ethnic identity, the growth of the youngsters, military mobilization, intellectual conflict and reflection and technological enterprise. In the end of the work I argue that contestation is actually a strength because it not only enlists a broader range of audience but also allows China of Chinese environmentalism to adapt to a new social and political context. Contestation serves as a safety valve and helps us to understand the environmental reasons in China is a forceful impact indeed.
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C
Thank you very much for this detailed exploration on contest in your title and also I think it's very touching the very interesting to imagine this kind of dialogue across a century's time and across discipline when you read Ling's report at Yale when you were also a Yale student. So I think, you know, it's an amazing moment. And also as the title implies, one of the key moves in the book is your insistence on environmentalisms in the plural. So when you use this term for the Chinese context, what exactly do you mean? Are you referring primarily to modern science inflicted ideologies based on a nature culture split? Or do you also include cosmological memorialized way of relating to trees and forests that may do not map neatly onto European American environmental sort?
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D
Yeah, that's a great question that actually I asked a long time when I was writing this book. I think I would tend to go against this trend of philosophical abstraction, although the unity of heaven nature was highly emphasized. And also I the one central argument that drives this book is the inbound ideas behind the other literature, film or various sources work. But I also want to make it historically grounded so that I can find a concrete literal work, a piece of archival documents, a news report so that to help me to make this work have historically lineage or to be contested. So for me I think a lot of environmental historians tend to focus more on how many trees have been planted, what the consequences of it, and they are very important questions. I do learn a lot from their endeavors for the Literature works. A lot of works focus on the literary representations regarding the literal work itself by close reading. And they are also very inspirational to me. But when I was trying to do this, I want to think about the deeper questions and what do they have in common and what are the ideas have driven those environmental changes either in history or what has been seen in literary works. The more I study, the more I realize. Actually the beginning of 20th century's works is highly linked to the the environmental representation to call the Chinese conservation, what I call Chinese conservation literature. In 1980s, the Environmental Scientists actually their effort to disseminate environmental knowledge to call for environmental protection is similar, very similar to what we see in literal works. So I try to link them together. Another thing I do have to say is that at the beginning when I tried to write this book, I really struggling to find the literal works. In the beginning of 20th century, in republican era, on tree planting, in mountain conservation, I found very little. Even if I found them, I realized they are not what I truly wanted to argue or what I truly feel that is relevant to my research. So I decide whether the environmental cities work are important to us. How about the foresters? How about their endeavors? How about the official government documents? How about even a newspaper talking about what we should do on arbor there and how the government political documents they actually become of my sources. But what truly leads me is the environmental notions and how are they crafted, how are they related and to disseminate the environmental conservation knowledge. Regardless list of sources. Whether it's a cell phone app, ant forest that you can literally plant trees by using a cell phone app, or a beginning of 20th century piece on Arbor Day in a very isolated newspaper or literary works, Achong's very famous novella King of Trees. They all function the same thing to disseminate the knowledge of conservation. So that's why you see my works and actually has multiple disciplines from literature, film, cell phone app as well as the history.
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C
It's really glad that you mentioned this because I really admire the way you treat environmentalism from a multifunct and more comprehensive perspective. And I think as you mentioned, this also makes your book really hard to be situated in traditional disciplinary framework. It across environmental history, literary studies, film studies and many other disciplines. And one of the things that really struck me when reading this book is how methodologically ambitious this book is. So you range across forestry's treatises, local archives, newspapers, Mao era films, novels and even contemporary mobile phone interface. And today together, all this intervention is pushed back against the classic decline narratives in Chinese environmental history, such as in Judith Shapiro's work. So can you share with us how you assembled and work across this heterogeneous material? And how does this multi source interdisciplinary strategy both engage with and push against existing accounts of Chinese environmental ecological history?
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D
I think to answer your question quickly, I think Julie Shapiro's work is very influential. I actually learned a lot from his or her work on Mao's war against nature. But I think this is only one piece of history. And as I mentioned, I also read the documents in the Mao era in multiple places in China actually during the Great Leap Forward people and actually advocate tree planting in a faster speed. So that was very counterintuitive when I first found this work. I mean found the documents regarding the Mao era. I think that's exactly what scholars were trying to do and go deeper and to see what lies behind it. That's why in the chapter two or talk about the Green the Motherland Campaign, that has been a very important campaign. Even Mao Zong launched that campaign in the 1960s, which happened in 1950s, but also goes beyond the Green Forward. I also try to connect this movement nationwide tree planting campaign when it comes to the borderline to see it actually can be highly oppressive when and the Han Chinese dominant native so called universalized tree planting campaign can function as a means of social control on the ethnic groups. So I think this is what I was trying to do.
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C
Excellent. Thank you for sharing these thoughts and also basically what you want to make from this book. And also in chapter one, you tell this very fascinating story of Arbor Day under the Republic of China from Sun Yat Sen's Grand Forestry vision to increase ritualized ceremonies under the rule of Zhang Kai Shen or Jiang Jieshi. So how would you characterize the relationship between actual tree planting practice and this kind of symbolic political performance in this period, which is I think definitely related to the traditional ritualized culture in Imperial China. And what does abidei help us see about the making of a modern Chinese nation state?
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D
Actually, you can see I just talked about the Green the Motherlands campaign. I regard the Arbor Day as a precursor or mini form of campaign which I did not really talk about in my book. But you can see in a certain day all the people came to plant trees in China in 1916, which is their first Arbor Day. I would like to say in various sections of this book, I have a very strong feeling that at the beginning chance environmentalism is very marginal, especially at the beginning of 20th century when the nation's priority is natural survival. And also different fractions fight against each other for various reasons, either civil war or the Second World War, or even the First World War. But I think one the dominant fact is how they make the tree planting efforts to integrate with the mainstream political and social movements. So Arbor Day actually become the form for political campaign. When Chiang Kai Shek and Wang Jingwei both try to plant trees, they actually fight against for the political legitimacy as ayres. Also Yansen. At the same time, in other chapters I also talk about once the tree planting or environmental efforts try to integrate with other mainstream efforts, it actually comes at the expense of the real intention or real intent of tree planting. Which means once the more it integrates with the mainstream social endeavor, it actually runs the risk of being marginalized. And this constitutes a paradox. The strength of tree planting drops when it tries to expand its scope to other social aspects of the society of modern China. So that exactly can explain the Arbor Day at the beginning of 20th century, the Chinese scientists, Chinese foresters promoted Arbor Day and try to shape people to make China become stronger, to have more timber for Chinese production. It not only focus on tree planting, but also about tree harvesting at the moment. At the same time, it runs a risk to be marginalized to justify the political control of one party or another. At the same time. In this chapter I also talk about how the Chinese environmentalism become a global effort of the rise of environmentalism. The Chinese scientists educate Yale at the University of Michigan in the States. Some advocate Germany and Japan went back to China and promoted tree planting. China joins the global narrative of environmental conservation.
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C
Excellent. It's just fascinating for me to read this chapter to understand how tree planting was such a complicated issue, combining both very urgent needs about environmental protection at that time. It's a global trend, but also related to the more ritualized fight and competition over legitimacy among Chinese politicians. And also simultaneous with this increasingly ritualized arbor days under Nationalist rule. On the other side, Communists in places like Jiangxi and Shanbei were trading tree planting as a very urgent survival and governance strategy. Because both Jiangxi's mountainous region and Shanbei's semi arid climate really demanded more systematic environmental intervention. Right? And in the book you also follow several foresters whose careers span the Republican, Maoist and Reform eras, which is very impressive. So how these communist forestry experts experiences before 1949, before the establishment of the PRC and the early era of the PRC shaped their speeches and writing once they become ministers and professionals in the new China?
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D
in the Mao era a lot of the environmental sites or foresters were actually educated abroad and they maintain their positions and promoted forestry. So there is a very strong sense of sustainability in terms of the human resources in the Mao era and pre maar era. The second thing I do want to talk about is the very essential chapter of the chapter two is I found that during the soil erosion in the Yellow river, the hydrologists want to build dams on certain parts of the Yellow River. The foresters want to emphasize a very whole scale, very ambitious plan for tree planting in order to solve some long term issues and they have some clash during the national conference and within themselves. So they're both environmental scientists and they have a different vision in seeing the nature. And more importantly, very important concept I want to answer is what is on how the environment. That's the issue I want to solve in chapter two for the environmental scientists, for the hydrologists, a small part of the Yellow river they should focus on that. The foresters on the other hand, want to solve the entire Yellow river problem. The more I research this, the more I found this very exciting and interesting. Is another example in the United States which I did not talk about in the book but I can talk about during the interview. Today I finally have the chance to talk about it. During the 1960s, during the Rachel Carson's period, Rachel Carson was hailed as the mother of the modern environmentalism of the United States and she's very famous for her book sun and Spring. But she also encountered a lot of resistance from various groups. One group which is somewhat very surprisingly is actually forester because if DDT was not used, the trees will be die because the Gibson moth will thrive. It is not surprising that the chemical industries were against it. But to my great surprise, from the documents, from the letters of Rachel Carson and the far forester called Cynthia Westcott, who has a lot of documents in Cornell, you see the correspondence between them. They are not very friendly. And then the more I understand, the more I realize actually for Rachel Carson it is the entire nature sister natural system, which is like the foresters in China. They want to see the big picture. They will see very dynamic system. In the case of the United States, the four foresters seem to become sort of evil. They only focus on trees. My goal is only to protect all trees. I really don't care about the birds were killed. In some ways this tension is not so striking versus as opposed to the Carson versus the chemical industry's representative. But it still makes me to realize the definition of nature. How they were trained was not a one way solution by the environmental sciences themselves. So that's one thing I try to answer as a sub question in chapter two is what is the environment? It's not only about the democratic versus the authoritarian, but actually it's the knowledge system. And how they were educated, how they were trained, shaped their way to see nature and to define nature from the very beginning.
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C
Excellent. Thank you very much for this answer. And I think again we need to return to the keyword contest and environmentalisms. And also from these two keywords we will need to be back to the understanding the very plural and also diverse understanding of nature in the modern history. Not only in China, but also across the globe, even in the US and also in your discussion of more era films, cinema becomes a crucial archive for understanding new forestry in China's multiethnic border regions. In the book you show for example how films set in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang stage afforestation as both a civilizing project and a security project for state sovereignty. So what do these films teach us about how afforestation campaigns in New China were imagined for Chinese borderlands? And how do they give us access? I think however media access to Mongols we worse or other ethnic minority reactions to all these tree related projects in China.
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D
Regarding chapter three, regarding this M.O. era films, I actually have a very surprisingly findings when I do the research is tree planking can be very harmful endeavor in the desert. Desert has its own ecological system. So tree planting is an intervention sometimes to damage the original desert environment. So that actually become part of the hidden argument in my book is tree planting is not a universal effort to make the world become better. And the desert has its own lizards in the natural has lizards, has animals, has their own plants. And if you watch Netflix, you can find the desert system is so exciting and so stimulating. And if you want to get rid of them, you're actually harming the environment. And that was what I'm trying to do. I visit inner Mongolia like 2015. I talked to local people and who around there they told me they have different ways to describe the different forms of desert in their native languages. And the more I study, the more I realize actually the ethnic groups has their own way of representing nature and the so called universal way of planting trees. Like the growing the Motherland campaign, which might be not so stimulating, not be so positive, not be so welcoming when it comes to the borderline for the native people. And so for example the Inner Mongolias regarding tree planting as regarding the tree planting or anti desertification efforts to be efforts to add disrespect to their ancestors. When the Chinese try to open the land and they do farming, however for the Mongolian they have nomadic lifestyles and which leads a very different way of life. So I was trying to say it's not only about the universal versus the local, but also has a different static versus nomadic lifestyles behind it among the Han Chinese and the ethnic groups. I think this is what I was trying to do. And also in the Mao era films I also find a lot of scientific documents or the governing pamphlets regarding to disseminate tree planting and also the local newspaper from the provincial level you can see the efforts there. So I was trying to read or study the MO error films not only as cinematic representations, but try to historicize it by using other sources.
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C
Well, thank you very much for mentioning this because I work in China's inner Asian region, you know, northwestern region, so I can prove. Yeah, indeed. Tree planting in the semi arid region, particularly in desert region needs to be very careful because deserts they have a very specific, very special type of ecosystem. It is generally considered a non equilibrium ecology here. So some tree species, if you plant them in improper way or you picked a very improper tree species in desert region, they may consume too much water which is actually really valuable for local people to live. So yeah, I think this is also contested and also very complicated issue. And thank you for this contribution to mention it in your studies. And also building on this, I want to further talk about another issue in your next chapter. I noticed the notion of legal territory is the focus in this chapter. So you mentioned two contradictory impulses, namely romantic appreciation versus militaristic vigilance. So how do you consider this contrast? Help us understand Chinese conservationist Thoughts and practices.
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D
Yeah, this is actually a transition chapter. I was trying to say that forest is actually a kinetic space for exploitation and occupation, but by the adversaries. But conservation itself is not only nurturing and preserving, but it's also about enforcing and elimination. Killing the enemies and purifying the forest is actually the way the communist regime is trying to do. And they try to get rid of the potential enemies hiding in the forest. Don't forget, in the beginning, when Mao led the revolution, he and his forces were hiding in in the forest as well. So when they came to power, they know the anxiety of the forest, so they go there to try to eliminate them because they disrupt the order of the society. However, the more I study, the more I learn. Actually, the military mentality begins to fade during the 1970s, and a sort of romantic understanding of nature begins to show up. And that actually functions as a precursor of modern Chinese conservation literature. In the 1980s, when you can see several science fiction works, very short for children, actually signals, signs, signals some part of features of environmental or conservation ideas.
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C
Yeah, I think it's a very interesting and also perfect transitional chapter because also it builds a bridge between the Mao era's political and environmental campaigns to the new era, to China's marginalization era. And the next chapter, the Great Green Awakened chapter, describes how ecological science and conservationist literature in the 1980s generated both new hopes and new tensions in China. So how would you summarize the key intellectual trends of that decade?
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D
I think in the 1980s, there was a kind of very strong sense of pursuing the ideas from the west, but the intellectual was trying to recover from the cultural revolutions. But I actually found from the literary works there are two trends. One is going deep into the Chinese native tradition, what I call Green Nativism. And during the actual novella King of Trees, you can see they try to emphasize the craft knowledge. The other thing is some Chinese intellectuals also want to use the west knowledge as a foil for more ambitious political and environmental endeavors. One example is the Wake Up Woodcutters by Xugong in what I would call this effort as Green Occidentalism. So environmental writing at this moment is not only about environmental conservation yourself, but also to try to talk to the history or talk to the future for more political ambitions. At the same time, in this chapter, not only about go back to the Green Nativism or Green Occidentalism, one is local, one is Western. But more importantly, I also try to link the ideas of conservation to the first chapter, that is how they disseminate the Knowledge, the notion of ecology, how this kind of scientific notions gateway show up in modern Chinese literature. And all of these efforts can be traced back to half a century, at least half a century, efforts by ecologists, environmental scientists, foresters in particular to disseminate that the ecological systems is all together and the trees functions as a center or hub of everything. Wow.
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C
I think this chapter really makes me a little bit nostalgic because growing in China I read many this kind of environment related literature written in the 90s and 80s and I basically witnessed the whole debate during this whole process during my childhood. Basically. I think you definitely document this kind of intellectual debate and also to summarise them very clearly in this chapter. And obviously I think all these intellectual debates have had very concrete implications to other social actors such as you and me and such as enterprise NGOs and also other individual citizens. And in the coda enterprise initiatives like Alibaba's and Forest Ma Yi Senlin stand at the center of what you call consumer environmentalism. So how do you evaluate this cooperate tree planting schemes? To what extent do they meaningfully contribute to a forest tuition and emissions reduction as the claim in their plan?
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D
Yeah, first of all, that's a great point for non Chinese specialist listeners. Antforce is actually a cell phone app that on your iPhone or Android phone that you can plant trees while using Alibaba's search service. And basically if you order a food like Uber or you do online banking, the Chinese version of Venmo or Zhao, or if you lend money from Alibaba, you actually help to plant trees in the Chinese borderlands. So this is what the app is about. I just want to explain to our non Chinese specialist. It's a very exciting app, has its own English version. But when one involves this business, it actually the points when it accumulates help to plant trees. But it functions as a game that different people compete against each other. There is also a social media people engage with each other, strangers, friends, some people you never know, some people you have known for decades all contribute to this. If you see from the name the ant forest, small ants come together to accumulate and forge very powerful efforts. And this is ridolance of socialist mass mobilization in the Mao era. At the same time, Alibaba is a business, they want to make money. Many of his efforts actually strengthens a greenwashing aspect that some of the efforts, well, superficially it seems to be environmentally friendly, but the research, many research reports show is not necessarily the case. So as you can see, the ant forest integrate the socialist mass Mobilization as well as the capitalist money making efforts. At the same time it allows people who you have never met to plant the trees altogether. It actually mobilize all people to do the same thing. That is exactly what Lin Daoyang or other Republican era foresters politicians were trying to do to fund Arbor Day in 1916. And a century later I called Anth Forest a virtual Arbor Day. You can plant trees almost every day. At the same time it cultivates active citizenship and to promote a practice of caring of others, affection and respect. And this is exactly what Forresters was trying to do. Eccentricity.
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C
I think this concept of a virtual Arbor Day is such a genius idea because it shows how tree planting is still a symbolic and hope making project in China and to understand how this tuition has formed and sustained. I think your book still provides a perfect entry point for us. And throughout your book you try to show that authoritarian environmentalism is real, but also historically contingent and internally contested. And looking across the book from Republican arbor days to to Communist border region campaigns and to current ant forest, what possibilities do you see for bottle up or grassroots environmentalism in China and beyond China and what constraints do they continue to face today?
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D
I think what I try to argue when I wrote the book, I have a argument that democratic authoritarianism and authoritarian environmentalism are not mutually exclusive, exclusive, but actually very similar and actually complementary. As you see various ways. The democratic environmentalism is actually pretty slow. It has its own limits, but it's sort of enduring in many ways. The campaign style, what I want to call the campaign style of the terror environment. Tourism is very powerful and efficient at at a first glance, but actually is not very enduring in many ways. For example, a supreme leader may call for a campaign like mini campaign Arbor Day or Green the Motherland campaign in the 1950s, 1960s. It is influential at that moment or that single day. But no one really care about how many trees were planted after the Arbor Day. Very few people care about that. They will. Numerous research show that they did the celebration Arbor Day, they did the Green Motherland campaign, but the result was very minimal. So what I'm trying to say is actually the campaign style environmentalism has consumed so much power of the society's energy and in the long term centralized efforts to promote an idea versus a sustained and coherent solution to environmental efforts internally, long term becomes a vexed issue for modern China. A short campaign to cultivate environmental consciousness clashes with a long and incremental work of putting environmental ideas into practice in everyday life. Another thing I would like to emphasize is actually it's not necessarily the US versus China, the democratic versus authoritarian, but also the knowledge system that what I just talked about in chapter two. The foresters and the hydrologists were trained in different ways in China. The marine biologist Rachel Carlson would also train from different perspectives versus the foresters. So the mode of their training goes beyond the national boundary. And that's actually one thing we need to learn and to think, think more in depth regarding the conventional binary opposition between the authoritarian versus the democratic environmentalisms.
- [45:43]
C
Perfect. Thank you very much. I think it's very insightful. And finally, I think we need to treat trees more seriously rather than treat them as the object or subject of our own hope to build a more, I think, a more environmentally friendly world. And thank you very much for all this insight. And at the end of our podcast, could you please share a bit about your current and future projects? How has reading this book particularly shaped the question you are pursuing now about Chinese ecology, governance and perhaps other transnational environmental issues?
- [46:15]
D
Yeah, I actually want to go deep further regarding the rise of China. I think this has driven the work in many ways. This is more rural work, but in terms of tree planting, I actually want to talk about the cultural representation of the Chinese infrastructure, the subways, the bridges, the network, the cables, in many ways in literal works and goes beyond the tree plant initiative. And I have written a chapter on the subway of different representations of Beijing subway. I hope that I can explore different aspects of different formats of Chinese infrastructure and to see how they were represented and their social and political implications in in contemporary China.
- [47:02]
C
Excellent. Thank you for sharing this current project and I really looking forward to reading it and to learning from it. So Cheng, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us today and all the stories related to contested environmentalism. It has been a real pleasure chatting with you.
- [47:18]
D
Yeah, thank you so much for having me Again, I really appreciate the chance to share some of the background story behind the book once again. I think I. I get a lot of the chapters from the graduate school work from chapter one to chapter five. I think this is a great way to make some sort of experiment for graduate school. And it's actually I also feel deeply rewarding when I talk about my peers under very little pressure when I was in graduate school. And then when I revive this book, I also feel there's a lot of work work for the scholars to explore. I feel very appreciative for the old efforts, especially from Yale. Their scholars, their librarians are excellent for me to have a comprehensive understanding of the rise of China environmentalism across the world. And I want to take advantage of this opportunity to show my deepest appreciation for those people who helped me.
- [48:23]
C
Excellent. Thank you very much. And as the readers, we want to thank you for writing such a wonderful book, such an interesting topic and a very important issue talking about very important issue about modern China's forming and also nation state building. Thank you very much.
- [48:38]
D
Thank you very much.
- [48:39]
C
As well as we wrap up, it's also hard not to forget the calendar. So China's Arbor day Falls on March 12, commemorating San Yasen's death and more than a century of decades over how, why, and for whom trees should be planted. With that it approaching, it feels especially meaningful for us to revisit contested environmentalisms with you and to reflect on how tree planting and the related ideas, rituals and debates surrounding it have been woven into the making of modern China, from Republican era to Mao era to the current era of ecological civilization and consumer environmentalism. For listeners interested in the intersection of environmental history, literary and film studies, and the history of ideas like environmentalism in today's China, I think this book offers a powerful reminder that trees are more than themselves. They are also ways of imagining citizenship, authority and territory. It provides a highly creative lens to understand China and beyond. You've been listening to the Chinese Studies Channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li. We hope to see you next time.
- [49:45]
D
Thank you so much. Sam.