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Jesse Rodenbiker, "Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China" (Cornell UP, 2023)
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A
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B
Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Chinese Studies Channel of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Yadong Li, a PhD student in Socio Cultural Anthropology at Tulane University. In today's episode, we are stepping into an insightful and very timely discussion on ecological governance, urban transformation and environmental politics in contemporary China. Today's new book asks some very important question about how the Chinese state governs through ecological interventions. How environmental protection and landscape transformation become an instrument of power, spatial reordering and moral imagination. So today I'm very pleased to welcome the new book's author, Professor Jesse Rodenbiker. So, Dr. Rodenbiker, welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Thank you so much, Yedo, for having me on the podcast.
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B
Well, it's a really great pleasure to have you with us today. The new book today is entitled Ecological States, Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China, published by Cornell University Press in 2023. The author of the book is Dr. Is Jesse Rodenbiker. He's Assistant professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University. He's a human environment geographer and his research centers on state power, environmental governance and social environmental transformation in today's China. I also want to let everybody know that this book is freely available in an open access through the generous support of the Henry Lewis foundation, so you can definitely download it from the Cornell University Press official website. So this is truly exciting news for our audience. So first of all, Dr. Roland Bicker, to begin, could you please introduce yourself to our audience? Like, what initially drew you to human environment, geography, and what are some of the, I mean, central questions or scenes that have shaped your work, especially as you develop this particular project?
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C
Sure. Thanks so much, Yadung. And thanks again for having me on the podcast. Just to reiterate, as Yadung said, I'm a geographer at Rutgers University and I'm the author of the book Ecological States, which, as Yadong pointed out, is available open access from Cornell University Press. And this book shows how ecology has become really central to constitutions of state power in China. It analyzes how China's green urbanization drive, which is really the largest on earth, is displacing millions of people in deepening social inequality within that process. And it signals to how China's approach to managing nature, in managing society, is also reconfiguring environmental governance globally. So the research that I did for the book is based on long term grounded fieldwork in China, including hundreds of interviews with government officials, urban planners, everyday villagers and ecological migrants who are undergoing displacement in the name of making the city more sustainable. So the book brings attention to how urban rural planning and conservation policies serve to enact control over land, to enact control over resources, while at the same time displacing people and deepening social inequality. And the book really draws on attention not only to the domestic situation within China, but also how China's approach to large scale environmental planning and interventions has the capacity to shape things outside of China's own borders. So that's some of like what the book is about in a really broad, broad sense, to the questions of, you know, how I got to the project, how I got to the questions that framed the project. I came to this work through my experiences of living and working in China in different capacities over a number of years. So I first lived in China's northeast in Jilin Province, in an area that's predominantly heated by coal. So there I got really used to living through the winter days in a, in a coal haze sky. So environmental issues really came to the fore through that lived experience. I later lived in southwest China, an area that's commonly associated with pristine landscapes with natural beauty. But it wasn't until I was working as a China Program assistant with the Sustainable Cities Initiative that I was really confronted with a problem of how widespread displacement was through various efforts to make China's cities more sustainable. And for many of the urban planners and the landscape architects that I was working with at the time, displacement was just simply seen as part of greening cities. Buildings were being updated to new green building standards, land use was being optimized, landscapes were being beautified in a number of different ways. But at the same time, millions of people were undergoing displacement processes. So I entered into this project wanting to interrogate how China's ecological approach to urban planning emerged and how it came to reshape environmental governance in different capacities. So this drew me to questions broadly about the relationship between ecology and power. How did ecology come to take on such a central role in China's environmental governance? How did ecological urbanization come to be seen as a means not only for environmental improvement, but also for social improvement? And how do everyday citizens act when the state wields ecology to try to govern their conduct, to try to govern their forms of habitation? So these are some of the questions that I came to in my work and. And these emerged out of some of my own lived experiences and work experiences and really informed my research for the book.
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B
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing this, your personal journey in China, and also how you gradually get this very big question about the relationship between power and environment this China. And I think you finally have woven this very important question in a very subtle and also particular way in case studies in southwest China. And I think you deserve through really deep case study analysis and also ethnographic fieldwork. And like you mentioned, this book is based on two years of fieldwork across southwest China from Sichuan to Yunnan. I'd really love to hear the story about how it all started. As we know, Yunnan has a very important position in environmental studies in China. But I'm very curious about why you choose this region as a research site and what brought you to focus on Chinese state's approach to environmental governance. There's sure.
- [07:33]
C
Thanks so much for the question, Yadong. So I started fieldwork and started doing the research from places where I had already established networks. So for me, this included Beijing, it included Chengdu, it included Kunming. I had lived in Kunming before the research for this project ever began. And I had close contacts from my other work with urban planners in Chengdu. And over the course of of starting to do the fieldwork in the early years, more and more doors were opening up for me in Yunnan Province and in Sichuan Province, I became a visiting scholar at Sichuan University in the School of Land Management. And I developed a research collaboration with the provincial level environmental bureau in Yunnan provinces. So these kind of experiences were really instrumental to me in orienting myself to the field, orienting myself to place in these two provinces, and also orienting the research around the cities of Kunming, Chengdu and Dali. So another motivating factor for focusing in these areas in China's southwest was an overarching desire to expand the geographical scope of research on urban China. So almost all of the research that's out there, whether in anthropology or geography or otherwise, is based in cities that are located along the eastern seaboard or along the southern seaboard. So these are stories about Beijing, about Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, et cetera. All of these places that are renowned for their economic dynamism, their different political and corporate networks, and so on. So it was important for me to shift the focus to other types of cities in China and show that urbanization in other places of China is also important. And there's more and more work coming out about China, cities in the west, in the Southwest, the Northwest and the north, et cetera. So those are some of the factors related to the decision around placement, right. Where to place the study, how to orient it. And I should say a word or two about the question of methods here as you brought them up. So I conducted grounded research in these three different cities that I mentioned. Chengdu, Kuming and Dali. And another reason that I chose three cities specifically, in addition to having networks within these areas, was because they correspond with the three types of cities where urban, rural, coordinated planning and ecological protection zoning policies were being rolled out in China and being experimented with at this time. So this includes provincial capitals and prefecture level cities. That's Kunming and that's Chengdu, and it includes county level towns. So that's Dolly. So these were, you could think of these as cities where these ecological forms of planning were being experimented with and rolled out. Right. And for doing the different types of research for the broke, I drew on mixed methods. I drew on ethnography. I did hundreds of interviews with urban planners, government officials, eagle migrants. As I noted, I also conducted historical research across the natural and social sciences, both in archives that were within the southwest as well as digital archives. And I used a visual participatory method called photovoice. So photovoice entailed for me partnering with villagers. And villagers would then take pictures of their land, their housing, their environment. And people would bring these pictures to focus group discussions and interviews. And they would really be a kind of starting point or a ju off point for understanding some of the experiences that Everyday people were undergoing as their land and their housing were being zoned in these ecological protection areas. So for instance, I recall one time when a woman brought a picture to a focus group meeting of someone standing in a green field surrounded by garlic shoots. You could see some village housing within the background. And she held up this photo and she explained that this is actually a photo that she had someone take of her. And in the photo she's working as a day laborer. So since her land was leased by the state for conservation purposes, she's been working as a day laborer, selling her daily labor on someone else's land. And at the same time, she obtained an annual payment from the government for leasing her land for conservation. So she and others like her would use these kind of images and photos for describing some of their experiences of transitions in relationship to land and labor and housing as their land and their space was included in these conservation areas. So this is just one example. Just trying to give you a sense of the type of grounded research methods that I used, which were really kind of interpersonal and engaging ways to learn about people's lived experience and their local knowledge. And for me, it was really important to triangulate across these different methods to develop a sense of the history of ecology in China, how ecological thought came to shape contemporary state policy, and then how conservation planning and practices were impacting people on the ground.
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B
It's fascinating to know all your effort in bringing all these messes together and strategies together to produce this very fascinating book and also all your case studies. And I think you mentioned that one of the most important aspects of a book is its concentrated attention on China's urbanized environment. And you argue that understanding China's ecological politics requires saying how ecological governance unfolds within a rapidly urbanizing context. And we can just think about how most decisions about large scale projects of shaping China's landscape and environment are actually made in urban setting, like in Beijing, the capital, and also in Chengdu Kunming. You mentioned these provincial centers and also in Dali, the smaller regional center. So I think it's a really timely reminder for us who are studying environmental politics in China. And we can see that after your book's publication. Amy Zhang, Circular Ecology Echosis, your idea proposed in this book. So why in your view is urbanization so central to the story of China's environmental politics?
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C
Yeah, thanks for this question. This is a great, this is a really great question. So I think people familiar with China from a more academic standpoint, or even folks who maybe have traveled to China I think they really get the sense that urbanization is really pervasive. Right. Urbanization is everywhere in China. So China has the largest number of big cities in the world. It has over a hundred cities with over a million people in each city. So the U.S. by contrast, has less than 10 cities with over a million people. So in China, the urban landscape is really extensive, right? Really expansive. China's speed of urbanization over the last 50 years is also unprecedented. So it's the fastest urbanizing country. The world has the largest number of high city, large cities. Right. So in the PRC was formed in 1949, less than one out of five people lived in cities. That number is now closer to 65% of the population. So that's roughly a billion people who are living in cities. How did this happen? Right. This isn't something that just kind of happened spontaneously. Instead, the levers of the state, different policies went into effect that spurred this rapid urbanization. So for instance, in the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping initiated a number of different reforms which fundamentally altered the character of Chinese cities. For instance, there was a creation of special economic zones, the loosening of hukou restrictions, which allowed for the flow of migrant neighbors to go from the countryside to the city. Previously, the Hukou system was really bounded people towards their work unit, whether that was an agricultural collective or an urban donwei. So this is just kind of one example of some of the policies that spurred urbanization in the reform era. And in the book, I examine a raft of different policy transitions that went into effect from the 1980s through the 1990s and into the 2000s that incentivize cities to grow in size and at the same time expand their territorial reach over people and over the countryside. So I'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, but you can find this discussion in the chapter three of the book. Rather, I just want to bring attention to the kind of most important and recent policies that really matter for understanding some of the interventions in the book. So in the mid-2010s, China began rolling out new type urbanization planning. And new type urbanization planning marked a new phase of urban rural coordination. Importantly, it included rural areas in the urban planning process. This new type urbanization planning was rolled out alongside other policies that mandated 20% of land be zoned for conservation. So this policy was called the ecological conservation red line policy. Sometimes it's just shortened as ecological red line policy. And the confluence of these policies allowed municipal governments to territorialize rural land in the name of optimizing urban Rural coordination in the name of optimizing ecological conservation. So in the book I refer to this as ecological territorialization, and I call it this because the municipal government is drawing on ecological planning principles and different ecological planning processes to garner control over land and resources and people. So alongside this drive toward urban rural coordinated planning, there is a concurrent state drive to urbanize rural people. So for instance, there is this formal goal of the Chinese state to urbanize 250 million people by the year 2025. So there's a simultaneous drive from the central state to urbanize millions of people. And there's a local state drive to implement these new ecological policies and urban rural coordinated policies in ways that can benefit the economically. So this all comes together in processes that urbanize the rural population, which from the standpoint of the local state is also a way to create socio spatial optimization. So I'll give you just one example to illustrate how urban planners think about their efforts of building city and improving the population simultaneously. So I remember one instance when I was interviewing an urban planner and he brought out the Urban Rural Comprehensive Plan. The Urban Rural Comprehensive Plan is actually a huge set of different documents and books. It's not like something that you can find on the Internet. But he brought out one of the books and opened it up and pointed to a few villages that were located in a newly zoned ecological red line. And he said this is just kind of an approximate quote. He said that the village and the city are not the same. The city is concentrated. And he brought his hands really close together. The city's concentrated like this, but villages, they're really dispersed. And he brought his hands out kind of like imagine an accordion here, right? So the villages, their surface, up until now, they have not matured. But with this form of governance, and he's referring to the urban rural coordination here with this form of governance. It's not only a plan, it's also a structure of the city and the countryside in which they take this dispersed area and concentrate it vertically. And with this kind of planning, their living situation improves. So, right, you get a little bit of a sense of how urban planners understand the unequal relationships between the city and the countryside. The city is mature, you know, the countryside is, you know, maturing, not yet matured backwards in some ways. And you can get a sense of their role as an urban rural coordinator and an ecological planner. Right. So this planning process entails the formal movement of people from relatively dispersed, relatively organically organized rural spaces into high rise apartments. And along with this, there's an effort to remake rural spaces according to specific ecological uses that are written into the urban Rural communities comprehensive plan. So these are some of the urbanizing processes that I refer to and talk about in the book.
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B
Well, thank you very much for this very vivid description. And also I really appreciate your emphasis on this urban rural coordination, like many other things happening in today's China. What hidden this harmonious rhetoric of coordination is very real and ongoing politics over land, administrative expansion and disposition. And we will definitely talk about it later. So as you have already highlighted, your project is master, logically diverse and rich, is multi sided from Beijing to Chengdu to Dali. And also it's dialogical, it's comparative. You spend time with so many different actors like you mentioned, urban planners, local officials, relocated villages, and also intellectuals, these ecologists. So why did you choose a multi sided approach? And what kinds of challenges did you face along the way? Also, I talk with a few you, you know, readers of this book and authors are very interested in the process that you traveling with your daughter. So how did you, how did that shape your field experiences?
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C
Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for this question. I mean, I'll talk about these things kind of, kind of piece by piece. Right. So multi sided research is always challenging. It's always challenging to work at multiple sites. Right. Doing research also as a single parent is also challenging. You know, my daughter accompanied me for all of my field work with in China. And of course it's especially challenging to do research these days in the context of China more broadly. I think this in part is part of what makes the findings in the book really quite valuable because it's more and more challenging to do this kind of research these days. So I did the bulk of the underground fieldwork from mid to late 2010s, and it's become harder and harder to do this kind of research in the prc, not least of which because of a new set of laws that came into effect in 2023 that restrict social science research that might be deemed as sensitive or related to some kinds of sensitive topics. And what counts as sensitive. The remit of what counts as sensitive keeps getting wider and wider, and it definitely includes things like land use these days, and it definitely includes things like resettlement. Okay, so I'll say first something about the kind of multi sided question here. So as I started researching, I noticed pretty early on that there was actually a great deal of variation across site a great deal of variation across conservation sites, resettlement sites, villages, even within individual cities. So it became pretty clear that multi sided research could be a way for me to try to capture some of that variation while at the same time trying to crystallize some of the processes that hold across cases, some of the things that we can apply across these cases, but also some of the things that are different.
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B
Right.
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C
So one of the challenges that I encountered was access. So how to interview folks in the local government, how to engage with villagers that are undergoing displacement, and for interviews with the local government or planners, with environmental scientists. I started working from my own networks and then I expanded that through snowball sampling. Snowball sampling is just like a social science term to describe, you know, trying to expand the scope of interviewees by asking interviewees to introduce you to others of a like kind who might or might not be interested in participating. Right. So urban planners suggested other urban planners, government officials, others and so forth and so on. And I did similar things for interviews with villagers, similar things for interviews with ecological migrants. And I also just spent a lot of time simply being in villages, simply being and spending time in resettlement complexes to have more opportunities to meet and to talk with people, to run into people that I've already seen inter them a second time, a third time, et cetera, et cetera. But of course, I spent more time with those who had an interest in the project, and I spent more time with folks who had an interest to talk to me and to talk with my daughter. And here I'll say that doing fieldwork with my daughter was really instrumental to this work, especially doing some of the ethnographic engagements and interviews in the villages. So I did research for the book as a single parent with full custody. So my daughter was with me really for the whole time in the field. Did part of kindergarten and she did all of first grade in China. Her Chinese was really fantastic at the time that we were living there. And anytime that she wasn't in school, she would be joining me in villages to do fieldwork. It was harder, of course, to do things in like scientific labs or formal interviews with government or urban planners with her. But we did most of the work in the villages together. So over time I started to think of her kind of like my research partner, because her presence was shaping the different ways that I would engage with people that were part of the study. Right. So in the book I write about how when I went to the field as a lone Mandarin speaking white guy, I drew attention because, you know, it was pretty clear that I wasn't local, it was pretty clear that I wasn't from this place. And people were generally interested in my otherness. And my otherness would then open a conversation or open a vein for having a conversation. But in contrast, when I went to the field with my daughter, people were really interested in her and they would ask questions about her and what she's up to and all these types of different things before I ever asked anything about what was going on in the village. So over time, in some specific sites, people came to know us both. And those that had kids would bring their kids out to play with her while we talked about other stuff and did interviews and things like that. And I write her into the book, particularly in chapters four and in chapters five. And of course, I dedicate the book to my daughter because she played such a large role in the speaking, and I'm really grateful for her presence and at that time. And continued presence.
- [25:20]
B
Exactly, exactly. And it sounds like you had a really great research assistant during your research and to help you get really quick immersion in your field science. So it's fascinating. So I think it's now it's time to. For us to turn to some historical tracing about environmental governance in China. It's not a new thing in environmental studies, and many, many scholars have done this kind of research, but I think you did a really great review and also, you know, archival. So in your book, you trace how environmental governance stretches across the Maoist, post reform and also Xi eras, each time acquiring a new political rationale. So could you please highlight some historical continuities and differences in these campaigns? And you also describe an equal developmental logic at the heart of the contemporary Chinese state. So how would you define this concept?
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C
Fantastic. Yeah. Thanks for these questions. Thank you. So in the introduction of the book, I lay out some of what you just talked about and some of the continuities and some of the ruptures in how the Chinese state approaches nature under Mao and how that's similar or different under Xi. And I tell that story through the perspective of a villager that I interview that I named Zhang Jian in the book. That's just a pseudonym, but it's a pseudonym for a real person who experienced substantial social and environmental disruption under these two different environment environmental campaigns. The first under Mao and the second under Xi. So I first met Zhang Jian in the courtyard of a village who's waiting to get his hair cut. There was a local barber who, like, comes to the village, you know, once a month to cut hair. He was waiting there, and we started talking, and he started to talk about some of the transitions that he had experienced in his village. So now, you know, at the current moment, his village is undergoing displacement under Xi's effort to build an ecological civilization. But in the socialist period period, his village was at the forefront of the Maoist campaign to increase arable land through filling in parts of Lake Dien. And for those who don't know, Lake Dien, or Dien Shi in Mandarin, is a high plateau lake just south of the city of Kunming. So in the Maoist period, Zhang was part of the Fill in the Lake brigade. This was both a labor unit and a performance group. And when we met, John was actually. Actually, when we were talking about this, John came to sing some of the songs from his day in the performance troupe and talk about and discuss those performances in relationship to learning from Da Dzai. So Da Dzai is a village that had done very well in agricultural production, and it really became a model for the rest of China at that time. And as Zhang recounted his experiences as part of this brigade, the commonalities and differences between Xi and Mao really came into focus for me. So Zhang was recounting how he spent his days pulverizing rock, trying to fill in parts of Lake Dien. And these efforts eventually didn't end up producing that much more arable land. They fundamentally transformed the landscape, fundamentally transformed the ecology, but it wasn't that successful in creating more arable land. But the way he did so reflects the politics of a certain state approach to nature. So Mao's logic entailed mobilizing social forces, mobilizing state power in effort to modernize the nation. And there's significant continuity there with Xi, which I'll talk about in a minute. But the key point of distinction here for Mao's version of technical triumphalism over nature is that it was explicitly a political project to obtain the right relationship with nature. To shape nature for the purpose of modernization, it required the application of the correct political thought and correct political action, such as in this case, turning a lake into an agricultural field. So in that moment, it was learning from Dajai, it was performing, forming redness by showing your ideological purity and showing your commitment to socialist ideals. And Zhang Jian did that through his song and dance as part of the Fill in the Lake brigade, which again, is why I open the book with this kind of example, to emphasize the performative nature of environmental politics during the Maoist period and the shift that we see here under the Xi Jinping period. So now, under Xi, which is the time that we're living in right now, ecological modernization is still persistent, pursued through a technical triumphalist vision, but it is not explicitly political in the same ways that it was under Mao. So Xi's vision is really one of building an ecological civilization. Now this is a really charged word for a lot of people and a lot of scholars write about ecological civilization simply as a high level party state slogan or a high level party state discourse. But my book shows that while it is that, it is also much more than that. So the discourse of ecological civilization doesn't just emerge at sea with Xi. It doesn't just emerge. You know, in the 2010s, ecological civilization merged organically from Chinese intellectuals across a range of different disciplines, from system science to botany to political economy. And all of these people were grappling with questions of how we square ecological thought with socialist thought at a time when China seemed to be transitioning out of socialism as we know it. But it was not yet able to be said that it was as something like capitalism or state capitalism or something to this effect. So there's a lot of internal disagreement at this time in the 80s and the 90s and in the early 2000 Ox about what ecological civilization means. But where the debate lands at the moment that is co opted by the Chinese party state is essentially as a philosophical foundation for eco developmentalism. And this gets back to your question here. So at its core, eco developmental logics hold that state intervention can prevent produce ecological equilibrium in the biophysical world. Eco developmental logics hold that state intervention can produce a modern society, produce a modern society through the ordered semblance of people and the ordered semblance of nature. And that through doing this it will also create an aesthetic sublime in the physical landscape. So the types of interventions that you see in contemporary China are really aimed at socio natural, in socio space spatial optimization, you see things like ecological restoration sites, you see resettlement of rural people into spatially concentrated housing, as well as various efforts at landscape beautification. So for example, we can think of the construction of, you know, a large artificial waterfall, which you can see on the book. So if you're listening to this podcast now, I want to invite you to pause the podcast here, pick up the book and take a look at the COVID Or if you don't have the book, go to Cornell University Press. Download the book for, because it's open access, or just Google the book so you can take a look at the COVID which is what I'm going to talk about really briefly right here. So pause it. I'm going to imagine that you've unpause it now. So what you are looking at here is the largest artificial waterfall in Asia. This is part of Kunming Waterfall Park. It is a human made artificial waterfall. It is also a site of displacement and resettlement. So this is a place that used to house several natural villages, all of which have been displaced and resett into high rise apartments. You can't see them on the COVID but they're kind of off to the left side, the resellment apartments. It's also a waterfall that was built with the intention of beautifying this landscape, attracting people to this urban site, but also helping with issues of eutrophication in Lake Dien. Again, Lake Dien is in the south of Kunming. It's been suffering from eutrophication for many decades. And increasing the rate of water flow through this waterfall, through the river and into that lake was a way of imagining the optimization of ecological relationships in that space. At the same time, you can see these high rise commercial apartments right in the background. So these commercial apartments essentially stand as kind of symbols of socio spatial optimization. So the COVID of the book shows you this kind of eco developmental landscape that I'm analyzing and this eco developmental logic and set of techniques that I analyze throughout the book. It reflects an attempt at socio natural optimization again across biophysical, governmental and aesthetic modes. So returning to your question here, there is a lot of continuity between Mao and Xi, right? Both espouse a kind of vision of technical control over nature in the service of ecological modernization. But their visions are fundamentally different. They look different and here is the rupture. So while Mao emphasized the maximization of agricultural yields through proper performance, proper performativity of red politics, in contrast, contrast, we see Xi's vision is one of technoscientific optimization. So going back to Zhang Jian, right, Zhang Jian performed Mao's vision of red politics through singing, through dancing, through his labor of creating this field. Xi's vision, in contrast, is a fundamentally mechanistic orientation to technoscientific optimization. If you apply the proper scientific and planning interventions, then you will get the kind of desired sociospatial output. So in this instance, instance, Zhang is supposed to simply accept resettlement into a high rise apartment. And once he does so, you will create this kind of sociospatially optimized landscape, right? So resettlement is what Zhang is now facing. Undersea's environmental campaign. But of course, nature and of course society don't simply operate mechanistically. There's all kinds of feedbacks within any given ecological system. Ecological relations don't simply transform according to the mechanistic expectations of planners or scientists and societies certainly don't doesn't respond in uniform ways to state efforts to govern their conduct, govern their forms of habitation through ecological policy. So a large part of what the book analyzes is how people encounter and then in some instances counter these eco developmental logics, these eco developmental techniques. And that includes the ways in which state planners, the ways in which scientists encounter these things and work with them, as well as everyday citizens who are at the forefront of seasoned environmental care campaigns.
- [35:46]
B
It's perfect. It's perfect. Thank you very much. And I agree that the book cover is really great. It's a spectacle, spectacle landscape and also showing this performative spatial reordering that features the Xi era. And also I really like your elaboration of the knowledge production process in so called Building Ecological Civilization. It shows that even in an authoritarian context, knowledge production involves different actors, including intellectuals. And also, I think one of your key contributions in this book lies in your analysis of what you called ecological territorialization. You have already mentioned this term and I think it's time to elaborate more on this. So I think you do a really great and helpful work showing how local governments in China today expand their administrative and fiscal reach under the banner of ecological protection and reservation. So why do you see this process as a critical entry point for understanding China's environmental politics today? And how do such processes generate large scale ecological migration and produce what you call new eco developmental frontiers?
- [36:57]
C
Thanks, Yadong, for this question. Super important question, and especially now that we've talked a bit about some of the eco developmental logics of what that means, we could think about the ways in which these logics shape different practices and produce these frontiers. Years of state governance. Right. So I use this term, ecological territorialization in the book to refer to the confluence of planning practices through which municipal governments enact control over rural land. So the two that I've touched on, I'll just reiterate here, include urban rural coordinated planning and ecological redlining. And again these are being rolled out as part of new type urbanization planning. These planning techniques justify municipal state control over rural land and resources, again in the name of making making the city more sustainable, but also improving the population. Right. So of course there's a number of ways in which cities have enacted control over rural space in China's modern history. And I try to be really careful in the book to say that ecological territorialization is just one of the latest ways in the list of a long line of techniques through which cities have strived to Control rural land, to control rural surplus value and to control the rural population. Population, right. So the second part of the question. Yes, ecological protection zoning precipitates a number of different peri. Urban ecological migration processes. And these fundamentally reconfigure livelihoods of rural folks and reconfigure their lives in different ways. And I think this is really important because, you know, most of the scholarship that's out there focuses really on ecological migration in China's nomadic herding communities, particularly in Tibet and in Inner Mongolia. So part of what I'm doing here is shifting the focus from these largely rural areas to thinking about peri urban areas. And, you know, there's a lot of great work on this. I'm thinking about Emily Ye and others who've done work on sedentarization of nomadic herbivores in places like Tibet. Right. So in contrast, I'm bringing attention to ecological migration within municipal regions. So when rural land is zoned for ecological protection and assigned a specific ecological function as part of the comprehensive planning process, rural land and housing undergo processes of valuation and they undergo processes of compensation. And in the book, I discuss how the politics of land and housing compensation actually shape villagers aspirations for upward socioeconomic improvement, for upward socioeconomic trajectories. Right. So as villagers, they undergo peri. Urban ecological migration. Many of them do so under different conditions. Many of them do so under different terms of compensation. Some of them fare really quite well, and they are able to accumulate through the process of displacement, while others undergo conditions that essentially further push them into conditions of precarity. So I bring attention to this in the book because it's a process that's happening all over, across all of China's cities. At the time that I did the research for the book, state policy mandated that roughly 20% of land. I'm sorry, exactly 20% of land needed to be zoned for ecological red lines. Now, since the Kunming Montreal Biodiversity Framework came into effect and was approved in 2022, China increased that figure to 30%. So now 30% of all land needs to be zoned as part of this ecological red line ecological conservation program. So there's a real need for continued attention to how ecological territorialization continues to reconfigure relationships to land in relationships to livelihood.
- [40:43]
B
Thank you very much. And I think here a very important keyword is unevenness. And I think in your later chapters in the book, you beautifully trace the divergent trajectories of peri urban migrants, some benefiting financially from the relocation, while others face despair and Disillusion. So you provide your readers with many, many stories. And what does this kind of unevenness reveal about the social consequences of state led ecological transformation? And can we understand these differences as outcomes of ecological territorialization itself?
- [41:19]
C
Yeah, so yes and no. In some ways you can. But I think it's important to understand the process as initiated by ecological territorialization, but also structured by already existing, existing forms of class difference. And those can partially account for this unevenness. Right. So as I mentioned before briefly, as land is zoned into conservation areas within the urban rural planning process, there's a process through which rural land is then valued and compensated. So the process of land and housing compensation themselves, they're really slippery kinds of political processes. And in the book I bring attention to how the volumetric politics of these valuation processes are really important in shaping different socioeconomic transitions. So in chapter four in particular, I'm drawing on and engaging with some scholarship on verticality and the volumetric within fields of architecture and urban geography. And in the book I'm kind of shifting or departing from that scholarship by departing from the kind of God's eye view of the planner or the God's eye top down view of the military strategist, which is where a lot of that literature has been, and shifting to thinking about the everyday experiences of peri urban ecological migration. So what's the experience of peri urban ecological migration? How does one navigate the politics of land and housing compensation, especially when they're so politically slippery? Right. And part of what the book draws attention to are the creative ways in which villagers navigate these politics. So I discuss how people resist moving into high rise resettlements through collective organization, through protest. I discuss how people creatively use compensation capital, again, compensation capital that's supposed to assist their move into a high rise apartment for other things, they'll use it to lease land in a different village, they'll continue farming elsewhere, they'll engage in petty entrepreneurship, et cetera. I also discuss the ways in which villagers corporatize in effort to maximize compensation capital for land and housing. And in these instances is villagers are essentially utilizing state assets in ways that are unintended by state planners. Again, this is a pushback against that kind of mechanistic approach to thinking about socio environmental governance.
- [43:41]
B
Right.
- [43:41]
C
So they're creatively remaking their relations to land, labor and housing in pursuit of their own benefit. And in some cases villagers are quite successful and they accumulate through processes of displacement. In the book I refer to these as as instances of accumulation through displacement. So I'll Give you an example to think about this. So Jong Lin is one example of a peri urban villager turned urban landlord through ecological migration. So I first met Jong Lin when he was sitting at a bench in the courtyard of the resettlement complex. He was wearing a blue Mao suit, he was smoking a cigarette. He was just basking in the sun, soaking up some rays. And I asked him how his move was, how the resettlement was, if he got a compensation. He responded something along the lines of, you know, I don't have a cure in the world, I'm set for life. He was really happy with how resettlement turned out for him. So when I sat down to interview him, I came to learn that he had obtained a high price for land and housing, including different volumetric measures that were compensated not in the form of money, but compensated in the form of resettlement housing. So altogether his family came to own 15 apartment units in the resettlement community complex. And in his rule to urban transition, he took on rentier status, essentially moving into the housing managerial sector. So through peri urban ecological migration, he transformed from a villager into an urban landlord. So this is one example of accumulation through displacement. But the book also identifies instances of people who are essentially moving into what they describe as high rise poverty or what you can think of as conditions of extensive relative to precarity, relative precarity to their life in the village. So in one site, this is a contrasting example here, interviewees would refer to the site of their own resettlement as the refugee district. And they called it the refugee district because of the relatively low levels of compensation they receive for land and relatively low levels of compensation they receive received for housing. So residents in the refugee district were compensated for land and housing jointly with just one 50 meter apartment unit and monthly compensation payments that amount to about $85 a month. And they received about $85 a month for a 20 year period. So this fell far below their housing in their land's market value and is a lot closer to the national low income subsidy, the depao. So when I interviewed them, they described their experience as one of moving into high rise poverty. And as I visited the refugee district, more and more in residents came to know. When I was researching, there were times when I would literally be surrounded in the courtyard by people trying to talk over one another and essentially share their stories of hardship. Some people would tell me about how the elevator quit working just after it was installed for a couple months. Others told me about how they broke their ankle as they were walking through the Floors and the floors were open, uneven. Some people would burst into tears when they would talk about and think about their old houses in the village. They would describe them as, you know, so wide and open. And now they're stuck in a small apartment, not only with their kids, but now also their grandchildren. There's just no space. And they'd tell me how tough it was to find work in the city. It's so challenging to find work there. And they would, regardless of the story, they would inevitably come back and contrast it with a sense of. Sense of how much space they had within the village and how much freedom they had relative to what they're now experiencing living in the high rise. Right. So there's a wide range of experiences, as you intuited in your question. And the experiences range from accumulation through displacement to high rise impoverishment. And in the book, I bring attention to two key forces that undergird this unevenness. One is the capacity for social organization. Those that socially organized, such as through protest or through forms of village corporatization, generally fared relatively well compared to those that did not. Another factor is already existing forms of inequality. So already existing forms of class difference and social inequality tended to be reproductive produced and deepened through peri. Urban ecological migration. So villagers who had larger houses and had more space to be valued also tended to have better political connections to help them navigate these slippery volumetric politics. While those who were on the kind of lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum initially had smaller built structures to be valued and compensated, and they had fewer political connections to help them navigate those slippery valuation and compensation processes. So these are some of the things that I bring attention to in the book that relate to this question of unevenness.
- [48:48]
B
Wonderful. Thank you for this. You know, thank you for this answer. And also through discussing all this very complicated politics of relocation and compensation, I think you, you know, perfectly build this connection between micro and micro level politics as people are dwelling in environment and we are part of our environment. I think every change of the environment will create a rupture in individual lives. And I think your book kindly reminds us that we should never ignore this connection between larger and more underground changes. And also you devote a full chapter to infrastructures about roads, housing, irrigation systems and their role in the governance of nature and people in today's China. So why are infrastructure and its distribution or intentional disrepair so important for understanding power and politics in China's urbanizing ecological frontiers?
- [49:43]
C
Yeah, thanks for this question, Yadong. So I think the first question, infrastructure is often thought about in relation to the kind of productive powers of the built environment, as well as, to some degree, the kind of speculative futures that are made by the promise of infrastructure. So what kind of new markets are going to be emerging through infrastructure? What do we see on the horizon when some kind of new real estate or infrastructure is going to be put into effect? These are the kinds of questions that I think dominate a lot of the scholarship and a lot of the literature, But I think it's less often thought about in terms of what happens when infrastructure is removed or what happens when infrastructure is damaged, and what kinds of diffuse power relations are embedded in the intentional removal or damaging of infrastructure. So in the book, I write about how state power can actually be constituted in diffuse ways through infrastructural disrepair and intentional infrastructural removal. And a lot of this takes in chapter six. And in chapter six, I write about one case when villagers had come together to resist resettlement. And some villagers there were not resisting. They had signed contracts to sell their home. They fully accepted the state's deal. And as soon as they did so, a demolition bureau would come to their village and partially demolish of those who had signed the contract. And as they did so, they left a bunch of debris, they left a bunch of sharp wires, broken glass in place and strewn about the village. And this came to be thought of by villagers as an intentional way in which the demolition bureau tried to coerce them into signing contracts to sell their housing and to accept resettlement. So when these villagers protested, they met with diffuse techniques of infrastructural removal. So this resulted in them essentially having to go through their daily life surrounded by partially demolished housing, partially demolished infrastructure. So imagine that for a minute. Imagine what it would be like to live in a village surrounded by partially demolished buildings, right? What effect would that have on you, waking up day after day surrounded by rubble? Other villages had different experiences with infrastructure. They had their infrastructural services cut off. So this included things like electricity, electricity included things like water, sanitation services. So, you know, imagine the effects of suddenly waking up and having no electricity, or having your water shut off, or sanitation services cease and rubbish is just piling up in your home or piling up in. In your town. How would that affect you? How would that affect your daily life not having these infrastructural services. So in the book, I write about how these techniques of infrastructural removal took effect on communities over time. Over time, villagers grew tired of living in a landscape of detritus. They grew tired of living without these basic infrastructural services and their solidarity weakened. In some of these places, many began to slowly accept resettlement. So think about villages that are, you know, filled with partially demolished homes. The effect that it had in these places was to diffuse collective forms of resistance. And in the book I refer to this as infrastructural diffusion. The diffused ways in which power operates through infrastructural disrepair and infrastructural removal. Infrastructural diffusion has the effect of dividing communities, has the effect of isolating individuals. So in the book I made the case that infrastructural diffusion signals another way that authoritarian power is expressed and another way that it is limits forms of collective counterconduct.
- [53:35]
B
Thank you very much. I think basically, I think for political scientists it will be, you know, benefiting a lot from your case studies about how solidarity is weakened by this kind of infrastructural, you know, infrastructure problems in China. And I think also what is very interesting for this book is, you know, this is a book based on the study of China. But you are, your scope goes beyond the Chinese context. And also you also insist that China's environmental governance can't be studied in isolation, that it must be situated within global frameworks of ecology, development and governance. So how might we think of China's ecological state comparatively? Could the analytical framework you propose in this book be useful for understanding other sides of state led environmental governance or even global, global China?
- [54:27]
C
Thanks for this question. This is a really great question, in part because it really speaks to where the book concludes and it speaks to some of the new directions that my research has been taking since this book was completed. So in the book I developed this concept of ecological states, or what you might think of as ecological state formation, which refers to the biophysical, the governmental, the aesthetic articulations between ecological and power and the ways that these articulations undergird everyday state formations and the relationship between state and society. Right. So the book isn't portraying some kind of, you know, top down authoritarian state like so much of the literature on China does, but rather a state that comes into being through reasoned forms of ecological knowledge production, struggles over resources within the local state, and everyday negotiations within the state and between the state and society.
- [55:20]
B
Right.
- [55:21]
C
And then in the book, as, as you bring attention to here, I make the case that we can apply ecological state formation outside of China and to think about China in global environmental governance situations. So one Way that I write about this in the book and in subsequent work is through thinking about China's presidency at the United nations in the COP15 biodiversity conference, which is one one of the first times that China had a major leadership role in multilateral environmental governance.
- [55:49]
B
Right.
- [55:49]
C
So in that space I've paid a lot of attention to the use and deployment of ecological civilization building discourse to try to frame environmental change and environmental governance within international context. And I've looked at some of the ways in which Chinese environmental models, things like the ecological conservation red line, are being portrayed as models for emulation elsewhere, especially in Global south context.
- [56:14]
A
Right.
- [56:14]
C
In other works I've been thinking about ecological state formation through a kind of broader global lens, including a kind of a global China lens. And in that work I really think about global China as a kind of socio ecological dynamism, which is how I frame it in some of the kind of forthcoming work that's coming out. Some of that is around kind of so called green bri. Some of that is around infrastructure investment, some of that is around international environmental exchanges. I mean, if it's okay with you, maybe I can talk about some of the ways that I'm approaching this in some of my new work.
- [56:49]
B
Definitely. Please go ahead.
- [56:51]
C
Yeah, so I've been thinking about this question, this ecological state formation incentive globally thinking about it in relationship to global China frameworks, but also thinking about China in the environment across a number of different scales. So one project is a forthcoming special issue with Julia Tipkin on China in the environment. In that special issue, we're really bringing attention to politics of scale and how we think the questions of scale should really be at the center of research on China in the environment. So that's something that should come out in early six. Related to this, I'm interested in the ways in which China's international environmental interventions are shaping new frontiers of green capitalism and power relations. So again, in the book I lay out this idea of ecological state formation. That's the ways in which state power materializes, arises through processes that transform ecology. Right. And I've written about ecological state formation since the book came out in the context of the South China Sea and the ways in which transforming marine ecosystems into artificial islands has been a key part of state efforts to territorialize the ocean, to territorialize the sea. So I have a piece in Political Ecology, excuse me, Political Geography, about that. And this kind of piece, this is kind of an example of thinking about ecological state formation formation as a kind of hard power. Right. So another way in converse that I'VE been thinking about this is ecological state formations as a form of green soft power. And by green soft Power here I'm thinking about ways in which China's international engagements are shaping environmental actions outside of its own borders, as well as the kind of discursive character of what we consider to be green. What is green? What is sustainable? What are the forms of knowledge production required to make those things come into being? So I have a policy paper out on this with the Wilson center, and I'm collaborating on a book project with this with some scholars, Yi Hsien Sun, Juliet Liu and Tyler Harlan. We have a working book on this called Green Soft Power. That's something that's in the works. Another way I've been thinking about this through the lens of global China is through how Chinese presence abroad is reshaping politics not only in the global south, but also in the rural North. So one of the papers that I have on this topic examines how China's BRI investments are reshaping political economies and reshaping social inequality in East Africa. That's a piece that's out in the journal Critical Asian Studies. Another paper focuses on the broader geopolitical imaginary of China as a threat to resource security in the rural United States. So this article, which is in Political Geography, argues that we've essentially entered into a a new red scare, the third red scare, which essentially aims to discipline transnational capital. And as it disciplines transnational capital, it has the effect of alienating those of Chinese and Asian descent living within the US and delimiting their capabilities to own land and pursue capitalist relations within the United States context. And then finally, I have a project that's on the relationship between urban politics of consumption and biodiversity loss at sea. And in this project I'm centering high value seafood commodities, things like sea cucumbers, things like shark fins, things like fish maw, in major urban markets like in Hong Kong. So this project is trying to shift the predominant focus that has been generally around casting blame on biodiversity loss on so called undifferentiated Asian super consumers. Rather, it aims to bring attention to class and gendered politics that undergird the market, as well as the international fishing networks that supply the market and contribute to amplifying biodiversity loss at sea. So these are some of the new projects that emerged out of the book. I would encourage your listeners to reach out to me if they're interested in these projects, you know, to look at my research website for publications as they come up. And again, I'll just kind of close out the question by also encouraging listeners to download the ebook version of Ecological States for free. It's published and is available open access with Cornell University University Press, so I'll leave it here. Yadong, thanks so much for engaging with the book, for reading the book, and thanks so much for having me on the podcast.
- [61:11]
B
Thank you so much Dr. Rodenbiker and we will definitely put Dr. Rodenbiker's email address in our blog post and so any of our audience who are interested in his work and also in Ecological States can directly email him. And also we are, you know, as we are approaching the end of today's podcast and you know, I want to thank you so much for sharing with us your research trajectory after ecological Portugal States. I'm really looking forward to reading and learning from them in the future. So thank you for joining the new Bookstat World Today and offering this insights about ecological governance and its connection to an increasingly urbanized and also globalized China. It's been a great pleasure for me to talk with you today.
- [61:51]
C
Likewise. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
- [61:55]
B
Thank you. So in today's podcast I've been speaking with Dr. Jassy Rodenbiker about his book Ecological Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China, published by by Corner Invest Press in 2023. Again, this fascinating new book is freely available through open access. It's a deeply engaging exploration of how ecology becomes an arena of governance, transformation, and everyday struggle. I'm Yadong Li. Thank you for listening to the Chinese Studies Channel of the New Books Network and we hope to see you next sa.