Building an Ecological Civilization across the Rural/Urban Divide and the Politics of Environmental Knowledge Production in Contemporary China

Over the past four decades, China’s environment has been transformed markedly, both in terms of pollution and degradation, but also through protection initiatives. This dissertation draws on political ecology, including theories of environmental knowledge production, and uneven development, to examine how China’s ‘green’ turn unfolds onto, and through, rural/urban inequalities, and how it reconfigures this profound divide that organizes society. This dissertation examines how these two ‘crises’ — one environmental and the other socio-economic — are in conversation with each other, and in many ways, build off each other. My analysis is based on first-hand research in the Qinling Mountains (Shaanxi), interviews (including with academics, officials and villagers), participatory observation, as well as on secondary literature on rural-environmental questions. Based on this data, I identify two paradoxical processes transforming rural environments: the ruralization of pollution and the mobilization of rural efforts to ‘green’ the nation. I propose the concept of socio- environmental reproduction as a useful lens to understand this paradox. This concept illustrates how the rural/urban divide is constitutive of the environmental project; it also helps to understand the mechanism by which national greening initiatives further re-assert rural/urban differences. This dynamic appears most clearly when examining the politics and logics of environmental research including limits on fieldwork, pressures to commercialize research and political decisions about what is, or not, acceptable environmental knowledge. This study therefore analyzes institutional, political and discursive frames that regulate rural-environmental research to explore the parameters that shape what is known, or made invisible, about rural-environmental realities. I suggest that the political and economic context shaping environmental research in contemporary China is productive of the invisibility of urgent rural-environmental questions — a process which contributes to reproducing rural/urban inequalities, and illustrates one of the new ways through which uneven development unfolds in contemporary China.Ph.D.2020-07-10 00:00:0