China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet
Pluralizing the Anthropocene
Pluralizing the Anthropocene
Schedule: 14:00 - 15:30 (UTC + 1)
The session will be in English
Registration: Events will take place online. All welcome but registration required by this link
Events
will take place online. All welcome but registration required
Yifei Li (New York University
Shanghai) and Judith Shapiro (American University)
Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS/ Sci-Tech Asia)
What does it
mean for the future of the planet when one of the world’s most durable
authoritarian governance systems pursues “ecological civilization”? Despite its
staggering pollution and colossal appetite for resources, China exemplifies a
model of state-led environmentalism which concentrates decisive political,
economic, and epistemic power under centralized leadership. On the face of it,
China seems to embody hope for a radical new approach to environmental
governance. In this keynote, the authors
probe the concrete mechanisms of China’s coercive environmentalism to show how
"going green" helps the state to further other agendas such as
citizen surveillance and geopolitical influence. Through top-down initiatives,
regulations, and campaigns to mitigate pollution and environmental degradation,
the Chinese authorities also promote control over the behavior of individuals
and enterprises, pacification of borderlands, and expansion of Chinese power
and influence along the Belt and Road and even into the global commons. Given
the limited time that remains to mitigate climate change and protect millions
of species from extinction, we need to consider whether a green authoritarianism
can show us the way and what are its promises and risks.
Related
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international
scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to
questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological
transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of
socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher
and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the
University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he
held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village
Life Today (University of
Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming
Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research
has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of
anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member
of the Research Group on
Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues,
at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research
network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and
society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative
approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to
challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of
modernity.