UC Berkeley

My dissertation explores articulations of modern power in contemporary China through the logics, practices and trajectories of ecological civilization building, the modernist project of social and environmental engineering. Modern power in China, I argue, operates through entangled ecological states, an ensemble of logics, practices, and trajectories shaping socio-environmental governance and socio-physical landscapes. This work explores these articulations of power through the cultural politics of science and nature, political economies of urban environmental land governance, and infrastructural politics of peri-urban peasant dislocations.

The introduction provides a summary of the entire work and an analytical framework. The analytical framework of Ecological States interlinks the multiple and overlapping moments within and through which ecology and civilization take on meaning and shape the socio-physical landscape. Ecological states include states as in governing entities, biophysical states, states of nature, aesthetic states, and future states of attainment. I argue, in this work, that contemporary power relations articulate through ecological states remaking state-society relations and the landscape of modern China.

Chapter one, Making Ecology Developmental, charts a genealogy of the logics of ecological civilization building through which the contemporary modernist vision of sustainable socialist development came to be articulated. I illustrate key historical moments of transcultural exchange within the social and natural sciences that formative for the contemporary political moment. I show the ways that Chinese Marxism and Earth Systems Scientists conjoined to articulate modern development as ecological civilization building, a form of national futurism and sustainable socialist modernism. Through this genealogy I show how state-society relations are remade. The role of the peasantry transforms from the revolutionary vanguard under Mao to a backward social force holding China back from modernity that comes to be typified in the nature of modern urbanites. The role of the state is reaffirmed as the benevolent, highly interventionist, technocratic engineer of society and environment. These logics inform the cultural politics of urban and rural difference, as well as contemporary practices of social and environmental engineering.

Moving from the national to the local scale, chapter two, Botany, Beauty, Purification, provides a situated account of the practices of delimiting historical ecological records and ecological construction in the Lake Dian Basin. Through interviews, observations, and historical ecological reconstruction with ecologists, I show how scientists privilege the botanical record, pre-determined landscape functions and aesthetics over the social history of land use. In illustrating this practice of delimiting historical ecological records, I argue that a politics of site-sight is embedded in the practices of historical ecology and ecological construction in which historical practices of agrarian land use and rural natures are either erased or coded as degrading, unsightly, polluting or backwards. In contrast, scientifically engineered landscapes are considered beautiful and, although recently designed and built, pristine natural sites of social and environmental improvement. These politics run throughout practices of creating ecological sites across the peri-urban fringe.

In chapter three, Ecological Territorialization, I argue that the practices of making peri-urban ecological sites facilitate territorialization of village land and housing allowing for land-based accumulation by the local municipal state and institutions. The peri-urban frontier is produced through the territorialization of village land, first through municipal state consolidation of land control and second, by dispersing land governance responsibilities across multiple institutions. Ecological land demarcations (shengtai yongdi) are steeped in legal and practical ambiguities. Capitalizing on these ambiguities, the municipal government hierarchy extends control over peri-urban construction and agricultural land through comprehensive urban-rural planning and dual functional zoning, in which land classification types (such as "ecological land," and either "agricultural land" or "tourist land") can overlap. These practices facilitate consolidation of control over village agricultural and construction land as local governments purchase or lease these from villages. City governments assign institutional responsibility for financing, constructing, and managing land to a number of state and non-state institutions detailed in this chapter. Government officials refer to these institutions as land "owners," denoting transfer of proprietary land control with full sovereign control moving from the village to the municipality. Land is either allocated or granted on a lease basis to these new "owners" who then operate as an umbrella organization controlling economic activities on the land plots assigned to them under municipal government supervision. In the wake of development zones (kaifaqu), which slowed under new central state regulations, this consolidated yet dispersed land governance through making ecological sites produces a new regime of land-based accumulation. However, these practices are highly varied leading to uneven incorporation of village land and housing, which in turn spur myriad trajectories for villagers in transition.

Chapter four, Vertical Aspirations, illustrates how the uneven incorporation of land and housing into ecological sites shapes socio-economic trajectories, social differentiation, and the politics of navigating rural-urban transition. In lieu of standardized practices of valuating and compensating village land and housing, I show how the politics of valuating and compensating village spaces shapes socio-economic transitions and the politics of navigating rural-urban transition. I support this argument by showing the how entangled processes of what I refer to as volumetric transitions, that is the measures and calculations of volume, their spatial valuations and compensation, shape social differentiation and the politics or rural-urban navigation. For many, these transitions entail movement into resettlement complexes, a spatial practice that concentrates rural housing space effectively opening up rural construction land to other forms of conservation-oriented development. I show that how villagers navigate the transition is shaped by the volumetric relations to land and housing. I present these volumetric relations and trajectories in the chapter through horizontal relationships to land proprietorship, vertical relations to housing valuation and resettlement, and temporal politics of transition out of the village. Through discussing these processes of the green urbanization of the rural, I problematize the boundaries between the agrarian question and urban question to show how they are mutually constitutive and produce highly uneven trajectories through their entanglements.

Chapter five, Village Redux, charts trajectories of uneven incorporation into conservation through two figures whose village land have been purchased to make an ecological site: a multi-generational agrarian elite, and a multi-generational peasant. The chapter shows how class and infrastructural access are spatialized in the landscape of a village in transition, not only by their individual class positionalities, but by their nostalgic memories of past village life. I argue that the ways villagers rework tropes of rural and ecological natures into the built environment, cuisine, and experiential service provisioning practices are indelibly shaped by their own rural imaginaries formed in relation to class positionalities, which are aesthetically emplaced in the landscapes of their own dispossession. In effort to provide leisure services to burgeoning tourists who visit the ecological site, which abuts their homes, each draws on their own nostalgic imaginaries to reconfigure their domestic spaces and livelihood practices. Towards these efforts they curate representations of rural and ecological imaginaries, but in ways that are shaped by class difference and differential access to village spaces. The agrarian elite effectively territorialized the failed TVE infrastructure, which he is transformed into a rural restaurant (nongjiale) and rural museum replete with a growing personal collection of village relics. The landless peasant transformed his home, the only space to which he has access, into a site of social reproduction, a rural restaurant. In addition, he clandestinely traverses the ecological site to draw in customers for rural cuisine and rural experiences of traditional fishing. Both figures remake their livelihoods and domestic space, but under conditions shaped by political economic continuities and ruptures from the Maoist and Deng legacies up to the present.

Chapter six, Archipelagos of Resistance, highlights the ruptures and fissures in ecological civilization building to argue that making city spaces governable is highly contested. In contrast with other scholarship on residential housing, I focus on street-level governance to show how making spaces governable does not occur in a vacuum of consensus. I highlight how political contestation is met with a series of micro-political techniques of erasure, which I detail in this chapter including: violent disintegration of village housing and collective resistance to ad hoc demolition bureaus that partially demolish village homes, demobilization of street level activity by "volunteer" street police, uprooting guerrilla agricultural practice through militarized aggression, dismantling village spaces through environmental surveys and land classification, unseeing land measures, and the digital erasure of confrontations over the moral character of "civilized" behavior. Through these accounts I illustrate that the micro-politics of ecological governance entail techniques of erasure steeped in moral claims on what is “ecological” and “civilized.” In highlighting grassroots resistance to the all-encompassing technocratic vision of "ecological civilization building," this chapter opens up possibilities for alternative modes of organizing cities and sustainable development.

In the conclusion, Global Ecological Futures, I move beyond the domestic sphere to consider how ecological states mediate the expression of power outside of China's domestic borders. Reflecting on China's recent climate engineering and maritime island formations that support new sovereign claims in the South China sea, the conclusion provides building blocks to consider the future of the expression and constitution of state power through ecological states globally.