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A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
This book reveals how China’s celebrated green transition is built on the displacement and demolition of rural communities, landscapes, and livelihoods to make way for new industry and urbanization. Drawing on eighteen months of archival and ethnographic research in Jiangsu province, Jia-Ching Chen traces how state-led planning, land clearance, and ecological construction reorganize life in the name of sustainability—shaping the experiences of resettled villagers navigating fractured kin networks as well as migrant workers hired to dismantle homes. Chen argues that ecological civilization produces not only low-carbon infrastructure but also new forms of inequality, exclusion, and dislocation. Centering the concept of “surplus ecologies,” the book offers a critique of statist environmental governance that reveals the recursive violence of green development. Bridging political ecology and urban studies, Ecological Demolition reframes debates on climate governance and environmental justice.
“In this extraordinary book, Jia-Ching Chen unearths the hidden logics and contradictions embedded in China’s massive project of ecological civilization, the twenty-first-century successor to the party’s project of population governance, which also pursued a near-totalistic, technocratic reordering of life and land in the name of national progress and global fame. Through sophisticated theorizing, in-depth ethnography, and a visual feast of photos, Chen tells the story of chaiqian (demolition-relocation) in Yixing, Jiangsu, and how it transformed rural villages and households into ‘zones of necessary sacrifice’ that had little choice but to go along as their communities and histories were erased so ‘nature could be saved.’ Intellectually ambitious, deeply affecting, and beautifully crafted, Ecological Demolition will be the go-to book on environmental governance and the demise of rural China for some time to come.”—Susan Greenhalgh, John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society Emerita, Harvard University
“Ecological Demolition offers a strikingly original account of China’s famous ideology of ecological civilization. Making use of an exceptional body of fieldwork materials, Chen reveals how the Chinese environmental state deploys what he calls ‘ecological demolition’ to pursue territorial and ideological consolidation, even as it produces dispossession and a fundamental reshaping of life across China’s rural-urban divide. A tour de force.”—Michael Watts, Class of ’63 Professor of Geography Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley
“In the literature on a carbon-free future, much has been written about the distance between a green transition and a just transition. But what is often missing is supplied in Chen’s superb study, which shows through skilled, careful, long-term fieldwork that green energy production can result in the same processes of displacement, demolition, hierarchy, and precarity that are often attributed to carbon-fueled industrial development. This book makes a strong case that the path taken to a green transition may be as important as the transition itself. Otherwise we will end up in a carbon-neutral world that is unlivable for the majority because of ever increasing inequality and widespread oppression.”—Akhil Gupta, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Los Angeles
“At a moment when the energy transition has become increasingly central to global politics, this magnificent book brings these often highly abstracted problems back to earth. Chen not only reveals the profound and unsettling consequences of green development in new sites of production, but also argues persuasively for the centrality of surplus ecologies to contemporary Chinese capitalism and its attendant system of authoritarian governance. Theoretically engaging and ambitious in scope, Ecological Demolition is a dazzling study that will change how we understand China’s land politics, ecology, and development.”—Eli Friedman, author of The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City
“An indispensable guide to making sense of ‘ecological civilization,’ Ecological Demolition takes us across fields strewn with rubble to reveal the textured affective landscapes of demolition-resettlement as a central mechanism of China’s ecological planning. Chen’s account of the reconfiguring of Yixing as a series of eco-development zones is poignant and sharp, brilliantly demonstrating how demolition, dispossession, and the production of ecological surplus recursively legitimize development and secure the state.”—Emily T. Yeh, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development
“What does it mean for environmental futures to be built on the demolition of rural worlds? Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic and archival research in Yixing—a self-styled hometown of environmental protection—Chen ingeniously advances ‘ecological demolition’ as a framework for understanding how green development proceeds through recursive dispossession. Tracing how village clearance, land reclassification, and resettlement produce surplus ecologies and environmental state space, Chen reframes sustainability as a technology of rule that reproduces the state’s authority through affective and territorial means. Ecological Demolition is essential reading for political ecology, critical urban studies, and Global China scholarship in an age of planetary green transition.”—D. Asher Ghertner, author of Rule by Aesthetics: World-Class City Making in Delhi
“This is a must-read for anyone interested in China’s ‘environmentalism.’ Meticulously researched, this book offers compelling concepts to understand the refiguring of rural worlds into ecological spaces (e.g., surplus ecologies, ecological demolition, commonplace greening, spatial discipline), and it skillfully decenters the state while also attending to the interweaving of technical, political, and biopolitical practices. Chen shows how material and affective relations of demolition, dislocation, disorientation, and disjuncture are central to the governmentalization of environmentalism, underscoring that not only are people’s lives being revalued, but also visions of sustainable futures are always historically situated and power-laden processes.”—Lisa Hoffman, coeditor of The Sage Handbook of Urbanization in China
“Anyone who wants to understand what ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics,’ or ‘Ecological Civilization,’ or even ‘National Rejuvenation’ means in real life could do no better than read Ecological Demolition. Chen draws on a decade of field research in Yixing, Jiangsu, where state capitalist actions are replacing centuries-old more-than-human landscapes with rational, planned, modernist residential and green energy projects. We see both the face of transformation—progressive modern bureaucratic redesign—and its hidden exhaust: powerless local people sucked up into the ‘surplus ecologies’ of their overwritten homes.”—Stevan Harrell, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of Washington, Tacoma