For decades, tree planting and forestry have been pivotal to Chinese environmentalism. During the Mao era, while forests were razed to fuel rapid increases in industrial production, the ‘Greening the Motherland’ campaign promoted conservationist tree-planting nationwide. Contested Environmentalisms explores the seemingly contradictory rhetoric and desires of Chinese conservation from the early twentieth century through to the present.
Drawing on literary, cinematic, scientific, archival, and digital media sources, Cheng Li investigates the emergence, evolution, and devolution of Chinese conservationist ideas. Combining literary, historical, and environmental studies approaches, he shows that these ideas acquired their value and assumed their power precisely because of their malleability and adaptability. Li historicizes authoritarian environmentalism and probes the global-local dynamics underlying conservationist ideas that energize environmental impulses in China. Examining ethnic borderlands, the Beijing political center, and China’s growth on the world stage, this book demonstrates the strength of Chinese environmentalism to adapt and survive through tumultuous change lies in what seems to be a weakness: its inconsistency and contestation.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Arbor Day: The Rise and Fall of China’s Environmentalism in the Republican Era (1912–49)
2. Selling the Forestry Revolution: The Rhetoric of Afforestation in Socialist China (1949–61)
3. Marching into the Desert: Planting Ethnic Borderlands in Mao-Era Ecocinema
4. Deweaponizing Forests and Engineering Nature: Militarization, Coming-of-Age Stories, and Science Fiction in the Mao Era
5. Great Green Awakening: Ecological Science and Chinese Conservation Literature of the 1980s
Coda: Arbor Day Is Every Day!: Virtual Arbor Day and Consumer Environmentalism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Circa l’autore
Cheng Li is Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.
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