Environmental Governance in China: Creating Ecologically Civilised Environmental Subjects

Abstract

Since the European industrial revolution, human society has been developing exponentially, but the resultant acceleration in production and consumption has come at great cost to the global environment. In the case of China, the link between industrialisation and environmental damage created political pressure to the point that in 2007 President Hu Jintao announced that the Chinese government would become an “ecological civilisation,” a sustainable model of economic development that aimed to mitigate the effects of its development on the environment. The incorporation of “ecological civilisation” by the Chinese party-state into its official discourse is of major significance as it marks a unique moral approach to addressing the environmental crisis. In this dissertation, I trace the origins of this concept and follow its development to the present. The key literature on “ecological civilisation” calls for a shift in ideals toward ecological sustainability, which in turn promotes cooperation, a healthy environment, and the common good. Such a shift from the primacy of rapid industrialisation to a more environmentally balanced approach, implied in “ecological civilisation,” in turn signifies an important shift in governance in China. To analyse the policy change, the thesis utilises a theoretical framework drawn from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to argue that China’s ecological civilisation campaign is indicative of the environmentalisation of the Chinese state’s pastoral care. This means that the government has extended the biopolitical imperative of securing the health and well-being of the population to include environmental health as an acknowledgment that the wellbeing of the population and the health of the environment are inextricably linked. From this premise the thesis draws out a larger issue, which is that the process of governmentalisation in the West and in China have an important difference. In China, the particular form of the state-society relationship effects a form of paternalism, which uses moral persuasion as a weak form of governing behaviour—this best describes the governmental techniques utilised by the Chinese government as typified by the ecological civilisation campaign. The object of this paternalism is to change individual consciousness and behaviour toward a sustainable environmental future. However, weak paternalism by its very nature will be insufficient to resolve the coupling of industrialisation and environmental degradation. The Chinese party-state has the power to effect change but the resort to paternalism as a major weapon against environmental degradation and pollution implies a certain constraint on its use in terms of legitimacy and the power of the market economy in shaping political options. The thesis supports the theoretical perspective through three case studies of how “ecological civilisation” is invoked in China today: the first examines how ecological civilisation is used as the guiding concept for policy development in China; the second draws on a case study in Pujiang County, Zhejiang, to examine how ecological civilisation and related concepts are invoked in environmental remediation efforts; and the third example draws on a case study of the New Rural Reconstruction Movement, by taking the example of Hong Nong Academy in Henan Province. This research demonstrates that the techniques of governance used by the Chinese government in its environmental remediation efforts are an example of weak paternalism. This is because they are an intervention involving the population’s liberty of action rationalised in terms of ecological values—values that seek to improve the welfare of the population and that concurrently promote moralistic education seeking to create a condition of autarchy, rendering the paternalistic interventions redundant. It is by these parallel processes that the environmentalisation of the Chinese state is taking place, with the object being to turn the Chinese people into “environmental subjects.” My research examines the different ways these techniques of governance are used in China for policy development, in rationalising environmental remediation projects, and in attempts to imbue people with ecological values. If the ecological civilisation campaign is to be successful, it needs to institutionalise ecological values so as to create “environmental subjects,” which, guided by these values, will conduct themselves in a manner that can reverse the current direction toward environmental destruction.