ABSTRACT
This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world’s most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China’s physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy, and illuminates the diversity of narratives and worldviews that inform contemporary Chinese understandings of and engagements with nature and environment.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|109 pages
Ecology and the classics
chapter 4|13 pages
‘Hard-hearted’ and ‘soft-hearted’ ecologies
chapter 6|30 pages
When the land is excellent
part II|111 pages
Imagining nature in modernity