ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the principles of sustainability as they have evolved since the coining of the terms in Western development literature. The appeal of sustainability in China is its ability to steer the often contentious course between modernism and the socially-affirming precepts of tradition. Sustainable development persists as a contested concept even within the primarily Western environmental ethics and international development policy-making fields from which it derived. The conflict between modernism and tradition draws heavily from this rhetoric and persists in the form of Chinese sustainability. The explicit purpose of Agenda 21 was to take the much publicized concept of sustainable development and prepare the foundation for its implementation as policy. Recognizing that forms of capital stock change over the long-term and cannot be preserved forever, sustainability offers the notion of compensation. In contrast to Taoism, the Confucian tradition holds that the central goal in human life is to create a cultural order in the world.
