ABSTRACT
With its chemical spills, cancer villages and frequent protests against air and water pollution, China’s litany of environmental woes is now well known. Scholars are paying increasing attention to the politics of urban and, to a lesser extent, rural industrial pollution (discussed by Tilt 2013). Yet some long-time observers of China’s environment have argued that the ‘green’ issue of degradation of natural resources such as forests and grasslands are ultimately more threatening to long-term sustainability than ‘brown’ pollution problems (Edmonds 1999, Smil 2004). Nevertheless, a survey of the literature on Chinese politics reveals more attention to pollution than to natural resources, given the former’s close association with violent protests and other visible forms of collective action.1
Thanks to Elizabeth Wharton for research assistance, and to three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1One notable exception is Joshua Muldavin’s work on the political ecology of agrarian reform, which argues that the ‘mining of communal capital’ such as reservoirs, irrigation canals and erosion-control structures, and the redirection of investments from communal infrastructure to private agricultural investments have exacerbated rural environmental problems in the reform period. Against the
