ABSTRACT
In the battle for global legitimacy, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has learned to take advantage of the public consensus regarding the need to be more environmentally sustainable. President Xi Jinping’s determination to adopt a “green” vocabulary, as epitomized by the concept of “ecological civilization”, points to this new paradigm. This chapter introduces the concept of environmental authoritarianism—the idea that the environmental challenges ahead will lead to the inevitability and necessity of measures that defy democracy—to trace the connection between authoritarian resilience and the domain of environmental politics. The starting point is the fact that environmental movements, depicted by eminent scholars as key actors for social and political change, add to a long list of failed phenomena expected to weaken China’s authoritarian regime. Taking an ethnographic attention to explore grassroots movements, the chapter adds to a growing body of literature that theorizes contemporary depoliticization in terms of post-politics to rethink our understanding of the CCP’s approach to environmental governance. Building on the work of post-political scholars, this chapter introduces novel ways to understand the implications of the instrumentalization of the environmental sphere by China’s authoritarian regime, and especially in the urban sphere.
