China's Green Public Culture: Network Pragmatics and the Environment (original) (raw)
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Table of Contents & Introduction to Green Communication & China
Liu, Jingfang, and Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Eds. Green Communication and China: On Crisis, Care, and Global Futures. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020
"The edited collection Green Communication and China has burst onto the scene, extending environmental scholarship on China and China-US relations, forging methodologies necessary for meaningful global environmental change, and enriching the psyche. From the historical to contemporary, from leisure practices to labor, and from policy-making to art, this volume inaugurates environmental communication relating to China, foregrounding Chinese intelligentsia. The multimodal and multinational and transnational project helps move us from importing theories to transforming them and rendering national environmental, health, animal, and policy concerns of global import. If you care about the planet and what we can do and say to save it, start with this courageous collection of essays." —Kent A. Ono, Professor of Communication, University of Utah "A must-read for those interested in environmental issues in the globalized China. This collection eloquently weaves influential forces from various sectors to examine how the environment is engaged from the Chinese cultural lens. It includes a wide array of topics ranging from tourism and environmental policies, to responses to governmental practices from nonprofit organizations and civic groups. A groundbreaking resource for researchers and practitioners working in the field of environmental communication."—Hsin-I Cheng, Associate Professor of Communication, Santa Clara University
A Climate Change Public Sphere in China: Does it matter?
In 2007 with the publication of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, Chinese media began to make a link between human activity and climate change. To analyze the climate discourse that has emerged since the publication of the report this article draws on the argument of Guobin Yang and Craig Calhoun that China has a Green public sphere. In China amid the messages to consume more are messages broadcast for the masses by the Chinese state and foreign NGOs advocating "green" and "low-carbon" lifestyles with little mention of climate change nor questioning of existing policies. Smaller spaces or publics exist primarily occupied by governmental and non-governmental elites that debate and discuss climate change in serious and playful manners. Yet it is spaces that are not public, where public sphere theory is insufficient to explain the unequal power dynamics, that policies are being crafted that influence the emissions of greenhouse gases in China.
International Journal of Communication, 2017
The Chinese Communist Party has seen controlling information and guiding opinion as an essential element of power since its earliest days. But the methods of control and guidance have had to evolve radically in the transition from the age of broadcast media (one to many) to the era of networked communications (many to many). This article examines the contest between official and nonofficial media narratives of the environment, pollution, and climate change in China in the early 21st century. It finds that environmental issues provide a rich ground on which to explore fundamental questions about mediating China, particularly when considering the role of the party-state, the prospects for something akin to civil society, and the immediacy of the issue in people’s everyday lives.
Eco-media Events in China: From Yellow Eco-Peril to Media Materialism, 2020
This article brings together recent writing on eco-media, media materialism, and racialized Otherness to rethink the place of China and Asia in debates about the Anthropo-cene. We begin by examining the nonwhite postapocalyptic futures imagined in Bong Joon-ho's sci-fi film Snowpiercer and argue that the film problematizes a persistent Western-centric bias in both the environmental humanities and the literature on media materialism. Inspired by the metaphoric power of Kronon, the industrial-waste-turned-explosive in Snowpiercer, we theorize the instantaneously mediated and circulated chemical dust explosions in Kunshan and Tianjin in 2014-15 as eco-media events-that is, spectacular and ephemeral moments in which the material processes of digital production link the old forms of resource extraction with our new lives of electronic gadgetry and media tool dependency. Writing against the discourse of Yellow Eco-peril, which depicts such events (in both academic and journalistic writings) through a racialized Eco-Otherness, we offer a counter-politics to reconnect mainland China to the very systems of globalized production and consumption-the deep earth mining, the slow violence of black lung disease, the factory work, the digital consumption practices-that have propelled and intensified the country's stupendous development as well as its ecological challenges. We find new work on eco-media and media materialism most productive, as it sheds light on three closely intertwined dimensions of eco-media events: time, body, and matter. Probing the deep entangle-ments between the human and the nonhuman, a critical engagement with these events presents new possibilities to think anew environmental humanities in China, across Asia, and globally.
Media, Civil Society, and the Rise of a Green Public Sphere in China
China Information, 2007
Direct citizen voices are relatively absent from China's public arena and seldom influence government policymaking. In early 2004, however, public controversies surrounding dam building on the Nu River prompted the Chinese government to halt the proposed hydropower project. The occurrence of such public debates indicates the rise of a green public sphere of critical environmental discourse. Environmental nongovernmental organizations play a central role in producing this critical discourse. Mass media, the internet, and “alternative media” are the main channels of communication. The emergence of a green public sphere demonstrates the new dynamism of grass-roots political change.
Wright, Teresa (Ed.). Handbook of Dissent and Protest in China. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019, 2019
Since the mid-2000s, Chinese citizens have recurrently mobilized against major government-backed developmental projects. This chapter nudges the discussion on this phenomenon forward by posing two questions: first, how are such instances similar or different from other kinds of protests in China and forms of environmental contention elsewhere? Second, do they constitute a new type of contention in China? The study first outlines key attributes of three prominent repertoire concepts: Rightful Resistance, NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard) and Environmental Movement. It then examines 25 major cases of environmental contention between 2007 and 2016, drawing on news reports, Internet materials, interviews and existing scholarly research. The chapter shows that a majority of them do not fit easily into any of the three repertoire types. It therefore sketches out the notion of an Environmental Public Interest Campaign to demarcate more clearly what defines this new species in China’s contentious politics.
Managing Democracy in the Digital Age: Internet Regulation, Social Media Use, and Online Civic Engagement, 2017
This paper investigates online talk about environmental issues by average Chinese citizens in what has been labeled the " green public sphere " (Yang & Calhoun, 2007, p.212). It compares online everyday talk on three different platforms to explore if this effectively involves the general public in Chinese environmental politics. By analyzing forums ranging from an explicitly political, a mixed (overlapping between political and non-political realms) to a non-political forum, we found that such talk in Chinese digital spaces does not necessarily lead to the formation of public debate in the Habermasian sense. Rather, it gives rise to new forms of civic engagement to change and cope with the deteriorating environmental situation. It expands the green public sphere to the very grassroots level, in which average citizens are the main actors to produce green discourses, instead of the authorities, elites, corporations and social organizations. A range of non-deliberative acts help to make personal issues into public issues, transform ordinary citizens into engaged publics, and fostering a sense of community among participants, as a new way of being political.
Globalization of mediated spaces: The case of transnational environmentalism in China
This study takes a network perspective on media globalization, demonstrating how transnational civil society provides linkages that circulate norms and globalize mediated spaces. Based on interviews in China with the most prominent transnational environmental NGOs, I describe their institutional position and strategies through interactions with media, other civil society groups, and the government. Supported by case study examples, I argue that this transnational network, bound together via a problem-solving logic and connecting with more localized structures, enables adaptation to the authoritarian constraints of Chinese society and, in providing global linkages,