Journals

The contributions to this volume contend that technological and corporate driven solutions are not sufficient effectively to address the aggravating environmental problems, and hence ask how communities and individuals grapple with the crisis from a Chinese point of view, and what is at stake in the different approaches taken. Voices addressing the problems and issues of anthropogenic environmental disasters do not only observe the visible violations and abuses at their origin, or interrogate the prevailing sets of knowledge production and moral values that are conducive to the excessive risk-takings of dirty industries, but moreover critically reflect on all domains of modern everyday life from individual lifestyles and religious orientations to economic practice and state-sponsored tools for mitigation. In one way or another, the papers moreover explore the reappearance of other, oftentimes premodern forms of a relationship with the planet’s nonhuman organisms that were imagined or spelled out in the past by members of the educated Chinese elite and are currently mobilized and reconfigured to challenge the predominant scheme of radical alienation, objectivation and exploitation of natural resources. As such, this issue engages with a broad spectrum of perspectives on sustainability across the Sinosphere, ranging from official technological solutions and soft power investments in public environmental awareness to unofficial calls for the aesthetic reconstruction of landscapes and new models of ethical human–nonhuman relationships. As humanities scholars working on China we hope to identify and outline ways in which the twenty-first century’s prospective leading economy, as a swiftly rising geopolitical force, not only contributes to the global destruction of ecosystems and livelihoods, but also to finding and implementing sustainability-oriented solutions within and beyond its national boundaries.