When it comes to understanding China’s relationship with the environment, the way we frame the question can change everything. A new editorial published in the Chinese Journal of Sociology argues that researchers need to think more carefully about “scale” — meaning the size, level, and reach of the environmental processes and systems— in order to get a fuller and more accurate picture of what’s happening.
RCEI Affiliate Jesse Rodenbiker, a professor in the Department of Geography at Rutgers University, is a co-author on the study, alongside Julia Teebken of the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Germany.
Most research on China and the environment tends to fall into one of three camps: (1) studies that focus on past environmental damage, (2) studies that emphasize China’s unique political system, and (3) studies that compare China to other countries dealing with the same problems of industrial growth and resource use. Each of these approaches tells part of the story — but none of them fully capture how local decisions connect to global processes, or how power relations shape environmental outcomes at different levels.
That’s where scale comes in. By paying attention to how environmental issues play out at the individual level, the community level, and the global level researchers can achieve greater clarity on China’s relationship with the environment.
For example, consider the rise of China’s environmentally conscious urban middle class. At the level of individual consumers, it looks like a green success story — people embracing environmentalism, simplicity, and frugality in their daily lives. Zoom out to the city level, and the picture grows more socially complicated: the “circular” recycling economies that make urban sustainability possible are built on the precarious labor of rural migrant workers who turn the city’s garbage into tradable commodities. Zoom out further to the global scale, and a darker environmental side emerges, as growing Chinese demand for consumer goods and clean-energy technologies fuels extractive mining for metals and minerals in places like South America and Africa. Related phenomena, in other words, can be read as progress at one scale, or social inequity and environmental harm at another scale.
“By centering the question of scale, we can move beyond monolithic portrayals of China’s environmental pursuits and consider alternative ways of understanding multi-scalar relationships across local and global processes and relationships. Ultimately, a better approach to environmental policies and practices depends on attention to multiple scales of a given climate or biodiversity issue.” — Jesse Rodenbiker
This attention to scalar politics has real practical value. It can help policymakers, planners, and communities better understand why environmental policies sometimes fail and how to design more effective solutions. Understanding these connections across space and place could improve climate governance both inside China and internationally.
You can read the full study here: https://doi.org/10.1177/2057150X261417716
This article was written with assistance from Artificial Intelligence, was reviewed and edited by Kenneth Tam, and was reviewed by Jesse Rodenbiker, a co-author on the study.
