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is ­there environmental
awareness in china?
Karen Thornber

The s­ imple answer to this question is yes, environmental conscious-

ness is quite strong in China, and it has grown significantly in the past
de­cade. Most notably, the nation’s ever more educated and wealthy
urban population is demanding a better quality of life for themselves
and their ­children. Particularly concerning to Chinese of all classes
is air pollution, which is becoming more and more disruptive and at
times is so severe that cities are brought to a standstill, with airports
and highways closed. Slowing if not reversing climate change is also
a priority. Chinese president Xi Jinping’s opening ­plenary speech at
the World Economic Forum in January  2017 positioned China as a
leader in the global fight against climate change, even as the United
States appears likely to withdraw from this role.
Recent reports rank China a dismal ninety-­first in the world in
Internet speed, while the government restricts access to numerous
segments of the Internet. Yet social media—­especially Weibo (Chi-
nese Twitter) and Weixin (WeChat)—­have greatly facilitated discus-
sion and debate in China on environmental crises. Lit­er­a­ture also
has contributed to rising environmental consciousness and activism.
Creative writers such as worldwide sensation Yan Lianke ruthlessly
satirize the seeming obsession of Chinese authorities with economic
growth and wealth at all costs. Especially noteworthy in this re­spect
is Yan Lianke’s recent novel Explosion Chronicles (Zhalie zhi), which
174 environment

describes the transformation of Explosion from a small mountain

hamlet into a megacity. This novel exposes and sharply critiques the
relentless drive for economic dominance that has severely compro-
mised h ­ uman health, scarred China’s landscapes, and contributed to
devastating pollution and global warming.
Film has had an even greater impact in strengthening Chinese
environmental awareness. Former China Central Tele­v i­sion jour-
nalist Chai Jing’s self-­financed documentary film ­Under the Dome
(Qiongding zhi xia), a penetrating if not entirely accurate exposé of
air pollution in China along the lines of Al Gore’s An Incon­ve­nient
Truth (2006), was viewed more than 150 million times within three
days of its release in 2015. At first, ­Under the Dome escaped censorship.
China’s Minister of Environmental Protection Chen Jining initially
praised the film, drawing parallels with Rachel Carson’s monu-
mental book ­Silent Spring (1962). Chinese officials likely promoted
Chai Jing’s film b­ ecause it focuses on the China National Petro-
leum Com­pany, a target of Chinese president Xi Jinping’s anti-­
corruption campaign, and b­ ecause, as has been reported in the
press, the government viewed the film as a way to use public opinion
to its advantage for promoting tougher mea­sures for combating pol-
lution. Yet within a week of its release, ­a fter it had been viewed
more than 300 million times, ­Under the Dome was ordered removed
from Chinese websites.
Despite such censorship, popu­lar environmental consciousness
prob­ably has never been greater in China than it is ­today. The Chi-
nese ­people are talking about environmental challenges and pro-
testing environmental destruction more than ever before, while Chi-
nese writers, film directors, visual artists, and other creative producers
are addressing environmental degradation on a seemingly unpre­
ce­dented scale. Furthermore, as historian Prasenjit Duara has noted,
China’s government is committed to environmental education, man-
Is ­There Environmental Awareness in China? 175

dating it in the nation’s public schools since 2003. To be sure, envi-

ronmental courses are not always taken seriously ­because the mate-
rial covered is not on the college entrance examinations, but this
curriculum does introduce Chinese c­hildren to some of the chal-
lenges they are inheriting. Moreover, the strug­g les of grassroots en-
vironmentalists, often inspired by China’s writers and artists, have
met with some success. For instance, former president Hu Jintao in
2007 advocated that “ecological civilization” replace economic de-
velopment as the nation’s core focus, and in 2008 the State Environ-
mental Protection Agency gained full ministerial status, with local
environmental protection branches set up across the country.
But what about earlier environmental consciousness in China?
Chinese for millennia have engaged in ecologically unsustainable
practices, every­thing from massive deforestation to sizable hydro-­
engineering proj­ects (such as canals, irrigation systems, and dams),
terracing ever steeper slopes, and developing technologies that in-
creasingly allowed communities to shape their environments. But
throughout China’s history, concern for the environment has accom-
panied ecological destruction.
Nascent environmental consciousness in China dates to well be-
fore the ancient phi­los­o­pher Mencius (372–289 BCE), who famously
declared: “If nets of fine mesh do not enter pools and ponds, ­there
­w ill be more fish and turtles than we can consume. If axes enter the
hills and forests only at the proper times, t­here ­w ill be more wood
than we can use.” To give an earlier example, Guan Zhong, a prime
minister during the Eastern Zhou dynasty more than two thousand
years ago, cautioned Chinese “not to raise too many ­cattle on the
grassland, lest it fail to recover from over exploitation; and not to plant
crops too close together, other­w ise the fertility of the soil would be
insufficient.” And the Huainanzi, an essay collection of similar vin-
tage, declares that ­those who prospered w ­ ere careful not to deforest,
176 environment

overhunt, overfish, or other­w ise abuse the environment. For its part,
radical environmental sentiment in China dates at least to the eighth-­
century writer Han Yu, who decried ­people who destroyed nature
by plowing, felling, drilling, digging, and building; he argued pro-
vocatively that reducing the ­human population would benefit both
heaven and earth.
To be sure, much early Chinese writing and painting does not
question ­human treatment of the environment. Instead it celebrates
the beauties of nature and provides an often distorted, idealistic view
of ­people as intimately connected to the natu­ral world. Some cre-
ative texts—­including poems in China’s first poetry anthology—­even
go so far as to celebrate h
­ uman destruction of nature. One such poem
declares that heaven created a state in the very place that ­people had
uprooted all the oak trees and cleared the pines and cypresses. In-
deed, razing the land for agriculture was an impor­tant marker of be-
coming civilized; p­ eoples the early Chinese perceived as barbarians
called attention to their deforesting prowess as proof of their own
pro­g ress.
But in many parts of China, the consequences of so d­ oing could
be fatal. A Ming dynasty poet four centuries ago wrote:

It’s easy to exhaust the pines and bamboos,

and the grasses and weeds d­ on’t grow enough . . . ​

When we traveled through the mountains last month,

the trees on the mountains appeared to pile up together,
but now that ­we’ve come down from the mountains,
we see afar t­ hey’re sharp and bare.

The farmers have nothing to use as fuel,

so they set on fire the axles of their w
­ ater carts.
Is ­There Environmental Awareness in China? 177

This text is based on a landscape (the lower Yangzi River region) that
had been subjected to millennia of ­human transformation and, during
the seventeenth ­century, was consistently unable to meet ­human
demands.
A ­century ­later, Wang Taiyue’s poem “Laments of the Copper
Hills” describes mines that have been exhausted and forests that are
no more, warning of the consequences of continued ­human destruc-
tion of nature:

The mining paths go deeper and deeper e­ very day . . . ​

What once was just a morning’s work,
now takes at least ten days.

The lumber too has grown increasingly scarce,

the woodlands resemble clean-­shaven heads.
For the first time they regret that all this logging, day a­ fter
day
has left them without the firewood they need . . . ​

So fertile are the hills and seas

that it seems ridicu­lous to ask w ­ hether they flourish only
when protected by disaster . . . ​
But if ­people take every­thing, if they have no restraint,
then they w­ ill exhaust heaven and earth.

Read literally, the poem’s concern extends beyond the woodlands to

the biosphere more generally. It depicts not a flourishing environ-
ment, nor even one whose damaged areas are relatively contained,
but instead a world threatened by a growing ­human population with
ever increasing demands. The poem acknowledges that calling for
caution might appear absurd, given how fertile much of the natu­ral
178 environment

world remains, but it stresses that ­people have the capacity to wreak
irreparable harm and warns that they ­w ill be left with nothing if
current be­hav­iors continue unabated.
Similar concerns ­were voiced in the following centuries, as
Chinese authorities sanctioned, and often explic­itly ordered, vast de-
struction of the country’s landscapes. Official rhe­toric surrounding
the G­ reat Leap Forward (1958–1961) and the G­ reat Proletarian C
­ ultural
Revolution (1966–1976) was striking in its overt antagonism ­toward
nature. As is well known, the Chinese Communist Party launched
a literal “war on nature” to “defeat nature,” declaring that “shock
troops” ­were to reclaim grasslands and that wilderness was to be
opened to plant grains. A­ fter the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Chi-
nese leaders no longer spoke so explic­itly of a war on nature and in
fact issued propaganda posters urging ­people to “green the moth-
erland,” “plant trees and make green,” and “cherish greening and
trea­sure old and famous trees.” But they believed ecological pro-
tection to be incompatible with economic growth and did ­little to
safeguard the nation’s environment.
China’s unchecked industrialization ­under Deng Xiaoping and
subsequent leaders has resulted in some of the world’s most polluted
air, ­water, and land. China’s sustained economic growth in the past
few de­cades has radically improved living standards for millions, but
the environmental costs have been staggeringly high. Matthew E.
Kahn and Siqi Zheng provide statistics: in 2012, 57 ­percent of the
groundwater in 198 Chinese cities was officially rated “bad” or “ex-
tremely bad,” and more than 30 ­percent of China’s rivers ­were la-
beled “polluted” or “seriously polluted.” Similarly, in early 2013, smog
in northern China mea­sured more than forty times greater than what
the World Health Organ­ization has deemed healthy; only 1 ­percent
of China’s urban population lives in cities that meet the air quality
Is ­There Environmental Awareness in China? 179

standards of the Eu­ro­pean Union. China is now the world’s largest

emitter of green­house gases.
Even as China’s central government signs international environ-
mental agreements in a bid to achieve global legitimacy and, ulti-
mately, leadership, prob­lems persist at the municipal and provincial
levels, where local officials often ignore regulations from Beijing
­because of their ties to local industrialists. As frequently is noted, in-
creasing wealth remains for many the top priority, in China and
globally. So the juggling act continues, with China’s long-­term en-
vironmental prognosis uncertain but with the environmental con-
sciousness of its ­people unlikely to diminish anytime soon.