Book Review: Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China

Amy Zhang, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024; 216 pp.: ISBN: 9781503639294, £21.99 (pbk); ISBN: 9781503637962, £91.00 (hbk); ISBN: 9781503639300, £20.32 (eBook).

As China transitions from being the world’s largest polluter to becoming a global leader in renewable energy and climate solutions, there has been renewed academic interest in its environmental transformations and the socio-political implications of its ecological governance (Li and Shapiro, 2020; Rodenbiker, 2023; Harrell, 2023; Zhang, Wu and Liu, 2023). Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China contributes to this growing body of literature by focusing on the end of the value chain in capitalist production – waste – and a new frontier in China’s ‘green’ transition. Drawing on long-term and multi-sited ethnographic research conducted in Guangzhou from 2010 to 2018, Amy Zhang examines the people, technologies, infrastructures, objects, and practices surrounding waste’s circulation in one of China’s most populated and developed cities during its transformation from manufacturing hub into ‘a modern global city’ at the forefront of the state’s pursuit of ecological urbanism and green development (p. 11).

By tracing connections between controversies and conflicts arising from the state’s attempts to modernise Guangzhou’s waste management systems through waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration and citizen recycling campaigns, Zhang highlights the gaps and tensions between the top-down techno-scientific imaginaries of a circular economy – which envision waste in a smooth and seamless cycle of value extraction – and the on-the-ground practices of waste work and the material realities of waste matter that complicate its implementation. While the state’s strategies further exacerbated urban–rural inequalities by threatening the livelihoods of rural migrants and the displacement of rural lives, Zhang demonstrates how the same policies created opportunities for collective action among waste workers, homeowners, and activists to negotiate with the state over whose labour, knowledge and practices count as ‘modern’, ‘sustainable’, and ‘green’. By appropriating the state’s techno-scientific rhetoric and rationales, grassroots collectives circumvented state censorship and reclaimed agency in shaping China’s green future.

The book’s narrative follows five groups of actors whose lives became intricately entangled with the circulation of waste from Guangzhou’s urban centers to its peripheries. Chapter one traces the steps of informal waste collectors in the city’s central business district Tianhe. Detailing the challenges of informal waste work and the strategies workers developed to defend their spaces of living and livelihood against threats of eviction and displacement under China’s ecological development schemes, Zhang emphasised that these informal practices had become not only an effective and integral part of Guangzhou’s waste infrastructure but also an essential means of survival for rural migrants dispossessed by urban expansion and denied access to urban services.

Chapter two brings us to Baiyun, a peri-urban district of Guangzhou, where Zhang examines a series of confrontations and negotiations between rural villagers and municipal authorities over the construction and operation of the city’s first WTE incinerators in the village. From the initial protests and petitions to later inserting themselves into the facility as ‘technical monitors’ and meticulously gathering evidence that recorded irregularities in the incinerator’s daily operations, Zhang illustrates the ways in which villagers collectively resisted displacement by pollution and the state’s green development strategies. Most notably, in an episode known as the ‘850-degree controversy’, Zhang highlights that the scientific data collected by villagers forced officials to recognise that the materiality of Guangzhou’s municipal waste, which was particularly wet given that more than half of it was made of organic waste, hindered the incinerator from reaching 850 degrees Celsius, the temperature required to break down toxic compounds produced from burning waste, hence fulfilling the technology’s promise to transform waste into energy without generating pollution (p.83). Even though villagers’ efforts did not save most of the village’s inhabitants from being displaced by further expansion and continued operations of the incinerator, they laid the groundwork for broader citizen activism challenging the legitimacy of WTE technology championed by the state.

Chapter three focuses on middle-class homeowners in Guangzhou’s largest suburban gated communities in Panyu and Huadu districts, who mobilised against the state’s proposals to build a WTE incinerator in their neighborhoods. Through protests, petitions, and framing their concern as a technical dispute around the efficacy of WTE technology and its polluting effects on public health and local ecologies, homeowners effectively challenged the state’s decision. By situating the discussion within the context of China’s political repression and urbanisation strategies, Zhang highlights the complexity and dynamics of Guangzhou homeowners’ struggles that go beyond the framework of NIMBYism. Rather than merely defending the environment and home values within their own communities, Guangzhou’s peri-urban homeowners were forming a larger anti-incineration collective and contributing to a nascent anti-toxic politics that connected citizens across China against the state’s authoritarian environmental governance.

Chapter four delves into tensions between recycling activists and sanitation workers during an experiment implementing the official citizen recycling programme in a middle-class gated community in central Guangzhou. Despite repeated national campaigns and community organising efforts, the recycling programme faced resistance from both residents and sanitation workers, who relied on collecting and selling recyclables to supplement their low wages. By reframing waste work as a responsibility attached to good citizenship, the recycling programme obscured and devalued the labour of sanitation workers and challenged their claims to the right to reuse scraps that was earned through their willingness to endure the stigma and burden associated with waste work. Zhang’s ethnography highlights the ‘the moral economy of entitlement’ claimed by sanitation workers and the class dynamics underpinning the state’s ‘green community’ initiatives, which privileged middle-class identities over the livelihoods of the urban poor (p.110).

Chapter five diverts our attention from local reactions against the state’s waste management schemes to grassroots innovations and experiments with alternative ways to tackle the city’s waste crisis. Focusing on homeowner activists in Guangzhou’s peri-urban communities who were experimenting with eco-enzyme brewing to reduce and transform organic waste in order to repair the health of bodies and ecologies, Zhang highlights a shift towards ‘microbiopolitics’ in which microbes and their material effects enabled new forms of political mobilisation outside the state’s waste infrastructure and politics (p.139).

Fulfilling its promise to examine waste in its totality, Zhang’s analysis engages with a wide range of theories from Latour’s actor–network theory (p.31), Star’s ethnography of infrastructure (p.32), Marxist labour theory of value (p.109), Tsing’s ‘assemblage’ (p.133), Haraway’s concept of ‘sympoiesis’ (p.138) and Foucault’s biopolitics (p.139), to, as mentioned above, Paxon’s microbiopolitics (p.139). As much as the book is theoretically rich, it is also packed with ethnographic details which underscores the value of long-term fieldwork and serves as an inspiring example for scholars in urban studies, geography, and environmental anthropology. However, the dense theoretical framework and rich ethnographic detail may be challenging for readers who are not particularly familiar with Science and Technology scholarship and/or the history of modern China. Furthermore, the division of the book into ‘circulation’, focusing on the experiences of rural migrants, and ‘collectives’, centering around the urban middle-class, risks undermining the book’s key intervention: highlighting the roles that both rural and urban citizens have played in enabling the circulation of waste and mobilizing through collective action and techno-scientific discourses that exposed the gaps and frictions embedded in the state’s waste management infrastructure.

Through its engaging narrative and thick descriptions of on-the-ground practices of waste work and formation of grassroots collectives in response to China’s authoritarian environmentalism, Circular Ecologies makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarships of political ecology, environmental governance, labour practices, and urban dynamics in and beyond China. Alongside Rosalind Fredericks’s Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal and Robin Nagle’s Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City, Zhang’s work establishes herself as a key figure in Discard Studies, demonstrating exciting potentials in using waste as a lens to examine human–environment interactions and the socio-political systems that shape them (Fredericks, 2018; Nagle, 2013).

References

Carter N, Mol AP (2013) Environmental Governance in China. Abingdon: Routledge. Crossref; Google Scholar

Fredericks R (2018) Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal. Durham: Duke University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Harrell S (2023) An Ecological History of Modern China. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Li Y, Shapiro J (2020) China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet. Cambridge: Polity Press. Google Scholar

Nagle R (2013) Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. New York: Macmillan. Google Scholar

Rodenbiker J (2023) Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Crossref; Google Scholar

Zhang F, Wu F, Liu Y (2023) Handbook on China’s Urban Environmental Governance. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing. Crossref; Google Scholar

Cite this book review