Environment

Creativity and Climate Crisis

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International Conference-Creativity and Climate Crisis: Asian Media and Arts in the Anthropocene
Date: 19-20 May 2025 (Mon-Tue)
Day 1 / 10:00-16:00
Day 2/ 15:00-19:30
Venue: YIA LT2, Yasumoto International Academic Park, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Registration link

Extreme weather, pollution, water crises, and the loss of lives and biodiversity are some of the greatest challenges of our time. In both urban and rural Asia, extreme climate conditions and regional disparities have created increased climate vulnerability and inequalities. This interdisciplinary conference invites papers and discussions that examine media, elemental/infrastructural, and creative responses that help make sense of these challenges. How do media and arts in Asia engage new methods, materials, and practices to address current environmental changes? How do media technologies, art forms, and social actions create new meanings arising from these challenges? What are the “ecological affect” or “climate unconscious” that are structuring our feelings, emotions, practices, and actions?

Co-convenors:
Wu Ka-ming (CUHK)
Tan Jia (CUHK)

Speakers: Continue reading Creativity and Climate Crisis →

A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage

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Source: China Media Project (3/24/25)
A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage
Chinese media outlets have taken the unusual step of more openly covering a toxic thallium contamination in Hunan’s Leishuei River, exposing a crisis kept under wraps for a full week.
by David Bandurski

According to rare reports today from Chinese media, an environmental crisis is unfolding along a stretch of the Leishuei River in Hunan province that impacts the prefectural city of Chenzhou (郴州), home to more than four million people. Abnormal concentrations of thallium — a highly toxic, colorless heavy metal that causes organ damage and cancer through water contamination — have reportedly prompted the city to activate a Level IV emergency response, and residents are stockpiling drinking water.

In neighboring Guangdong province, the Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报), a commercial newspaper published under the state-run Nanfang Daily Group, splashed the crisis across its front page today, with the headline: “Thallium Abnormality in Hunan’s Leishuei River.”

The front page of today’s edition of Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily.

According to reports from both the Southern Metropolis Daily and Caixin Media, the crisis began nearly a week ago, on March 16, as automatic monitoring stations along a section of the river between the cities of Chenzhou and Hengyang, population 6.6 million, showed abnormal thallium levels, “causing trans-municipal pollution and threatening downstream water safety” (造成跨市污染，威胁下游饮水安全).

Continue reading A River Crisis Prompts Rare Coverage →

Loess plateau water and soil conservation project

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Source: The Guardian (3/14/25)
‘All the birds returned’: How a Chinese project led the way in water and soil conservation
The Loess plateau was the most eroded place on Earth until China took action and reversed decades of damage from grazing and farming
By 

It was one of China’s most ambitious environmental endeavours ever.

The Loess plateau, an area spanning more than 245,000 sq miles (640,000 sq km) across three provinces and parts of four others, supports about 100 million people. By the end of the 20th century, however, this land, once fertile and productive, was considered the most eroded place on Earth, according to a documentary by the ecologist John D Liu.

Generations of farmers had cleared and cultivated the land, slowly breaking down the soil and destroying the cover. Every year, the dust from the plain jammed the Yellow River with silt (this is how the river gets its name), sending plumes of loess, a fine wind-blown sediment, across Chinese cities – including to the capital, Beijing.

And so in 1999 the Chinese government took drastic emergency action with the launch of Grain to Green, a pilot project backed by World Bank funding, to regreen the plateau and reverse the damage done by overgrazing and overcultivation of the once forested hillsides that would become what the bank described in 2004 as “the largest and most successful water and soil conservancy project in the world” (pdf). Continue reading Loess plateau water and soil conservation project →

Tibet dam project alarms neighbors and experts

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Source: NYT (1/27/25)
China’s Large and Mysterious Dam Project Is Alarming Neighbors and Experts
The hydropower dam, in quake-prone Tibet, is set to be the world’s biggest. But China has said little about the project, which could affect nearby countries.
By Tiffany MayIsabelle Qian and Suhasini Raj

A dramatic, mountainous landscape with a river in the foreground.

China says it will build a dam in Medog, a remote county in Tibet, that could generate three times as much electricity as the Three Gorges Dam. Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Step aside, Three Gorges Dam. China’s latest colossal infrastructure project, if completed, will be the world’s largest hydropower dam, high up in the Tibetan plateau on the border with India.

China says the Motuo Hydropower Station it is building in Tibet is key to its effort to meet clean energy targets. Beijing also sees infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate the sluggish Chinese economy and create jobs.

But this project has raised concerns among environmentalists and China’s neighbors — in part, because Beijing has said so little about it.

The area where the dam is being built is prone to earthquakes. The Tibetan river being dammed, the Yarlung Tsangpo, flows into neighboring India as the Brahmaputra and into Bangladesh as the Jamuna, raising concerns in those countries about water security. Continue reading Tibet dam project alarms neighbors and experts →

China is testing more driverless cars than any other country

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Source: NYT (6/13/24)
China Is Testing More Driverless Cars Than Any Other Country
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Assisted driving systems and robot taxis are becoming more popular with government help, as cities designate large areas for testing on public roads.
By Keith Bradsher (Reporting from Wuhan, China)

A Baidu driverless robot taxi with nobody in the front seats traveling in Wuhan, China, last month.Credit…Qilai Shen for The New York Times

The world’s largest experiment in driverless cars is underway on the busy streets of Wuhan, a city in central China with 11 million people, 4.5 million cars, eight-lane expressways and towering bridges over the muddy waters of the Yangtze River.

A fleet of 500 taxis navigated by computers, often with no safety drivers in them for backup, buzz around. The company that operates them, the tech giant Baidu, said last month that it would add a further 1,000 of the so-called robot taxis in Wuhan.

Across China, 16 or more cities have allowed companies to test driverless vehicles on public roads, and at least 19 Chinese automakers and their suppliers are competing to establish global leadership in the field. No other country is moving as aggressively.

The government is providing the companies significant help. In addition to cities designating on-road testing areas for robot taxis, censors are limiting online discussion of safety incidents and crashes to restrain public fears about the nascent technology.

Surveys by J.D. Power, an automotive consulting firm, found that Chinese drivers are more willing than Americans to trust computers to guide their cars. Continue reading China is testing more driverless cars than any other country →

Xi thinks China can slow climate change

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Source: NYT (4/19/24)
Opinion: Xi Thinks China Can Slow Climate Change. What if He’s Right?
By Jacob Dreyer

A close-up of the face of Xi Jinping.

Credit…Minh Hoang/EPA, via Shutterstock

At first glance, Xi Jinping seems to have lost the plot.

China’s president appears to be smothering the entrepreneurial dynamism that allowed his country to crawl out of poverty and become the factory of the world. He has brushed aside Deng Xiaoping’s maxim “To get rich is glorious” in favor of centralized planning and Communist-sounding slogans like “ecological civilization” and “new, quality productive forces,” which have prompted predictions of the end of China’s economic miracle.

But Mr. Xi is, in fact, making a decades-long bet that China can dominate the global transition to green energy, with his one-party state acting as the driving force in a way that free markets cannot or will not. His ultimate goal is not just to address one of humanity’s most urgent problems — climate change — but also to position China as the global savior in the process.

It has already begun. In recent years, the transition away from fossil fuels has become Mr. Xi’s mantra and the common thread in China’s industrial policies. It’s yielding results: China is now the world’s leading manufacturer of climate-friendly technologies, such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles. Last year the energy transition was China’s single biggest driver of overall investment and economic growth, making it the first large economy to achieve that. Continue reading Xi thinks China can slow climate change →

How China came to dominate solar

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Source: NYT (3/7/24)
How China Came to Dominate the World in Solar Energy
Beijing is set to further increase its manufacturing and installation of solar panels as it seeks to master global markets and wean itself from imports.
By Keith Bradsher (reporting from Beijing)

An aerial view of solar panels blanketing a large area, with roads winding through the solar farm.

A solar farm owned by the Huaneng Group in Shilin, China. Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled.

Get ready for an even bigger display of China’s solar energy dominance.

While the United States and Europe are trying to revive renewable energy production and help companies fend off bankruptcy, China is racing far ahead.

At the annual session of China’s legislature this week, Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects.

With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a “new trio” of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an “old trio” of clothing, furniture and appliances.

The goal is to help offset a steep slump in China’s housing construction sector. China hopes to harness emerging industries like solar power, which Mr. Xi likes to describe as “new productive forces,” to re-energize an economy that has slowed for more than a decade. Continue reading How China came to dominate solar →

Lobsang Yangtso on Tibet’s environmental crisis

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Source: China Digital Times (12/7/23)
Interview: Lobsang Yangtso on Tibet’s Environmental Crisis
By

Lobsang Yangtso

As the U.N. COP28 Climate Summit is underway in the United Arab Emirates, bringing together thousands of political leaders and environmental activists, one topic that is sure to get little attention there is the environmental crisis facing Tibet. Tibet is currently warming three times as fast as the rest of the world. It has the largest reserves of fresh water in the world outside the Arctic and Antarctica, supplying water to one fifth of the world’s population through the flow of its rivers to downstream countries. The Chinese government is extracting Tibet’s natural resources through damming and mining, destroying rivers and mountains that are considered sacred to much of the local population.

In the latest installment in our interview series focusing on Tibet, we spoke to Lobsang Yangtso, the Environmental Researcher at the International Tibet Network. She was born in Kham, Tibet, and later moved with her family to India. She received her PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, where she wrote her thesis on “China’s Environmental Security Policies in Tibet: Implications to India, 2001-2013.” She has also worked as a Research Associate at the Centre for China Analysis and Strategy, New Delhi. She regularly attends international environmental conferences and forums as an expert on Tibet’s environment. She recently spoke with CDT about how China’s infrastructure development is destroying Tibet’s environment, the challenges for Tibetans of being heard on the international stage, and how neighboring countries could do more to hold China accountable for the environmental destruction that is impacting the whole region. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

China Digital Times: You were born and spent the early part of your life in Tibet before leaving for India with your family. Could you tell us about the environment where you lived in Tibet, and how those early years might have influenced your current work?

Lobsang Yangtso: I was born in a semi-nomadic family, meaning that when I was in Tibet, my family used to do farming and keep animals as well. And so my village was very rural, where most of the people do farming as their livelihood. So that has really influenced how I see climate change and its impact on farming, and specifically on the farmers. I escaped from Tibet to India in 1991. Then in 2016, after 25 years, I was able to go back home and visit family. During that time, I realized that the farming and livelihoods, and how people depend on farming and animals, has really changed a lot. In front of my house in Tibet, there used to be a small river. And when I was very young, we could just drink straight from that river. Then when I went back home in 2016, that small river was not drinkable at all. I could see lots of waste and garbage on the river. So that has also changed a lot. In my hometown, how people live and how they worship the mountain deities, and believe in the sacred mountain—I still remember that way of life. That has also been their way of protecting the environment. The kind of work that I do right now, I can really see the impact. It’s really important, the impact of climate change on farmers and nomads, and how the local people understand the environment. So these issues are very close to my heart. Continue reading Lobsang Yangtso on Tibet’s environmental crisis →

How China is attempting to change nature conservation

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Source: The China Project (10/20/23)
How China is attempting to change nature conservation
China is undergoing a great experiment — tightly controlled and driven by big data — that it hopes will offer an alternative way of protecting the planet. For all our sakes, let’s hope it works.
By Kyle Obermann

Beijing, as a critical bird habitat along one of the world’s most important migrating bird corridors, has included 26% of its land and water inside ERLs, including bodies of water like lakes of the Summer Palace. Photo by Kyle Obermann.

I was surprised to encounter the White House amid Sichuan’s Qionglai Mountains, decrepit, looking like a scene out of a post-apocalyptic movie. Surprised, partly because I had not been in China long, and didn’t yet know about the replica White Houses, Eiffel Towers, and Jackson Holes in random valley towns. But mostly surprised because I was traveling through a nature reserve.

Of course, China’s first nature reserve is only as old as Tom Hanks. Vestiges of the recent past are overgrown across many of China’s protected areas: felled trees, empty mines, destroyed shrines, inspirations from U.S. government infrastructure. Proof that despite imperfections, China’s protected area system at least effectively rewilded and preserved some of the 18% of terrestrial land it covers on paper.

These days, in an effort that goes unnoticed by most of the world, China’s leadership is pushing further to build what Jessica Gordon of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment once called the “world’s most comprehensive ecosystem-based land planning strategy” and raise the percentage of protected land area to 35% through Ecological Conservation Red Lines (ERLs). This innovation has the potential to make China a leader in global conservation, be exported elsewhere along the Belt and Road Initiative, and strengthen the state’s control over its land and people.

Continue reading How China is attempting to change nature conservation →

Questioning Borders

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NEW PUBLICATION: Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan, by Robin Visser

I’m pleased to announce that my new book, Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures in China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023), is now available at https://cup.columbia.edu/book/questioning-borders/9780231199810.

Questioning Borders explores recent ecoliterature by Han and non-Han Indigenous writers of China and Taiwan, analyzing relations among humans, animals, ecosystems, and the cosmos in search of alternative possibilities for creativity and consciousness. It comprises 7 chapters:

Introduction: Ecoliteratures Inhabiting Borders
1. Beijing Westerns and Hanspace Elixirs in Southwest China
2. Grassland Logic and Desert Carbon Imaginaries in Inner Mongolia
3. Sacred Routes and Dark Humor in Grounded Xinjiang
4. Cosmic Ecologies and Transcendent Tricksters on the Tibetan Plateau
5. Island Excursions and Indigenous Waterways in Activist Taiwan
Epilogue: Indigenous Entanglements in Techno Hypersubjectivity

Robin Visser <rvisser@email.unc.edu>

At Home in Nature

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The First Prism Monograph Supplement Book Launch

We are delighted to announce the publication of Prism’s first supplemental issue At Home in Nature: Technology, Labour, and Critical Ecology in Modern China authored by Prof. Ban Wang at Stanford University. The first Prism monograph supplement launch, hosted by Prism’s editor-in-chief Prof. Zong-qi Cai, will be held online at 6-9 PM (Pacific Time)/ 9-12 pm (EST) on August 3, 2023. The ZOOM meeting ID is 948 4417 6786, and the password is 62236914.

From the eco-critical perspective, this book critiques anthropocentricism, technoscientific hubris, and ecologically destructive modes of production. Examining modern discourse, literature, film, and science fiction, it views the domination of nature and labor under capitalism and technocrats as the culprit of ecological crises and human alienation. Alternatively, utopianisms of nonalienated labor keep alive the ideals of resonance between humans and Earth. The Table of Contents is listed below:

Introduction

Chapter One. Confucianism and Nature: Ecological Motifs in Kang Youwei’s Great Community
Chapter Two. Lu Xun’s Mytho-ecological Refutation of Technocrats
Chapter Three. Romancing Landscape and Human Animal: Shen Congwen
Chapter Four. We Are the Dragon King: Labor and Happiness
Chapter Five. Farewell to the God of Plague: The Revolution in Medicine
Chapter Six. Dignity and Misery of Labor
Chapter Seven. Art and Labor in Han Song’s Regenerated Bricks
Chapter Eight. Toxic Colonialism, Alienation, and Posthuman Dystopia in Chen Qiufan
Chapter Nine. Artificial Intelligence, Affective Labor, and Death in Life
Chapter Ten. Critical Ecotopia in Hao Jingfang’s Vagabonds

Epilogue Continue reading At Home in Nature →

Affective Anthropocene symposium

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International Symposium on “Affective Anthropocene: Contextualizing Feelings and Environments under Climate Change”

Date: 1-2 June 2023
Venue: WLB 105, Wing Lung Bank Building for Business Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University and online (mix-mode)
Organizer: The Anthropocene and Chinese Contemporary Cultures Research Consortium, Department of Humanities, Hong Kong Baptist University
Co-organizer:
Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University
Master of Arts (MA) in Producing for Film, Television and New Media, Hong Kong Baptist University
Cultural Literacy Programme (LIVE), Office of Student Affairs, Hong Kong Baptist University

In popular perception and imagination, narratives about climate future and ecological crisis usually fall into one of these categories: utopia and apocalypse. Meaning-making narrative or storytelling with characters, drama, and connecting threads is significant because it reveals how scientific findings on the Earth’s future is communicated to the public and hence to drive collective action. Mitigation or adaptation to climate crisis requires habitual-cultural, eco-social changes, and communal values in order to overcome public inertia, procrastination and paralysis. But overemphasis on narrative or storytelling, i.e. “tell the climate story well,” may simplify moral values and reinforce binary thinking as found in many popular climate discourses. Climate narratives of either dystopian thrillers or techno-utopias not only may fail to accommodate the contingencies and unpredictability of real life, but they also could be subjected to the appropriations by nation-states for fulfilling political ambitions and nationalist agenda, by big corporations for marketing strategies, and by ideologists or visionaries for other manipulative purposes. Continue reading Affective Anthropocene symposium →

Anger over cutting health insurance

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Source: NYT (2/23/23)
China’s Cities Are Cutting Health Insurance, and People Are Angry
Local governments, short on money after three years of “zero Covid” and faced with many more retirees, are raising costs and overhauling benefits.
By Keith Bradsher, who is based in Beijing, reporting from Wuhan, China

A cluster of people dressed in winter coats and wearing masks gather in a city plaza.

Protesters in Wuhan, China, many of them retired, objected last week to a revision in municipal health insurance. Credit…Keith Bradsher/The New York Times

Local governments across China, facing a financial tipping point after three years of expensive Covid measures, are forcing abrupt changes on the country’s health care system, squeezing benefits and angering citizens.

Thousands of seniors, who are most vulnerable to the cutbacks, converged on municipal parks and other public spaces in recent days to protest the changes. They gathered in the chilly northeastern city of Dalian, in semitropical Guangzhou nearly 1,500 miles away and in Wuhan in central China, where the Covid pandemic began at the end of 2019.

One of the most immediate problems is that municipal insurance funds that pay for many people’s hospital care are running out of money. The funds, supported by taxes on employers, face big deficits that city governments are required by law to top up.

To free up money to bail out hospitals, municipalities have started contributing much less to another important category of insurance, known as personal health accounts, which the middle class uses to pay for medicine and outpatient care. Continue reading Anger over cutting health insurance →

Interview with Murong Xuecun

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Source: The China Project (2/17/23)
From prizewinning author to censored chronicler of COVID in Wuhan — Q&A with Murong Xuecun in exile
Murong Xuecun rose to fame as an internet writer, and then won a prestigious official literature award in 2010. But then the state turned on him. His most recent book, ‘Deadly Quiet City,’ tells the stories of eight people in Wuhan in the spring of 2020.
By Jeremy Goldkorn

Illustration by Nadya Yeh.

He was “one of China’s most famous cyber-writers,” the state-run newspaper China Daily said in 2004, describing Mùróng Xuěcūn 慕容 雪村, the pen name of Hǎo Qún 郝群. Those were heady days: The China Daily is a propaganda sheet, but back then, it dared to print a story about Murong Xuecun that opens like this:

He describes himself as pessimistic and lacking ambition, he says he’s ugly and vulgar and likes good food and drink above all else.

His novel, Chengdu, Leave Me Alone Tonight (成都，今夜请将我遗忘) was a… trend setter [that] sparked a series of books describing life in modern Chinese cities where the young abandon idealism in search of fortune.

Murong says he writes for fun. He says he’s never had any ambitions to make [it] big in Chinese literary circles, and has no interest in dealing with “profound” social issues.

There is no way a passage like that would appear in the China Daily today. Murong, too, has changed. He is still something of a punk, but he has found himself dragged willy-nilly, or perhaps rather willingly, into “profound social issues.”

In 2010, he published The Missing Ingredient of China (中国, 少了一味药), an investigative piece about a criminal gang running a pyramid scam, which won that year’s People’s Literature Prize (人民文学奖). But he was not allowed to give his acceptance speech, which was a searing indictment of the censorship process at Chinese publishing houses and media. (The New York Times later published a translation of the speech.) Continue reading Interview with Murong Xuecun →