000 02284 a2200217 4500
008 250601b |||||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020 _a9781503639294
082 _a363.7280951275 ZHA
100 _aZhang, Amy
245 _aCircular ecologies: environmentalism and waste politics in urban China
260 _aStanford, California:
_bStandford University Press,
_c2024
300 _axv, 198p.:
_bill.; maps; pbk.:
_c23 cm.
504 _aIncludes Bibliographical References, Glossary, Index and Notes
520 _aAfter four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of "modern" cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resources. Based on long-term research in Guangzhou, Circular Ecologies critically analyzes the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged in response. In Guangzhou, waste's transformation revealed uncomfortable truths about China's environmental governance: a preference for technology over labor, the aestheticization of order, and the expropriation of value in service of an ecological vision. Amy Zhang argues that in post-reform China, waste—the material vestige of decades of growth and increasing consumption—is a systemic irritant that troubles China's technocratic governance. Waste provoked an unlikely coalition of urban communities, from the middle class to precarious migrant workers, that came to constitute a nascent, bottom-up environmental politics, and offers a model for conceptualizing ecological action under authoritarian conditions. https://www.sup.org/books/anthropology/circular-ecologies
650 _aAnthropology
650 _aEnvironmental Problems 
650 _aSanitation
650 _aWastes
650 _aEnvironmental Anthropology
942 _cTD
_2ddc
999 _c62438
_d62438