Understandings of contemporary China are inevitably skewed towards the eastern and southern regions from which political and economic power emanate. In the last few decades, however, as the Chinese state has turned its attention to the country’s environmental problems and intensified the assimilation of its ethnic minorities, the Northwest has gained a new prominence.

You-Tien Hsing’s Conserving China’s Northwest Frontier is a welcome contribution to the scholarly literature on this important – but still relatively understudied – part of China. This book, which stretches to almost 600 pages and is divided into four parts, might perhaps best be described as a plurigraph rather than a conventional monograph. Parts one and two explore how environmental governance has transformed the Northwest (or at least Inner Mongolia and Gansu), while parts three and four are about the complex ethnic dynamics of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region (with a chapter that also encompasses Hebei and Beijing, discussing the heritage politics of the Great Wall). Hsing threads these elements together through what she terms “territorialized social analysis,” a lens to examine the ways that territorial processes shape social transformation.

In the first part of the book Hsing makes some important interventions into discussions of China’s state-led environmentalism. She develops the concept of “productive conservation” to describe how the greening of the environment is also supposed to serve economic ends, such as poverty alleviation. Chapter one tells the fascinating story of rocket scientist Qian Xuesen, who developed a vision of “deserticulture” (shachanye) that reimagined the deserts of western Inner Mongolia not as barren wastelands but as spaces of bountiful economic opportunity in the form of agriculture and energy production. While much recent scholarship has focused on the active role of the Chinese state in responding to the country’s environmental challenges, Hsing makes an important contribution in detailing how the “crisis” of desertification has also constituted an opportunity for private capital. Afforestation projects have been contracted out to “green entrepreneurs” who are granted access to vast swathes of land, while desertification control is also entangled with platform capitalism in the form of Alibaba’s Ant Forest initiative, whereby users of Alipay earn points by reducing their carbon footprint, points which are eventually converted into desert-fixing shrubs in western Inner Mongolia. While such initiatives have significantly increased afforestation rates, Hsing points to the ecological damage that can sometimes result from the relentless pursuit of “color-coded conservationism” in the desert.

Hsing is also alive to the social disruption that has resulted from several decades of conservation initiatives in China’s Northwest. In chapter two she draws on her fieldwork to analyse the effects of grazing restrictions and resettlement policies in western Inner Mongolia, which were introduced in the name of desertification control. Her analysis is valuable in attending to the stratification of rural society that has been reinforced by such policies, but she is also sensitive to the adaptive strategies of those rural Mongols who can no longer depend on herding alone. She shows how resettlement villages often remain empty as families adopt new forms of mobile livelihood, shuttling between urban areas and their pastureland where they collect medicinal plants for sale.

Part two (chapters three and four) continue this theme of “surviving conservation,” shifting location to Minqin County in Gansu, which has long been a significant source of Han Chinese migration into Inner Mongolia. Hsing addresses the region’s water crisis and the ways in which the state, entrepreneurs and local farmers have responded to this. Her account is particularly effective in detailing the material politics of water access in the context of neoliberal reforms.

In part three Hsing is interested in the complex “ethnoterritorial” composition of Inner Mongolia. She provides a historical account of how this came about, drawing largely on secondary literature in Chinese. Those familiar with existing scholarship on the region will not find much to surprise them here, but Hsing does a good job of rendering these processes vivid and intelligible. Chapter five neatly lays out some of the key differences between Inner Mongolia and other minority autonomous regions, and it could be usefully incorporated into undergraduate courses on China’s border regions. Chapters six and seven retell the history of agricultural expansion in western Inner Mongolia, highlighting the role of Mongolian princes, Chinese “land-water barons” and Belgian Catholic missionaries. Chapter eight moves to the east of Inner Mongolia and begins by providing a history of the expansion of the agricultural frontier, foregrounding the role of the 1891 massacre of Mongols by the Han Chinese Jindandao secret society. Hsing then draws on her ethnographic experience in this mixed agro-pastoral zone to break down the category of “agropastoralism” into the divergent trajectories of “agropastoralism” and “pastoagriculturalism.”

Part four ostensibly turns to the conservation of culture in the present day. Chapter nine provides a rich account of the educational trajectory of an ethnic Mongol student educated in Mongolian-medium schools before studying for a PhD elsewhere in China. Hsing argues that this student’s struggles and ambitions have much in common with those of students elsewhere in China. However, the educational pathway described in this chapter is now a thing of the past, on account of the 2020 reforms which replaced Mongolian with Chinese as the language of instruction for most classes. These reforms are mentioned in the book only very briefly. Hsing is duly cautious of simplistic narratives which pit an authoritarian state against a supine populace, and in earlier chapters she shows with ethnographic acuity how Mongols have found ways of navigating the conservation regime. But the important parallel question of how they have responded to this latest project of cultural-linguistic assimilation is beyond the scope of the book.

Despite the detailed analysis that it provides of the region, Hsing’s book is notable in not being framed as a study of Inner Mongolia but rather of China’s Northwest. In the final chapter, Hsing’s framing shifts slightly to what she terms “the northern frontier,” since her account of the grassroots conservation of the Great Wall also takes in Hebei and Beijing. There are good scholarly reasons for juxtaposing the effects of environmental governance in Inner Mongolia and Gansu, and the history of Inner Mongolia cannot be considered in isolation from the unstable socioecologies of places like Minqin County. But one is left wondering how to situate Hsing’s analytic framing in relation to an emergent official discourse in Inner Mongolia of “northern frontier culture” (beijiang wenhua) which has increasingly replaced reference to Mongolian ethnicity and culture. In keeping with core assimilatory themes of China’s “second-generation ethnic policies,” this discourse celebrates the mixing of “grassland culture” with “Great Wall culture” and “Yellow River culture” (see T.S. “Constructing a de-ethnicized Inner Mongolia. Made in China, 2024, https://madeinchinajournal.com/2024/12/03/constructing-a-de-ethnicised-inner-mongolia/). Such discourses work to “deterritorialize the Mongolians from Inner Mongolia” (Nasan Bayar, “A discourse of civilization/culture and nation/ethnicity from the perspective of Inner Mongolia, China,” Asian Ethnicity 15(4), 2014: 450). These territorial processes, which have been central to the contemporary politics of culture of Inner Mongolia, are not addressed in this book, despite its concern with territory.

Nonetheless, there is much to appreciate here. In particular, Hsing’s contributions to discussions of China’s environmental governance make vital reading for anyone who wants to understand how the “greening” of the Chinese state is playing out on the ground.