Cheng Li’s Contested Environmentalisms is a substantial theoretical contribution to the field of Chinese environmental studies and history. Focusing on the rhetoric surrounding trees, forests, and tree planting, Li provides valuable and novel insights into modern Chinese environmentalism. Through analysis of both historical and literary sources, including science fiction, reportage literature, diaspora writings, films, newspapers, archival sources, science journals, and digital media, Li explores the changing ideas surrounding trees and forests articulated by various historical actors that shaped environmental discussions in Republican, Maoist, and post-Mao China, revealing multiple facets of modern Chinese environmentalism.
Contested Environmentalisms has three main arguments. First, Li argues that tree planting has been at the core of modern Chinese state building, nationhood, and citizenship. From the Chinese Nationalist (GMD) regime to the Maoist and post-Mao state, political leaders have considered tree planting a core mission to legitimize their rule and a panacea to various social problems. The multifaceted virtues and ideas attached to tree planting are connected to Li’s second argument that modern Chinese environmentalism was constructed from highly contested ideas supported by politicians, conservationists, scientists, intellectuals, and businessmen from the early twentieth century to the present. Third, in historicizing the multifaceted nature of modern Chinese environmentalisms, Li demonstrates that they developed in highly transnational settings. Taking these arguments together, Li suggests that the contested nature of modern Chinese environmentalism is not necessarily a limitation. Rather, the malleability and flexibility of modern Chinese environmentalism have enabled and will continue to enable the Chinese state to adapt to a constantly changing world. In this sense, Li frames the contested nature of modern Chinese environmentalism as a demonstration of the resilience of China’s authoritarian state.
The various sections of the book are structured around a series of contestations: symbolic gestures versus real practices of tree planting (Chapter 1), foresters versus hydrologists on the idea of nature as static or dynamic (Chapter 2), Han Chinese versus ethnic minority perceptions of nature (Chapter 3), militaristic versus romantic visions of the forests (Chapter 4), native traditions versus foreign influences in post-Mao environmentalism (Chapter 5), and socialist versus capitalist approaches to tree planting (Coda).
The opening chapter compares Chinese Nationalist (GMD) and Communist (CCP) visions of nature from 1912 to 1949. Li claims that, for the GMD leaders such as Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei, the symbolic gesture of connecting Arbor Day celebrations to the commemoration of Sun Yat-sen was a way to cultivate modern citizens and claim political legitimacy as Sun’s rightful heirs. The CCP, on the other hand, did not celebrate Arbor Day. However, the CCP benefited from the ecological, economic, and military advantages of tree planting practices and fostered tree planting initiatives under the guidance of first-generation foresters with transnational educational backgrounds. In this way, both the Nationalists and Communists carried on Sun Yat-sen’s political mission through afforestation. Chapter 2 centers on the Greening the Motherland Campaign launched in 1956, analyzing the writings of foresters such as Liang Xi. In doing so, Li situates Chinese efforts to use tree planting as a means of nation building in the context of global conservationist ideas. Moreover, he investigates contestations between foresters and hydrologists to show the complexity and diversity of environmental management during the Mao era. The compromises that hydrologists and foresters eventually made, Li argues, demonstrate not only the diversity but also the flexibility and malleability of PRC environmentalism.
Chapter 3 investigates afforestation discourses in China’s ethnic borderlands by analyzing two films about Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. Li claims that the CCP used tree planting to dominate ethnic borderlands in the Mao era. During this symbolic and ecological conquest, Han Chinese perception of tree planting as a way to fight against desertification, based on international forestry science, collided with understandings of the desert held by ethnic minorities, who saw trees as invasive species. Chapter 4 explores both militaristic and romantic visions of forests in the literary imagination during the 1950s. Li explains that the CCP developed a militarist mindset centered on killing Nationalist enemies who were presumed to be hiding in and destroying forests. These violent representations contrasted with a romanticized vision of forests as a purified environment that should be preserved and nurtured. Li argues that the fusion of these two contradictory ideas was deeply rooted in PRC environmentalism.
Chapter 5 traces the rise of conservationist rhetoric in the 1980s by tracking two distinctive trends in post-Mao China. The first is “Green Occidentalism,” which was heavily influenced by Western environmental conservation. The other is “Green Nativism,” which revisited Chinese traditions. Unfortunately, Li suggests, these two strands of environmental thought failed to raise awareness of environmental degradation among the public. The Coda concludes with a recent tree planting initiative, the Ant Forest app launched in 2016 by Alibaba, exploring how the app balanced socialist mobilization and capitalist profit-making. According to Li, the app reveals continuity in the Chinese state’s use of tree planting to foster citizenship in the Xi Jinping era.
One of the most substantial contributions of the book, particularly for the field of environmental history, is its theoretical redefinition of modern Chinese environmentalism. Instead of making a unitary assessment, Contested Environmentalisms reveals the complex and multifaceted ways in which modern Chinese environmental discourses developed. Combining literary analysis with historical research, Li insightfully observes that modern Chinese conservationist rhetoric has not been dominated by one individual, institution, or trend; rather, it was a site of contested perceptions, constantly changing from the early twentieth century to the present. This nuanced attention to the complexity of modern Chinese environmentalism suggests new directions for future scholarship.
In addition, the book’s emphasis on the transnational character of modern Chinese environmentalism is an important intervention. Instead of seeing modern China as isolated from international science or the global development of environmental consciousness, Li meticulously tracks how transnational scholarly exchanges and global networks became key factors shaping modern Chinese environmental ideas. This focus reinforces the book’s core argument for the flexibility and complexity of modern Chinese environmentalism. Moreover, because Li situates the modern Chinese state and its foresters in the global development of environmentalist thought, this book could be a valuable addition to the field of global environmental history.
One question for me, as an environmental historian, was how the book’s framing of malleability and resilience relates to the material dimensions of environmental change. Because Li’s primary focus is on discourse, narrative, and perceptions of the environment, with less attention to the environment itself, I wondered whether the resilience that he describes should be understood as a conceptual possibility or as something that had tangible connections to the biophysical world. The materiality of tree planting is mostly discussed in Chapter 1, which contrasts CCP tree planting with the empty symbolism of the GMD’s Arbor Day observances, and in Chapter 2, in which Li discusses Mao’s Greening the Motherland Campaign and how the competing PRC environmentalisms expressed by foresters and hydrologists mutually influenced and reshaped one another. For the most part, however, the book focuses on the discursive and rhetorical dimensions of trees, forests, and tree planting. Chapter 3, for example, makes the important observation that tree planting could bring ecological degradation to desert environments and that trees could be an invasive species in that setting. However, the discussion remains largely within the realm of perceptions. This focus on rhetoric and discourse leaves a historian wondering to what extent, and in which areas, conceptual resilience was connected to the material world. This ambiguity, I should point out, is not a flaw. Rather, the book invites future environmental historians to examine how the conceptual resilience that Li identifies was manifested in concrete ecological practices and state-led environmental interventions.
Overall, Contested Environmentalisms offers a theoretical framework for understanding modern Chinese environmentalism that will benefit scholars in the environmental humanities, literature, and history.
