Chinese Environmental Protests Linking Up: Towards a Broader Environmental Movement?

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

In China, environmental protests are mounting all over the country. Particularly so-called NIMBY-protests directed against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon spreading beyond China's major cities. While these protests are gaining growing academic attention, they have mostly been analyzed as isolated phenomena. For one, analyses of environmental protest events have largely focused on individual cases. Moreover, such grievance-based local contention has largely been investigated separate from environmental activism based on environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Neither the links between cases in different localities nor the linkages between these two facets of Chinese environmental contention have received sufficient attention. Recent protest waves against issues such as waste incinerators or PX plants are, however, pointing to linkages and diffusion processes at place. Here, environmental organizations and individuals can play a crucial role as brokers between affected communities.

This panel aims to investigate these linkages on both levels: Between cases of local environmental contention in different localities and between the two facets of Chinese environmental contention, i.e. grievance-based local contention and environmentalist activism. The panel will tackle questions such as: Is a diffusion of contention taking place in China? Do actors in different protest sites communicate or even form (online or offline) networks? How are the two facets of Chinese environmental contention interrelated? What role do environmental organizations and environmentalists play at the local level? What are the governments’ responses to such linkages? And, last but not least, does this lead to a broader environmental movement in China?

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Maria Bondes, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies

Chair

• Georg Struever, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies

Individual Presentations

• Becoming a Movement: Development of Environmental Advocacy in China - Nora Sausmikat, Stiftung Asienhaus

• China's Environmental Organizations and their Strategic Choice in Popular Protests: From the Perspective of ‘Political Opportunity Structures’ - Xiaoyan Yang, Department of Political Science. School of Marxism, China University of Petroleum（East China）, Qingdao，Shandong Province, China

• The Diffusion of Environmental Contention in China: The Case of Anti-PX Protests - Zi Zhu, City University of Hong Kong

• More than Fragmented, Not yet a Movement: Waste Incineration and Environmental Contention in China - Maria Bondes, GIGA Institute of Asian Studies

• Coalitions of the “Weak”: Fighting Pollution at China’s Rural-Urban Interface - Thomas Johnson, City University of Hong Kong; Anna Lora-Wainwright, University of Oxford