Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
eco-city, Chongming Island ecological development and planning, ecologi-
cal suburbanization, and the World Expo. Climate change is the primary
environmental and policy context. In other words, climate change is a
“metanarrative” that structures policy decisions.
18
h e desire to address cli-
mate change can dovetail with a willful blindness to the failures of projects
that purport to advance environmental aims. When describing Chinese pol-
lution, I'm not talking about it solely as a discursive phenomenon. Chinese
pollution is real, it's systemic and huge (and growing), and it hurts Chinese
populations the most intensively (only 1 percent of Chinese urban residents
breathe clean air, and estimates of early deaths attributable to air pollution
are in the hundreds of thousands per year) even as its impacts are regional
and global in scope.
19
h at said, “Chinese pollution” must be understood not
just as an environmental and scientifi c problem to be solved by engineering
and technology, but also within broader cross-cultural, comparative, and
political frameworks.
I give a brief history of pollution in communist China as a way to show
the linkages between contemporary environmental policy and development
and the recent past. In other words, the frameworks and discourses of Chi-
nese “environmental solutions” and “ecological harmony” in the post-
reform era are directly related to these earlier periods. Both this history and
contemporary policy changes are important in shaping the broader discur-
sive landscape upon which eco-cities are being built in China, as well as the
recent environmental casting of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. I then turn to
an overview of Shanghai's environmental problems as a way to situate the
city's recent forays into ecological development.
china: the nation runs black
In 2007, the
New York Times
ran a series of investigative articles under the
banner “Choking on Growth.” Focusing on a series of devastating contem-
porary environmental disasters in China, the series highlighted the social
