Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
projected by McDonough, his Chinese allies, and the local developers.
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Although more than forty houses were built, they remain empty. h e price
of these houses was far beyond local residents' economic means. Garages
were built for many new complexes, but not one local family at the time
owned a car. Many peasants refused to move into the new houses because
the yards were too small to raise domestic animals, and even worse, the
houses were too far from the fi elds that were the sole source of the villagers'
income. McDonough turned his fi rm's attention away from China's eco-
projects, and Huangbaiyu is no longer listed on the company website.
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Despite the many di' culties in the recent history of eco-city and eco-
village development in China, ecological images retain their
ideological
power with the government and with elites, and with those who serve their
needs, especially in the biggest cities, Beijing and Shanghai. By those crite-
ria, the 2008 Olympics in China's capital city, Beijing, was literally ground
zero for China's green dreams.
green dreams, green masks:
eco-fantasizing the beijing olympics
I have suggested that the problem of Chinese industrial pollution as a result
of production is also a global problem of consumption and demand. h e
problem depends, at least in part, on how to measure accountability, when
production and its environmental costs are intimately linked to the prob-
lems of resource extraction, production and manufacturing, and global con-
sumption. h ese debates about the global character and contexts of “Chinese
pollution” generally get subsumed under the burdens of cultural representa-
tion, as my colleague Mike Ziser and I have written elsewhere.
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Ta ke, for
example, the global media concern over the impacts of Chinese pollution,
which reached fever pitch in the 2008 American news coverage of the Sum-
mer Olympics in Beijing, an episode that serves as a potent example of this
repurposing of environmental discourse to geopolitical use. NBC's early
