Ecological Civilization (and Its Hiccups)

Chinese Cities - Sciences Po - OGLM 3050 - 59127 - S2 2025/26   
Clément Renaud 
[hi@clementrenaud.com](mailto:hi@clementrenaud.com)

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##  Week 8

# 闹

## Ecological Civilization (And Its Hiccups)

#### 31 Mar 2026

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## Character of the week

# 闹
[Purple Culture](https://www.purpleculture.net/dictionary-details/?word=闹) / [Hanziyuan](https://hanziyuan.net/) / [CUHK dic](https://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/lexi-mf/search.php?word=闹)

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# Today

1. China's main natural hazards — overview
2. How the state responds: engineering, planning, jargon
3. Case study 1: **Sichuan earthquake** — who rebuilds, where, how?
4. Case study 2: **Wuhan water** — sponge city, East Lake, and resistance
5. Contesting risk: NIMBY, dam resettlement
6. Group work

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# From Hazards to Governing Risk

> 70% of Chinese cities face floods, earthquakes, or landslides (World Bank, 2019).

### Political ecology

**Not "what are the risks?" but more "who decides where the risk goes?"**

- Whose neighborhood gets the flood retention basin?
- Which communities are relocated after the earthquake — and where to?
- Who gets the incinerator, the chemical plant, the elevated highway?
- When the "sponge city" is built, who loses land and who gains amenity?

Risk is not evenly distributed — it follows existing lines of inequality (income, hukou, land rights, etc).

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# 1. China Natural Hazards

### Overview

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# Water Stress

- [Reuters graphics](https://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/14/chinawater/index.html)
- [WRI's New Water Stress Map](https://cwrrr.org/opinions/wris-new-china-water-stress-map/)
  ]

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# Floods

[SCMP interactive map](https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/china/article/3094790/china-floods/index.html)

### Yangtze River Floods

- Dams and levees displace risk **downstream** — protecting one city by exposing another
- Urban encroachment on floodplains (Wuhan, Zhengzhou)
- **2021 Zhengzhou flood**: 12 people drowned in a subway tunnel — urban infrastructure as death trap
- Policy response: "Sponge City" programs (2015–)

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# Earthquakes

- Rapid urban growth in seismic zones — often without adequate building codes in rural areas
- **Sichuan 2008**: 87,000 killed, including ~10,000 children in school buildings that collapsed while government buildings nearby survived → "tofu construction" (豆腐渣工程) scandal
- Post-quake: stricter building codes and "quake-proof" retrofitting in Chengdu

See [TransRe natural hazards report](https://www.transre.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/chinas-natural-hazards-an-introduction.pdf)

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# Typhoons 台风

Typhoon Lekima 2019, Super Typhoon Saomai (2006) → $2.5B damage.

[Typhoons](https://www.worlddata.info/asia/china/typhoons.php)

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# Sinking Cities

- 1.8 million km² of land converted to urban use 1992–2018
- Shanghai subsiding + sea-level rise: double exposure
- Mangrove restoration projects (Guangdong)

.footnote[
Grey = regional hotspots. Circle: blue = low subsidence; dark red = high. [Source](https://theconversation.com/more-than-a-third-of-urban-chinese-live-in-sinking-cities-heres-what-they-can-do-229089)
]

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# Greenhouse Gas

### [Stats](https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics)

- Highest global emitter
- Per capita still relatively low — see [consumption-adjusted data](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita?country=~PLW)
- Industrial pollution: material footprint of the nations (2015)

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# 2. How the State Responds

### Engineering, planning, and "ecological civilization"

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# The "Ecological Civilization" 生态文明

### 2007 — introduced into the Communist Party constitution

[Carbon Brief: Glossary](https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/glossary/china/index.html)

Read: [What "shengtai wenming" actually means](https://aocrawford.substack.com/p/shengtai-wenming)

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# Ecological Red Lines

Read [report](https://environmental-partnership.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Policy-Brief-Ecological-Conservation-Redlines-2.pdf)

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# "Two Mountains" Framework

### "Clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as gold and silver mountains"

### 绿水青山就是金山银山

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# Strategies — and their limits

| Approach                   | Examples                                   | Limitation                                                       |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Hard engineering**       | Three Gorges Dam, levees, cloud-seeding    | Moves risk downstream; breaks ecosystems                         |
| **Planning regulation**    | Ecological red lines, flood zone mapping   | Enforcement can be weak in growth-priority contexts (evaluation) |
| **Nature-based solutions** | Sponge cities, wetland restoration         | Slow, expensive, politically difficult                           |
| **Tech solutions**         | Smart city monitoring, AI flood prediction | Addresses symptoms, not causes                                   |

> Default is to rely on hadr infrastructure — visible, auditable, and politically creditable （业绩）.

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# Case Study 1

## Sichuan 2008 — Governing Reconstruction

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# The Sichuan Earthquake (May 12, 2008)

### 87,000 dead — and the politics of rebuilding

### The disaster

**Magnitude 7.9** — epicenter in Wenchuan (汶川), Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province

- ~5 million people made homeless
- ~10,000 children killed in collapsed school buildings
- Government and factory buildings nearby survived → **"tofu construction" scandal** (豆腐渣工程)
- Parents protested; journalists investigated; petitioners were detained
  ]

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# The reconstruction as planning experiment

- **Central government mandate**: rebuild within 3 years (completed 2011)
- **"Counterpart assistance" (对口支援) system**: each province paired with an affected county
- Guangdong →汶川; Beijing → 什邡; Shanghai → 都江堰
- Faster than any post-disaster reconstruction globally — at significant social cost

.footnote[
Image: collapsed school buildings in Beichuan alongside standing government buildings — the image that defined the "tofu construction" controversy
]

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# Who Rebuilt Where — and Who Decided?

### The political ecology of reconstruction

- Relocated communities often moved to **new planned towns** far from original land
- Farmers lost connection to land, ancestral sites, livelihoods
- Some communities resisted relocation — parallel to nail house logic
- **Chengdu's "land quota trading" program** (地票制度): farmers traded rural land rights for urban apartments in new developments (Wilczak, 2020)
  - Praised as "innovative"; criticized as forced urbanization under the cover of disaster response
    ]

### The Chengdu model and urban expansion

- Post-quake reconstruction accelerated Chengdu's urban expansion (Abramson & Yu, 2011)
- New towns built on agricultural land — farmers compensated but landless (Xu, 2014)
- Chengdu's urban extent grew at ~13%/year through the 2000s ([Atlas of Urban Expansion](http://atlasofurbanexpansion.org/cities/view/Chengdu_Sichuan))

]

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# Reading the Reconstruction — Key Sources

| Author                   | Argument                                                                                                                                                                           |
| ------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Abramson & Yu (2011)** | The earthquake didn't create the urbanization agenda — Chengdu was already a pilot zone for urban-rural integration since 2007; the quake made it politically irresistible.        |
| **Oakes (2019)**         | 2,000 planners designed 361 new "pastoral" villages in 12 days — but the real function was concentrating rural populations and freeing land for metropolitan use.                  |
| **Wilczak (2017, 2020)** | Chengdu's land ticket system achieved "commodification without dispossession" — farmers weren't evicted, but once neighbors moved and services relocated, staying became unviable. |
| **Xu (2014)**            | The state used the disaster as a laboratory to turn "unruly peasants into grateful urban citizens" — reconstruction was about political transformation, not just housing.          |

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# Case Study 2

## Wuhan Water — Sponge City, East Lake, and Resistance

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# The "City of Hundred Lakes" — 百湖之市

- 127 natural lakes within city boundaries in the 1950s — covering 25% of urban area
- Today: 38 lakes remain; –65% surface area 1990–2015
- East Lake lost 30% of surface area — filled for development

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# A Long History of Floods

- 1931 floods — [old photo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_China_floods#/media/File:Hankow_city_hall.jpg)
- Yangtze River flooding, July 2020 — [photos](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/08/photos-chinas-summer-of-floods/615661/)
  ]

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# East Lake Development and Resistance

[link](https://www.connectingcities.eu/wuhan-east-lake-scenic-area-development-planning/)

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# 我们的东湖

## [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEaDfJ4Li-A) — [website](http://donghu2010.org) — [article](https://blog.futurechallenges.org/local/author/clement/)

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# After The Happy Valley

### The protest "failed"...

- **2009**: OCT leases 211 ha including 30 ha of lake for ¥4.3B
- **2010**: "Everyone's East Lake" art protest suppressed by police
- **2012**: Happy Valley opens — 3M+ visitors/year
- Villagers displaced, fishery demolished, compensation below market rate

]

### ...but the lake was "saved"

- **2014–2017**: Wuhan builds **102 km car-free greenway** around East Lake ([SWA Group / UN-Habitat](https://www.swagroup.com/projects/wuhan-east-lake-greenway/))
- Modeled on Hangzhou's free-access West Lake
- 12.9M visits in 2017; ~40M total since opening
- Water quality improved from Grade V to **Grade III** — best in 40 years

]
]

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# Sponge City

### Urban design to absorb, retain, clean and reuse rainwater

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# Sponge City

- **Sponge cities** (海绵城市) treat urban areas as permeable systems: they capture, slow, filter, and reuse rainfall with soils, wetlands, and storage—rather than moving stormwater off-site as quickly as possible through pipes and concrete.

- Program launched 2015 across 30 pilot cities; expanded nationally
- Restoration of urban wetlands and natural drainage systems
- Target: 20% of urban area meeting sponge standards by 2020

]

### The limits

- **2021 Zhengzhou flood** (also a sponge city pilot): severe flooding killed 380 people
- Sponge infrastructure works at neighborhood scale; overwhelmed by extreme events
- Risk: "sponge city" label creates false security while development continues on floodplains

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# 3. Contesting

## Dam resettlement, NIMBY, and urban waste

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# Activism with Chinese characteristics?

- "right to the city": Lefebvre's Collective right to reshape urbanization processes
- In China, "Rightful resistance" within official rhetoric (O'Brien & Li)
- Activism as negotiation rather than opposition
- How citizen actions influence policy outcomes?

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# Nuozhadu Dam Resettlement

### Hydropower as national priority — "mass participation" (群众参与)

### The project

- **Nuozhadu Dam** (Yunnan): one of the largest in the Mekong cascade
- Construction submerged 37 km of the Simao-Lanchang Highway and a 168-meter bridge
- 87 households displaced
  ]

### The "choice" offered

- **Government-organized resettlement**: move to a new village 90 km away, with water, electricity, and services provided
- **Self-organized resettlement**: stay closer to home, but must provide own certificates and follow regulations
  ]

.footnote[
[World Bank resettlement review](https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/210541593565161978/pdf/A-Review-of-Resettlement-Management-Experience-in-China-Hydropower-Projects-Identifying-Key-Lessons-Learned.pdf) — [Mekong downstream impacts](https://www.planet.com/stories/nuozhadu-the-mekongs-largest-dam-releases-6-billio-T2w4uDTNg)
]

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# Nuozhadu Dan — those who stayed

### What happened?

- 73 households moved to the government village — 14 decided to self-organize and stay closer (Habich-Sobiegalla & Rousseau, 2020)
- Self-organized group: now in charge of resource management (transfers from the state to communities)
- Those who stayed faced bureaucratic hurdles; those who left lost proximity to land and social networks
  ]

### What does the "choice" reveal?

- Framed as participatory — but the options are radically unequal
- Government village = full provision but displacement; self-organized = autonomy but no support
- Echoes the Sichuan reconstruction logic: infrastructure as vehicle for spatial reorganization
  ]

.footnote[
[official report](https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202209/1276056.shtml) — [power plant stats](https://www.power-technology.com/marketdata/power-plant-profile-nuozhadu-china/)
]

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# NIMBY - Anti-PX Protests

### against para-xylene (PX) chemical factories

some [pics](https://hongkongfp.com/2015/07/01/px-an-explosive-word-in-china-the-long-history-of-anti-paraxylene-protests/)

- **Xiamen (2007)**: First major success - relocation of chemical plant
- **Dalian (2011)**: 12,000 protesters force temporary shutdown
- **Maoming (2014)**: Violent confrontations over petrochemical expansion
- Lead to "Environmental Impact Assessment Law" amendments

]

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# Urban Waste Management

- **Beijing Waste Incinerator Protests (2011-2015)**
  - Asuwei and Liulitun neighborhoods
  - Citizen-led environmental monitoring
- **Shanghai Garbage Classification System (2019)**
- **Policy Outcomes**: "Zero-waste city" pilot programs in 16 cities

]

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# Governing Risk: What We've Learned

### Across all three cases

| Case                   | Risk type  | Who decides?               | Who bears it?                        |
| ---------------------- | ---------- | -------------------------- | ------------------------------------ |
| Sichuan reconstruction | Earthquake | State + provincial pairing | Displaced rural communities          |
| Wuhan sponge city      | Flood      | Municipal planners         | Residents in poorly served compounds |
| Nuozhadu dam           | Hydropower | State + energy companies   | Displaced villagers given a "choice" |

### A planning question

Risk governance not a technical problem: more a distribution problem. Every intervention shifts risk from some people to others.

The ecological civilization is messier than the slogan.

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# Group Work (15 min)

### Work on your final projects

- Refine your topic and angle
- Discuss with your group members
- Ask questions if needed