7 The greying of greenspeak?
Environmental issues, media
discourses, and consumer practices in
ChinaWanning Sun
Research on environmentalism in China has pointed to the connection between
environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) and new media and
online technologies, in enabling Internet- and web-based collective actions
and mobilization (Liu 2011; Dong 2013; Xu 2014). In a highly influential and
frequently cited work, which considers the role of transnational ENGOs, the
mass media and environmental activism via the Internet, Guobin Yang and Craig
Calhoun (2007) trace the formation and circulation in China of “greenspeak”.
They use the term in a positive light; it has nothing to do with the “greenwash”
that prevails in some critical environmental studies. The scholars argue that the
greenspeak discourse, contrary to the Maoist discourse of taming and conquering
nature, warns of the dangers of irresponsible human behavior toward nature
and calls for public action to help protect the environment. Greenspeak appeals
to and is practised by students, media professionals, intellectuals, and other
socioeconomic elites in urban China. In the same work, Yang and Calhoun also
argue that web-enabled environmentalism contributes to the formation of civil
society and the emergence of a “green public sphere”.
Acutely aware of the fraught nature of the debate surrounding the concept of the
public sphere both outside and inside the Chinese context, Yang and Calhoun are
careful to point out that they adopt a more “relaxed” notion of the public sphere,
taking the term to refer loosely to “social space” or “public space”. With this proviso
in place, the authors simply define their use of the public sphere to mean a social
space that consists of “discourses, publics engaged in communication, and the
media of communication” (Yang and Calhoun 2007, p. 214). The authors pointed
to a “fledging green public sphere” in China, which they see as including the active
participation of state-controlled media as well as commercial media. This is because,
they suggest, the Chinese government supported media coverage of environmental
issues in the first place; commercial media had gained more freedom as a result of
reforms; and many media professionals themselves were active environmentalists.
Yang and Calhoun’s view is somewhat reinforced in an analysis of 10 Chinese
newspapers’ coverage of environmental issues from 2008 to 2011 (Tong 2014).
Adopting a quantitative framing method, the study finds that Chinese journalists,
enjoying more autonomy in covering environmental problems than other issues,
demonstrate a critical reflective outlook in their coverage of environmental risks.