10 Tania Lewis
and convenience foregrounded by Shove? In recent years, China has increasingly
sought to brand itself in the international community as a green modernizer,
through highly visible models of eco-urbanization such as eco-cities and eco-
villages (Hoffman 2011; May 2011). Hoffman, for instance, discusses the example
of Dalian, the southernmost city of Northeast China, which has transformed itself
from an industrialized port city with major problems of pollution into a model
of green urbanism heralded across the region and globally (it was named as a
Global 500 environmental city by the UN Environment Program). Hoffman
asserts that cities such as Dalian, while drawing on elements of the global garden
city movement, are largely situated “outside of the dominant, mainstream West
and dominant planning theorizations” and as such are “important sites where
regimes of urban practices are generated [...] potentially displacing the centrality
of Western-generated models in urban studies” (Hoffman 2011, p. 69).
May likewise discusses “the Huangbaiyu experiment”—a United States–China
co-development that sought to build an eco village of 42 houses on rural land as
a sustainable model for urbanizing China’s 800 million rural inhabitants. The key
(if somewhat grandiose) concept for this fairly small eco-project was that “China
would lead the world in solving one of the most pressing political crises for every
nation in the twenty-first century: defying historical precedent by inverting the
relationship between increasing quality of life and fossil fuel usage” (May 2011,
p. 104). In reality, this rather top-down development saw once relatively self
sufficient rural Chinese uprooted and relocated into alien urbanized contexts and
socio-technical regimes, ones that, according to May, privileged a middle-class
cosmopolitan eco-consciousness and related set of lifestyle practices. Hoffman
similarly notes that, while the Dalian “experiment” has had global recognition, it
tended to privilege middle-class “quality” (suzhi) citizens while marginalizing the
poor and lower classes.
Both examples point to the troubling tendencies of Chinese environmental
authoritarianism as well as the problem of a continued reliance on a limited
conception of modernization and “quality of life” in which consumptive urban
modes of living are privileged over more ruralized, productivist models of
citizenship. As May puts it, the infrastructure of eco-governance “brings rural
residents who were once largely self-sufficient and productive of their own needs
for subsistence into complex consumptive relationships in order to receive basic
services” (May 2011, p. 111).
The “green” socio-technical regimes offered up in these urban experiments, far
from challenging normative “imperial” models of living, again involve relying on
market and technology solutions (or “pseudo-solutions” as Shiva terms them) rather
than actual transformations in ways of living and being, an approach that continues
to externalize social and ecological costs (Shiva 2008; Brand and Wissen 2013). In
Dalian’s case this occurred quite literally—with polluting industries and non-suzhi
citizens relocated outside of the city (Hoffman 2011)—pointing to the social inequity
often underlying this kind of capital driven, high-end green urbanism. The limits of
green technologies and green markets are also highlighted by the paradox of China’s
much-lauded production of solar panels, which have been exported widely to the