Many critics have cast doubt on modern Chinese environmental rhetoric and praxis, characterizing it as destructive, militaristic, and irrationally extractive. Featuring the authors of three new monographs on ecocriticism in modern China, this panel complicates the simplistic portrayal of ecological policies and practices in the People’s Republic of China, highlighting the plurality of narratives and ideologies in Chinese environmental humanities. Inspired by Rob Nixon's concept of ‘slow violence,’ which underscores the invisibility of environmental issues, this panel illuminates multiple, even contradictory, dynamics of environmental attitudes that go beyond the monolithic control of Chinese state power suggested by some earlier studies (e.g., Shapiro, 2001; Dikötter, 2010; 2022).

The contested landscape of Chinese environmentalisms explored by this panel ranges from debates among environmental scientists themselves (Li), Indigenous versus Han Chinese environmental practices (Visser), and state-led conceptions of labor and ecological agency (Wang). Li's and Visser’s papers present the scientific and local Indigenous perspectives, opening avenues for engagement with Wang’s analysis of state-directed environmental initiatives and their implications for labor. Together these papers invite us to reflect how contested environmentalisms shape nationhood and subjecthood of Chinese society at large. Through a multidisciplinary approach that intertwines literary and film analysis with environmental science, cultural studies, and history, our panel excavates the dynamics between literature and environmental ideology, making visible environmental concerns.

Cheng Li’s paper, “Contested Environmentalisms: The Rhetoric of Afforestation in Socialist China, 1949-61,” addresses rhetoric and practices in Chinese forestry in the 1950s. He begins by exploring the speeches and writings of Liang Xi, the most important forestry official in early socialist China, who advocated tree planting to solve flooding and silting problems with the Yellow River. Secondly, he analyzes the People’s Daily rhetoric of “Greening the Motherland,” a campaign launched by Chairman Mao in 1956, expanding tree-planting to a national scale in response to the persuasion of forestry experts. Drawing on a chapter of his book, Trees and the Making of Modern China (Stanford UP, forthcoming 2025), Li argues that, in general, the Maoist tree planting rhetoric was scientific, rational, and even constructive, albeit strongly contested by Chinese hydrologists who proposed alternate solutions to the Yellow River problems.

Maoist China also saw contested environmentalisms between Mongol pastoralists and Chinese farmers, as delineated in Robin Visser’s Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan (Columbia UP, 2023). In her paper “Pulling the Harrow: Desert Plants and Dark Ecology in Guo Xuebo’s Sand Burial,” Visser examines “agrilogistics” (Morton, 2016) in the novella Sand Burial (1993) by Mongol writer Guo Xuebo, which features sand, dogs, wolves, plant species, and humans as multispecies components of a desert ecosystem. A Chinese plant scientist exiled during the Cultural Revolution creates a green biosphere around a Buddhist temple in the desert. His Viridity Model includes planting xibag artemisia and sand willows, yet sand buries him alive while drawing the root of a Chinese pea shrub. A similar fate befalls his friend, a Mongol lama, forced to pull the harrow to provide fragile desert vegetation as kindling for Communist Party cadres. Visser reads the indeterminate ending (the scientist’s ex-wife braves a sandstorm to salvage his scientific documentation on desert vegetation) as questioning the fragility of Cartesian knowledge and “the carbon imaginary” (Povinelli, 2016) of the desert.

Ban Wang’s paper “Labor and Ecology: A Critique of the Anthropocene,” expands the scope of contested environmentalisms beyond scientific specialties, or different modes of livelihood, to the ahistorical conception of the Anthropocene. As he argues in At Home in Nature: Technology, Labor, and Critical Ecology in Modern China (Duke UP, 2023), Chinese visions of human labor understand it as inherently ecological. In his analysis of Lu Xun’s “Curbing the Flood” (1935), a postmodern reimagining of the legendary Yu the Great’s irrigation system, and the film Youth in Our Village (1959), featuring an agricultural cooperative in the 1950s, Wang presents labor as a socio-economic act of intervening into and transforming the physical environment which is itself embedded in natural processes.

Together, these three papers analyze competing environmentalisms in modern China. Presided over by Dingru Huang, a specialist in modern Chinese environmental humanities as well as international literary and cultural studies, this panel aims to complicate simplistic understandings of environmental thought and praxis in socialist China and historicize anthropocentric assumptions in ecocriticism. This exploration into competing environmental discourses and practices in twentieth-century China provides a unique lens through which to make more legible the contemporary rhetoric and policies of Chinese Ecological Civilization and its global implications.