This article uses nationwide survey data to answer two questions: who participates in environmental governance in China and why? First it explores the social structural characteristics that distinguish participants, finding that city dwellers, the more educated and those with higher incomes and higher social status are more likely to participate, while women, the elderly, those with rural residence registration and migrants are less likely. It then tests two main explanations as to why people participate in environmental governance: instrumentality and identity. (...) Participation is associated with attention to conservation issues, the perceived effectiveness of local environmental governance, knowledge of environmental problems, reading newspapers and magazines, voting in local elections, identification with a middle-class lifestyle and observance of Western holidays. Combining the analyses into a structural model shows that instrumental and identity-related variables account for nearly all of the social structural variation in participation. Participation is thus a function both of instrumental considerations and identities. (shrink)

China's political environment offers limited space for critical debates on domestic politics. In such a constrained environment, people tend to represent and articulate climate change issues without explicitly addressing their political aspects. The aim of this paper is to examine this political ambiguity in climate change discourses. Q methodology was employed to elicit the subjective positions of forty-five young and educated Chinese individuals. Three discourses were extracted: namely, prosaic environmentalism, co-operative economic optimism and actor scepticism. These discourses do not indicate (...) critical intent and deep engagement in the political arguments regarding climate change. This raises concern about the growth of climate citizenship within the country. (shrink)

Globalization is hailed by its advocates as a means of spreading cosmopolitan values, ideals of sustainability and better standards of living all around the world. Its critics, however, see globalization as a new form of colonialism imposed by rich countries and transnational corporations on the rest of the world, a process in which the rhetoric of sustainability and equality does not match the realities of exploitation and impoverishment of people and nature. This paper endorses neither view. Globalization is not new, (...) but it continually produces new challenges for conceptions of 'home' and 'belonging'. While some enthusiasts regard the 'liberal' and 'environmental' values of the West as the best remedy for what is wrong with the world, others argue that a resource for resisting the destructive effects of globalization may be found in the sense of identity and importance of place found in the traditional scientific and medical traditions of both India and China. Instead of trying to merge these two views in some grand synthesis, this paper argues that traditional conservative and modern liberal values should continually interact with each other to produce novel ideas in debates about home, place and belonging. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is the question of China’s contribution to the establishment of an association of ecological civilizations—as seen from the perspective of a European—given the growing economic, political, and ecological influence that China has in the world today. The question is which values are likely to guide Chinese development. Can concepts like “sustainability”, “environmental carefulness”, and “common concerns of humankind” easily be integrated as topics on the Chinese agenda? Or are they likely to be expelled due to (...) some basic values and ideas in traditional (or modern) Chinese worldviews? The paper discusses a number of modern interpretations that have argued that some basic concepts in the Chinese tradition are not only congenial with, but even provide fruitful additions to the modern debate about the establishment of cooperative ecological civilizations. In the final part the strong modern influence of both Marxist conceptions and consumerist behaviour is considered. (shrink)