Ecological States: Politics of Science and Nature in Urbanizing China

2

BOTANY, BEAUTY, PURIFICATION

Wang Liu, a high-level environmental planner for the city of Kunming, headed ecological restoration of the Lake Dian basin. During an interview in his office, Wang discussed his bureau’s approach to ecological restoration planning, saying, “Since Xi Jinping came into power, there has been a major emphasis on building ecology [shengtai jianshe]. The central state and the whole country look highly on building an ecological civilization. In fact, all our work is aimed at building an ecological civilization.” I asked Wang how his government bureau builds ecology.

Wang walked to a nearby cabinet, pulled out a map of the city several meters in diameter, and rolled it out across a table. Pointing to different shades of green on the map, Wang explained that they represent areas zoned (quhua) for ecological protection. The municipal government had created ecological protection areas across the municipal region as part of urban-rural comprehensive planning. These planning processes are techniques through which the government builds ecology, Wang continued. The central state requires 20 percent of land in municipal regions to be zoned for ecological protection.1 Ecological protection sites in Kunming were designed to address local problems of pollution and environmental degradation in the Lake Dian basin.

Lake Dian, once known throughout China as the “pearl of the plateau” for its pristine beauty, has in recent decades become better known for blue-green algae blooms. In 2009, Kunming mayor Zhang Zhulin called the lake an eye-sore that typifies one of the most challenging pollution problems in the country.2 For decades, Lake Dian suffered from industrial effluent pollution, upstream agrichemical runoff, and insufficient wastewater infrastructure. During the reform era, untreated urban wastewater and industrial pollution were dumped directly into the lake. The municipal government has since bolstered the city’s water treatment infrastructure and introduced multifaceted ecological restoration projects.3 The municipal state, in conjunction with corporate partners, constructed surface-flow treatment wetlands around the banks of the lake to mitigate effluent pollutants from tributary rivers.

In Kunming alone, more than 2,500 square kilometers of the municipal region were zoned for ecological protection, displacing tens of thousands of peri-urban villagers in the process.4 The ecological protection areas Wang spoke of featured nature aesthetics and served a bourgeoning leisure industry. These sites’ aesthetics, however, differed from the Thoreauvian “wild” nature that may be familiar to Western readers and conservationists.5 Many ecological protection areas, in contrast, appeared as modernist arrangements with carefully planned landscape features and tourist infrastructure. They exhibited a pristine-looking nature produced through substantial landscape interventions.

In discussing ecological restoration in the Lake Dian basin, Wang articulated an aesthetic rationale for displacing and resettling rural people grounded in eco-developmental logics. The rural citizenry, according to these logics, was a key source of environmental degradation and disorder. Socio-environmental engineering, he posited, would not only optimize biophysical and aesthetic conditions but also improve the rural citizenry. Resettling rural people into orderly high-rise apartments, he contended, would mitigate a key source of environmental degradation. Wang articulated these logics in relation to his bureau’s ecological restoration techniques saying:

Considering the problem of environmental restoration . . . there are two kinds. With one kind we hope to restore the landscape to an image of what it was once before. This is called restoration [huifu]. There is another kind of environmental improvement called reconstruction [chongjian] in which the ecology is already damaged. For example, if you consider the shores of Lake Dian over the last several decades, the area has become filled with farmers’ fields, aquaculture fisheries, and houses—all of which now occupy [zhan le] these areas. . . . We remove the fisheries, remove the houses, remove the people, remove the agricultural fields. Then we bring back the wetlands, bring back the shores, bring back the land. This restores a previous state of time before degradation. Degradation was caused by the increase in the rural population and their activities.6

Such assertions typify a shared aesthetic sense among state environmental scientists and planners, echoed by popular media, which hold rural people and their activities as disorderly and environmentally degrading.7 In order to protect nature and restore the lake to its former beauty, according to this way of seeing, rural people are to be removed from the landscape and resettled in spatially optimized housing.8

Pointing with two fingers to green representations of ecological protection areas covering one-fifth of the map, Wang asked rhetorically, “What is the relationship between the city of Kunming and Lake Dian? It is a relationship of planning restrictions. It is a problem of spatial and temporal arrangements. These green areas are zoned for ecological protection,” he explained. “These ecological protection areas will help restore Lake Dian to the way it was before.”9

When was the “before” Wang referred to? How did environmental scientists and planners determine ecological conditions of the past? Scientists and planners involved in ecological restoration ask and answer questions that delimit temporal, spatial, and place-based relationships. Debates in the field of restoration ecology abound regarding how to establish original ecological conditions and how the politics of establishing original conditions shape restoration techniques. Intervening in this debate, geographer Rebecca Lave illustrates how ecological restoration practices are steeped in local politics of environmental science. Ecological restoration, she argues, is undivorceable from the social worlds and political-economic contexts scientific communities inhabit. Scientific techniques take shape, in other words, within particular social and political milieus.10

In this chapter I bring critical attention to techniques of environmental science and power relations.11 While my discussion in this chapter is organized around the case of the Lake Dian basin, it is important to note that ecological restoration techniques, across contexts, entail an amalgam of efforts to re-create a landscape based on socially produced and interpreted historical records.12 A wide array of techniques can be used to form historical ecological baselines. The process of gathering and reading historical records is highly contingent on what counts within local scientific communities as an ecological record, the amounts of time and resources put toward collating records, and how records are read. In producing ecological baselines, scientists may consider historical documents, land use records, oral histories, maps, palaeoecological records, or archeological records.13 Such broad historical cross-referencing requires significant time and resources. Not only were both in short supply in producing the Lake Dian basin’s historical ecological record but obtaining a breadth of historical records mattered less to scientists than authoritative scientific works on botany and landscape beautification. The scientific community leading ecological restoration efforts perceived enhancing plant life and beauty as key to restoring ecological conditions.

In what follows, I discuss the aesthetic politics of seeing and sensing like a state environmental scientist.14 I take an ethnographic approach grounded in scientific practices of ecological restoration and establishing the historical ecological record for the Lake Dian basin. Far from apolitical, the process of delimiting histories of ecology determines reference conditions for the past. Environmental scientists tasked with collating and reading the historical ecological record privileged works written by authoritative scientists—largely botanists and ecological engineers. Shared aesthetic senses shaped how state environmental scientists saw nature’s past as they created an historical record, how they viewed restoration landscapes in the present, and how they planned ecological futures.

Drawing on insights from scholars of aesthetic politics, I argue that techniques of ecological restoration operate within and operationalize aesthetic regimes, thereby reinforcing state power. Jacques Rancière conceptualizes aesthetics as a shared distribution of the sensible. He defines an “aesthetic regime” as “a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making . . . corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships.”15 Aesthetics regimes, Rancière argues, shape how people come to know, see, and act in the world. Building on this concept, geographer D. Asher Ghertner demonstrates how a world-class city aesthetic regime became central to land governance in Delhi. Ghertner shows how governance regimes shifted from calculative statistics to judgments based on aesthetic appearance. Delhi’s government officials draw on shared aesthetic senses of what appears “world-class” to render urban spaces governable, particularly those that appear unsightly. This normative aesthetic justifies widespread displacement of slum dwellers.16 Analogously, techniques of ecological restoration in the Lake Dian basin reflect a shared aesthetic sense underlying expressions of state power and an unequal citizenry.

I discussed this aesthetic, in the introduction and previous chapter, as an eco-developmental sublime. The eco-developmental sublime functions via two interweaving aesthetic modes—ecology as pristine natural object and ecology as technically enhanced natural object. The latter finds expression within mechanistic models, and other means of optimizing and ordering socio-natural relations. The aesthetic character of technically enhanced ecology lies in ordered biophysical and socio-spatial outputs. This version of ecology, as technically enhanced object, exists alongside and in tension with ecology as pristine nature. Ecology as pristine natural object finds expression in landscapes designed to appear untouched by humans. This appearance, however, is the result of aesthetic conventions of landscape architecture and environmental engineering that stylistically mimic natural landscapes. These interdigitated aesthetic registers are expressions of an eco-developmental sublime.

State environmental scientists and planners’ articulation of eco-developmental aesthetics is evident in the ways they see and sense rural deficiencies, civilizational backwardness, and out-of-placeness.17 They see and sense the rural population as deficient, not just because scientific logics figure the peasantry to be environmentally degrading. Equally important, as this chapter attests, is the view that the rural population is unable to achieve the efficient aims of the state or the ordered sensorial semblance of state environmental control. Scientific interventions are seen as crucial to improving biophysical conditions, beautifying, and purifying the landscape. Even though there is a long history of agriculture in the Lake Dian basin, particularly on land undergoing restoration, scientists deemed agricultural land use extraneous to the historical ecological record. In their efforts to “build ecology,” they first removed agriculture from ecological history and then rural people from the physical landscape. State environmental scientists and planners see planning ecological landscape functions (shengtai jingguan gongneng) for optimal efficiency and creating pristine-looking botanical features as means of building an ecological civilization and a beautiful China. Restoration efforts in the Lake Dian basin, therefore, exemplify state environmental scientists’ shared ways of seeing and sensing, which align with an eco-developmental aesthetic regime.

Seeing Like a State Scientist

Wang Liu introduced me to the team of state environmental scientists who established the official historical record for the Lake Dian basin. I conducted individual and group interviews with these scientists, as well as joint field visits to restoration sites. In one of our early meetings, I sat with Zhang Xin, the ecologist who led efforts to produce the official ecological record. We were joined by his team of scientists. Zhang and his team shared with me the thirteen documents comprising the historical ecological record for the Lake Dian basin. All the items were scientific journal articles written by botanists, plant ecologists, or environmental engineers.

“This is the most important document in the ecological record,” Zhang said, drawing my attention to an article titled Dianchi Plant Groups and Pollution.18 The article was published in 1983 by plant ecologists Qu Zhongxiang (see chapter 1) and Li Heng. At the time of publication Qu and Li were affiliated with Yunnan University and Kunming Institute of Botany respectively. Zhang asserted that historical materials as comprehensive as this article were rare. Zhang’s team of ecologists, seated at the table, nodded in agreement. For the team that collated the historical ecological record, this article was their most valued source.

The article identifies the loss of botanical life in Lake Dian through a comparative longitudinal analysis. Qu and Li compared “visual observations” they made in 1975 with a study by Yunnan University ecologists in 1960. The authors claimed that, in 1960, submerged and emergent macrophytes covered 90 percent of the surface area of the lake. Submerged macrophytes constituted the majority. From their visual assessment, Qu and Li deduced that during the fifteen-year period the number of macrophytes decreased by 70 percent to cover 20 percent of the lake surface.

There are several valences, related to this key source, through which aesthetic politics operate. The first is in the article’s methodology. The findings were deduced through scientists’ visual accounting of botanical change. Qu and Li compared a 1960 report with their own visual assessment of the botanical composition of Lake Dian in 1975. The second valence relates to how contemporary ecologists read and valued the work of their predecessors. State scientists viewed Qu and Li’s visual observations as reflections of past botanical realties, and to a lesser degree as part of a larger tapestry of sources. Third, scientists involved in determining Lake Dian’s historical ecological record read this article selectively for evidence of rural people’s culpability in environmental degradation.

In the article, Qu and Li attributed the decrease in aquatic plants to the rise of industrial and agricultural pollutants they refer to as the “three wastes” (sanfei). These include gaseous, liquid, and solid wastes.19 As we discussed the article, I pointed to a section that read “industrial wastes, pesticides, and urban waste caused the pollution of Lake Dian’s waters with easily visible (xianeryijian) changes to the aquatic plant species.”20 Zhang surveyed the section, paused, and redirected the groups’ attention to another section in which Qu and Li claimed that pesticide use negatively affected the lake’s water quality. Even though the article stated that urban and industrial waste caused pollution in Lake Dian and provided reference to studies that supported the claim, Zhang focused on the section of the article that emphasized environmental damage caused by agricultural practices.

Qu and Li drew on longitudinal measures of industrial and urban pollutants to estimate that the daily urban and industrial waste discharged into the lake, at the time of publication, was 682,000 cubic meters.21 The authors suggested this number would soon dissipate since the city of Kunming was planning to install water treatment facilities to curb pollution. Urban wastewater treatment facilities, however, were not built in Kunming until the late 1980s and early 1990s. The majority were not built until the 2000s. Qu and Li provided specific measures of urban effluent pollution. But they did not measure, estimate, or reference sources to support their claims regarding agricultural pollutants. Instead of assessing agricultural effluent pollution, Qu and Li assumed that agriculture was a significant source of pollution. They made this explicit writing, “It goes without saying [buyaneryu] that agricultural pesticides harm aquatic plants, although it is a pity that we still have not done studies into the levels of pesticides in the waters of Lake Dian.”22 Despite this admission, the authors claimed that agricultural practices surrounding the lake are having a negative influence on aquatic plant species.23 In claiming this article as a key source for the historical ecological record and selectively reading it, environmental scientists operationalized logics of rural deficiency within their scientific practice.

In addition to selecting works composed solely by authoritative scientists, the official historical record was constructed from a relatively small number of sources with limited temporal range. When I first met with the team of scientists, the historical ecological record consisted of thirteen scientific texts that were published from 1963 to the early 2010s. Two texts were from the 1960s, four from the 1980s, one from the 1990s, and six from the 2010s. The texts published in the 2010s advocated for ecological engineering approaches to restoration. Although the works included in the official record are written by botanists, plant ecologists, and environmental engineers, some of the materials detail extensive histories of agricultural production and landscape transformation.

The Lake Dian basin has a long history of agriculture and environmental engineering. Land use maps in Acta Geographica Sinica, for example, illustrate how the lake basin supported a wide array of agricultural types. One map from 1947 displays the basin as permeated with “alluvial plain fields, rainwater fields, dry fields, and orchards” (figure 7).24 Tellingly, however, the map does not demarcate wetlands in areas that are now being restored through state efforts to construct treatment wetlands. In recent years, these constructed wetlands have come to encompass the banks of Lake Dian. Reading the 1947 land utilization map as an historical referent suggests that the areas now being restored as wetlands were, in the 1940s, agricultural land or lacustrine deposits.25 In addition to agriculture, environmental engineering and landscape morphology were notably absent from the historical ecological record.

The lake basin is, in part, the product of ecological engineers who, during the Yuan dynasty (1278–1368 CE), transformed the physical geography of the lake. When the Mongol empire territorialized what is now southwest China in the late 1200s, they instituted a multicentury effort of building dams, water diversions, and irrigation channels around Lake Dian. Transforming the lake basin involved the labor of hundreds of thousands of people. Water diversions, damming, and irrigation projects continued to be built and maintained under the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties up to the present day. Environmental engineering processes involved dredging waterways, building irrigation channels, and constructing reservoirs. These multicentury projects drastically transformed water levels, morphological contours, and the spatial extent of Lake Dian.26 The lake’s current biophysical and morphological conditions are the products of hundreds of years of ecological engineering, which

FIGURE 7. A 1947 Land Utilization map of Kunming’s Lake Dian basin. The map details types of agricultural fields. Reproduced with permission from Acta Geographica Sinica.

reduced the surface area of the lake by half—from approximately 600 square kilometers to 300 square kilometers.27 The decrease in water surface area and the creation of sophisticated irrigation channels exposed soils enriched with sediment deposits and nutrients.

The reduction of the lake’s surface area laid bare highly fertile land, which became renowned for agriculture. Agricultural production flourished in soils enriched with alluvium deposits accumulated over centuries. Yet, this history of environmental engineering and landscape morphology did not count for state environmental scientists. At least not enough to be considered part of the official ecological record. Ecological restoration efforts in the basin have displaced tens of thousands of rural people from land which, for the greater part of a millennium, supported agriculture. State scientists and planners consider rural resettlement necessary to restore biophysical conditions, particularly aquatic plant life recorded in scientific documents.

In subsequent meetings, Zhang explained how his research team had come across a reference to an English-language source on botany they had yet to acquire. The source was a collated series of taxonomies and descriptions published in the Journal of Botany between 1934 and 1935. The texts were collated from the late 1800s and early 1900s, a time when British and French botanists frequented Yunnan Province.28 They included journal entries, ranging from 1887 to 1920 collected by botanist James Edgar Dandy of the Linnaean Society and the British Museum of Natural History. When I obtained copies through digital archives and shared them with the team of scientists, they exclaimed that the texts were further proof of a botanical past they had already begun to re-create. In 2016, Zhang and his team began experimenting with reintroducing aquatic plant species noted in these records.

State scientists aimed to restore biophysical conditions that could host emergent macrophytes, such as those described in the Journal of Botany. Zhang’s team considered these anglophone writings to be among the earliest Western botanical records of the Lake Dian basin.

Entries described plant taxonomies of Yunnan Province’s large freshwater lakes and highlighted locations, elevation, and dates of botanical observations. They drew on Linnaean classification to identify the aquatic plant Ottellia (haicaihua) as indigenous to the region. Ottellia is a genus of aquatic plant and part of the Hydrocharitaceae family. The texts identify the following species: Ottellia acuminate, Ottellia yunnanensis, Ottellia polygonifofia, Ottellia cavaleriei. Ottellia yunnanensis was named after Yunnan Province where it is endemic. The journal entries also identified several native varieties of Ottellia in Lake Dian, Lake Erhai, and Fuxian Lake. Other, more recent, sources note Ottellia acuminate and Ottellia yunnanensis as common to the region.29 When Ottellia were abundant, they were harvested for their roots, much like lotus, which were used as a source of sustenance.30 Presently, due to high levels of chemical pollutants in Lake Dian, Ottellia can hardly grow. State scientists were keen to include these writings in the historical record because they provided historical precedence from turn-of-the-century botanists for efforts to reintroduce plant varietals already underway. The documents that I shared provided additional authoritative scientific voices to support their restoration efforts.

Ecological restoration scholar Eric Higgs argues that “restoration ecology version 1.0” entails practices of seeing a limited set of records as sufficient reference to a past reality.31 Reading limited historical records in this way ignores social and cultural connections to land and histories of place. Moreover, ecological restoration 1.0 realities are informed by renditions of the past that appear significantly different when a wider scope of sources are considered. Historians of science lodge similar critiques. They are critical of considering fragmentary historical accounts as a set of facts to guide ecological restoration.32 Analogously, scholars of restoration ecology have been critical of restoration projects that neglect lived experiences and oral historical records.33

Historical records are always partial. Techniques of reading and collating partial historical records reflect aesthetic milieus within which scientific communities operate. In the case of ecological restoration in Lake Dian, state environmental scientists hoped to restore Lake Dian in ways that reflected its storied past as one of China’s most beautiful lakes. State scientists, operating within this aesthetic milieu, selectively constructed authoritative sources on botany and ecological engineering as references to past ecological realities. In their role as definers of nature, scientists prescribed what counts as nature and how nature is to be acted on.

In curating an historical record that focused on botanical features, but excluded histories of human habitation and agricultural production, state scientists effectively erased the rural population from the official history of the Lake Dian basin. Additionally, scientists’ historical selection of records and their selective reading overlooked the longue durée of environmental engineering from the Yuan dynasty to the present, including the Maoist era campaign to “fill in the lake” (see the introduction). The histories they occlude are suffused with efforts to create agriculturally productive landscapes—inherently botanical interventions. The state directed many of these efforts. In the Maoist era, for instance, the campaign to fill in the lake with earth to increase the amount of arable land (weihai zaotian) mobilized thousands around a central task.34 The campaign, however, disrupted Lake Dian’s biophysical and chemical composition, which was further altered by decades of urban industrial pollution.35 Yet, state scientists tasked with reconstructing the historical ecological record readily ascribe blame for ecosystem disruption to the rural populations’ agricultural practices.

As one environmental scientist put it:

If we want to restore a lake to a time before it was disturbed, how do we do it? Why do we have to do it? Because it has been damaged [pohuai] by peasants.... For instance, large parts of the lake area had fishponds dug for rearing fish. But now that life is better, we don’t need aquaculture to raise fish. First, we restore the area’s natural features by planting appropriate vegetation and intervening in the landscape. We introduce plant varietals based on the record of aquatic vegetation in Lake Dian. This aids the process of restoration.36

In this quote, aquaculture projects near the banks of the lake are held up as examples of environmentally damaging agrarian practices causing ecosystem disequilibrium. This scientist sees the reintroduction of botanical life as means to restore the past. State environmental scientists’ efforts to optimize purification functions (jinghuade gongneng), landscape functions (jingguan gongneng), ecological landscape functions (shengtai jingguan gongneng), and aesthetic functions (shenmei gongneng) produce ecological restoration landscapes that reflect an eco-developmental sublime.37 Ecological restoration, therefore, is shaped by aesthetic senses of what looks beautiful and natural, yet scientifically ordered.

After interviewing and exchanging materials with state environmental scientists, I was struck by how closely ecological restoration in the Lake Dian basin resembled what Wang Liu described as “building ecology.” State scientists and planners produced an ecological record that reflected their shared aesthetic sense that botanical features enhance the beauty of the landscape—an expression of ecology as pristine nature. This shared aesthetic shaped what counted as a record of ecology, how that record was read, what belonged within a restoration landscape, and what did not. The presence of rural life appeared disorderly vis-à-vis scientifically ordered ecological restoration landscapes. Resettling rural people, reintroducing botanical features, and aestheticizing the landscape were seen as means of scientifically optimizing socio-natural relationships.38

As ecological restoration scholar Robert Elliot argues, establishing a record, from which to design biophysical relations, provides a platform for powerful actors who promise a return, often nostalgically tinged, to a site’s former conditions.39 Ecological restoration, as the case of Lake Dian reveals, has as much to do with imaginaries of a past, when nature was pristine, as it does with imaginaries of an improved future. Scientists looked back to a history of botany and beauty to justify displacing and resettling rural people, as well as constructing novel landscapes. The ecological restoration landscapes that emerged function as sensorial proof of the state’s power to operationalize ecology for governmental ends. They appear not only as material instantiations of beauty and ecological optimization but also as symbolic markers of purification.

Sensing Beauty and Purification

Kunming Waterfall Park was constructed as part of ecological restoration efforts in the Lake Dian basin. It serves as a grand spectacle of landscape optimization (figure 8). The park, at the northern edge of the city, boasts the largest human-made waterfall in Asia. Water cascades down nine separate falls. The main falls is four hundred meters wide and drops roughly thirteen meters. Landscaped vegetation punctuates the falls. Walking trails surround the rim. The site is emblematic of an eco-developmental sublime, reflecting both aesthetic registers: ecology as technically enhanced object and pristine natural object. This aesthetic conveys the power of the state to mechanize nature and beautify landscape. I visited this site often and observed people taking pictures with the falls and marveling aloud to one another about the site’s “beautiful ecology.”

FIGURE 8. Kunming Waterfall Park. Photo by author.

The water flowing through the constructed waterfalls comes from the state-engineered redirection of the Niulan River and the headwaters of the three parallel rivers in northwest Yunnan. As of 2013, ecological engineering projects to restore the Lake Dian basin had over US$21 billion in state investment.40 The Niulan River-Dianchi Water Project, included in these efforts, diverts 566 million cubic meters of water per year through the waterfall park into Lake Dian. Environmental planner Yang Bin claimed that “there are 1.8 billion cubic meters of water in Lake Dian, but the water basin can’t support four million people.... The Niulan River diversion project increases the water supply and the speed of nutrient cycling.”41 Yang described how the water is “purified” by aerating as it flows down the waterfall. State scientists claimed that redirecting the river to flow down the waterfall, accelerates the speed at which effluent pollutants cycle through the lake. Increasing fluvial speed, thereby, decreases the time chemical pollutants, excess nitrogen, and blue-green algae remain in the lake.

Three villages were demolished to make the Kunming Waterfall Park. Villagers displaced from the site were moved into nearby high-rise resettlement housing. High-rise commercial apartments and villa-style housing were still being constructed adjacent to the park. Villagers north of the waterfall park readied themselves for the next wave of resettlement.

I entered the sales office for the new apartment complex bordering Kunming Waterfall Park in the fall of 2016. Salesmen, smartly dressed in black suits, walked around models of the park and new apartment complexes. The contrast between the models and our surroundings was striking. In the surrounding area, scattered demolitions were underway leaving mounds of housing scrap and appliance parts. These scattered parts were periodically gathered by informal collectors for sale on the secondhand market. In contrast to the reality outside, the models in the sales office displayed sleek apartment complexes next to a school and hospital. Single-family villa housing, glowing from the tiny lights inlaid within the model, were surrounded by green velvet and mini-palm trees (figure 9).

A salesman approached me in a black suit smiling. “This area is surrounded by green space to the East and to the West. These are ecological protection areas [shengtai baohuqu], so you are guaranteed to have green space here, which will give you an escape from the noise of urban life,” he said to me as he pointed to different green patches on the model. “Each set of apartments [xiaoqu],” he continued, “will have a surveillance system and a new school. Some of the local farmlands nearby will be made available to residents of the apartment to rent. You can even have a peasant farm for you. The produce will be delivered to a locker box on the first-floor service center of every apartment.” The salesman assured me that, since there is a state-owned enterprise backing this construction project, it is a reliable investment. “The government has money” he said, “as opposed to developers [kaifashang] who are known to go bankrupt mid-project.”

FIGURE 9. Model of apartments and housing developments surrounding Kunming Waterfall Park. Photo by author.

After touring the dusty concrete trappings of what was to become a new apartment complex, I was offered the option to buy one of the available units. According to the salesperson, given the popularity of the new complex only a third of the units were still available. Clearly real estate companies were capitalizing on proximity to land demarcated for ecological protection. Urban housing surrounded by state-guaranteed greenspaces is valued highly. Their proximity pointed to the confluence of economic opportunism and restoration efforts. Producing an eco-developmental aesthetic heightens the value of nearby land and real estate. Its production, however, is contingent on displacement.

In discussing restoration efforts, environmental scientists and planners routinely described rural infrastructures and activities as unsightly and environmentally degrading. The role of rural people in this aesthetic regime is to adopt urban modes of life. Bing Zhou, an environmental scientist working in a branch of Kunming’s urban planning bureau, remarked on the relationship between aesthetics, rural displacement, and ecological restoration saying:

We hope we can restore sites to the way they were before degradation. What was it like before?... Lake Dian, in the past was very beautiful [hen mei], but now so many rural people have come to occupy the banks. We are slowly restoring them. We have removed over 50,000 mu [about 8,240 acres] of agricultural fields. We have removed more than 200,000 rural people, many homes, and fisheries. We have made these into wetlands. We pushed [tuichu] farmers off the lands where they used to grow vegetables. So now they don’t grow anymore... we plant botanical species in the lower areas where we built wetlands. This is, as much as possible, how we can restore the past.42

This quote illustrates the scale of state intervention in the Lake Dian basin and how Bing views rural displacement as imperative to restoration. His statement reflects how rural people and their practices are coded as unsightly and out of place.

Yang Liu, vice deputy of an environmental planning bureau, emphasized the importance of making the public aware of ecological purification and aesthetic functions within ecological restoration planning. He said:

The main component of planning ecological functions [shengtai gongneng] is to emphasize the appropriateness of the plants and species selection. We want to maximize biological diversity and plant diversity. This is one kind of function. The purification function focuses on the water in the fluvial system and the water distribution systems including wastes from farmland. The landscape function [jingguan gongneng] is basically contingent on the locality. If the site is close to the city, the municipal government can suitably remake it. We choose the appropriate botanical system. And we create landscapes. Lake Dian’s new treatment wetlands have been called the most beautiful in the country. . . . One aspect is to make sites of ecological construction really beautiful. Another is to let other people know and recognize this beauty.43

Yang’s statement provides a lens into how environmental planners understand fostering a shared aesthetic sense to be part of ecological restoration efforts. Through their practices, state scientists and planners aim to broaden eco-developmental aesthetic awareness within the wider public.

Yan Hong, vice director of an urban waste water treatment plant, spoke at length about aesthetics in relation to the wastewater system she manages. The flu-vial treatment system releases treated wastewater into recently built surface-flow construction wetlands as part of a secondary wastewater purification process. During our interview, Yan invited me to see the process for myself. We walked up to the balcony to view the water treatment infrastructure. She pointed across the road to the artificial treatment wetlands that stretched as far north and south as we could see from that vantage point. Yan insisted that the few village houses inside the wetlands were nail households [dingzihu]—referring to those who resist government-ordered relocation.44 She also stated that agricultural production in this area had been polluting the lake for decades. When I asked how her team came to this finding, Yan first noted that she wasn’t aware of a particular study that measured agricultural pollution, then provided her own visual assessment of how rural resettlement beautified the landscape. She said:

Take a look at how beautiful [piaoliang] these wetlands are. Take a look! Before this ecological protection area [shengtai baohuqu] was formed, all this land was covered with vegetables. It was full of plastic greenhouses. We have moved them off this site. When we first set up this water treatment plant this whole area was full of greenhouses. Now look, the whole area has been restored. We pushed them out [tuidiaole] and made the site into wetlands. And the wetlands are so beautiful [hen mei].... One component of ecological restoration is making the area beautiful [piaoliang], another is protecting the lake. This site won’t have agricultural fields again. With all those greenhouses and vegetables, of course there are going to be pesticides and herbicides to get rid of insects. After it goes on the plants and it rains, of course chemicals will run off into the lake. So now you can see the effects. This is what removal [tui] looks like. We built them apartments and relocated [banqian] these villages.45

This quote illustrates multiple facets of how Yan senses beauty and purification. In this example, plastic greenhouses represent a polluting agricultural activity. Yan sees removing greenhouses and building treatment wetlands as ways to beautify and purify the landscape. Aesthetic senses that Yan shares with her environmental scientist colleagues informed how she saw the constructed treatment wetland, as well as the village houses that remained. As Yan looked across the few remaining village houses, she saw a landscape degraded by rural activities. Measuring the effects of local agricultural practices on the water quality was unnecessary. For Yan, evidence was visible on the landscape.

The aesthetic regime underlying how state environmental scientists and planners, such as Yan, Yang, and Bing, sense beauty and purification correlates the visual presence of rural people with environmental degradation. Shared senses of beauty are not merely inherent to technical processes of optimization but visible in physical landscapes. This is significant because logics of deficiency are used to justify rural displacement. When notions of deficient rural natures inform environmental planning practices, they reproduce the inferior positionality of rural people within the citizenry. An eco-developmental sublime materializes through scientific techniques that target rural populations and biophysical relations.

Extant studies, however, suggest that local agricultural production is not the main contributor to Lake Dian’s pollution problems. The majority of nitrates and agricultural runoff flowing into Lake Dian come from far upstream, not from areas where extensive displacement is underway—where Yan and I overlooked the treatment wetlands. Contrary to the way state environmental scientists saw the landscape, greenhouses tend to reduce pesticide runoff in comparison with open-air farming.46 Yet, the sense that local agricultural production is environmentally degrading was reiterated throughout my interviews. For scientists and planners purifying the landscape was undivorceable from this shared aesthetic sense.

Aesthetic senses of rural deficiency and modernist improvement also manifest in state techniques of classifying slums. Across municipalities, government bureaus draw on policies of “slum reform” (penghuqu gaizao) to consolidate control over space.47 In 2014, the same year that the New-Type Urbanization Plan was announced, the central government released Notification Number 535 of the General Office of the Ministry of Housing and Urban-rural Development on Issues Concerning the Defining Standards of Slums.48 The document stipulates that each level of government can make their own definition of what constitutes a “slum.” Slums, in other words, can be defined and demarcated across levels of government. Definitions, therefore, differ across administrative units and jurisdictions. The Kunming municipal government, for example, defined slums as areas within the municipal jurisdiction that have simple structures (jianyi jiegou), poor housing quality, safety hazards, or inadequate facilities. Inadequate facilities can connote both “housing settlements that are too concentrated or too dispersed,” as well as areas with “incomplete use functions” (shiyonggongneng bu wanquan).49 Definitions as broad as this reflect the scope of local governmental discretion in how and where to demarcate slums. Many slums are classified in areas newly demarcated for ecological protection. The spatial relation between slums and spaces zoned for ecological protection is explicit in the Chengdu municipal government definition of slums.

Chengdu has a four-part classification system for slums.50 “Type-one slums” can be demarcated on any site, which has infrastructure overlapping with urban greenspaces. Similarly, “type-four slums” can be classified in any area that the Chengdu municipal government changes to a different land use type. By simply classifying a space for ecological protection or by changing a land use type, the municipal government can classify any area as a slum. These discursive definitional and classificatory techniques have significant material effects.

Following slum classification, infrastructure can be demolished by municipal governments in the name of “slum reform.” As is the case across contexts, slum demarcations facilitate displacement as a form of environmental improvement. In addition to justifying spatial control over land, classifying a rural area a slum discursively frames rural spaces as low-quality, disorderly, and infrastructurally unsound, thereby reifying logics of rural deficiency. These techniques are material expressions of a shared aesthetic sense wherein disorderly landscapes and people are provided with ordered resettlement housing from the state. Scientifically optimized landscapes, such as Kunming Waterfall Park and Lake Dian’s treatment wetlands, are emblematic of this aesthetic.

Each landscape, rural and eco-developmental, is imbued with a sense of time and place—a sense of meaning and developmental directionality. Zhang Jielin, the deputy director of an institute involved in urban ecological protection planning, portrayed rural developmental deficiency as follows:

The village and the city are not the same. The city is compact like this, but villages are really dispersed [fensan]. Their surface area is really wide. So up until now, they have not matured [chengshu]. This form of governance is not only a plan, but it is also a structure of the city and countryside in which we take the dispersed and concentrate it vertically. When the scale is very large it is much easier to deal with. If you deal individually with every single [village] household, then it becomes increasingly difficult.... We have tried to move villages to a point [qiancunbingdian], which involves concentrating many villages together. That is, we concentrate dispersed built areas to deal with them [lai chuli].51

This quote indicates how state environmental planners, like Zhang, perceive the relationship between the city and the countryside, developmental differences between the urban and the rural, and their own role in socio-environmental management. In discussing the process of concentrating rural people into reset-tlement complexes, government officials repeatedly framed villages as lagging behind cities. Zhang referred to rural built environments as immature, suggesting they exhibit an earlier stage of development compared with urban built environments that have been rationally planned. In this, Zhang articulated a shared aesthetic sense that vertically concentrating villagers is integral to socio-spatial optimization and bringing about a higher developmental stage.

FIGURE 10. A peri-urban village undergoing demolition. Resettlement housing is visible in the background. Photo by author.

Greening slums, for state planners, entails relocating rural people into resettlement housing, what planners commonly referred to as “moving villages to a point” or “concentrating villages” (qiancunbingdian) (figure 10). Zhang continued:

“Moving villages to a point” [qiancunbingdian] is one way we transform villages. The second way is to export labor. We take those animal rearing industries, pig husbandry, cow husbandry, sheep husbandry, chicken husbandry, duck husbandry, all animal husbandry as well as those in the flower industry and move them out of the Lake Dian area. . . . They are just polluting this area.52

In addition to socio-spatial optimization, many environmental scientists and planners saw resettling rural people as one of the many economic benefits they receive through restoration efforts. Ze Jian, a mid-level government official, claimed that building constructed wetlands was not only necessary for environmental protection but was also economically beneficial to those relocated.

The government made wetlands and pushed out rural people in these areas, but they participate in economic processes involved. For instance, many sell things outside of the wetlands or rent kiosks. So, this is a really a good reciprocal interaction for them. We are encouraging them to protect the wetlands. If they protect the wetlands, then they will benefit as well, directly and indirectly. Rural people really don’t take care of land. They destroy it, especially if they don’t get a subsidy or some financial support.53

Claims such as these reflect a shared sense among state scientists and planners regarding the rural citizenry, as well as the role of science and planning in reordering nature and purifying the landscape. Many planners, however, have a limited understanding of how displacement processes affect villagers in socioeconomic or experiential terms. Because state conservation efforts have displaced millions of peri-urban villagers across China, it is not surprising that rural people facing resettlement view the prospect of becoming part of the “urban” citizenry quite differently.

* * *

Villagers, whose land and housing are unevenly incorporated into ecological protection areas, see ecological restoration efforts through alternative aesthetic lenses. Wang Jie, a peri-urban villager, participated in my photovoice research during which he and other participants photographed changes brought on through the process of ecological protection zoning (see the appendix).54 The photos became material for interviews and focus group discussions on transitions in village life, livelihoods, and shared experiences.

Wang held up photos of newly built restaurants within an ecological protection area on his village’s former agricultural land. He placed the photos next to others he took of constructed treatment wetlands, village houses, and a kiosk. He said:

This kiosk and the restaurants here are run by a national investment corporation, which is claiming to protect Lake Dian by removing us. But they came and built these structures and then rented them out. Then they opened these big restaurants. It’s totally irrational. We [villagers] are not allowed to do this within the ecological protection area.55

Wang suggested that companies involved in environmental management were profiting in ways that excluded villagers. From the throngs of tourists coming to sites like the Kunming Waterfall Park and treatment wetlands surrounding Lake Dian, it was evident that they have substantial economic potential. Wang felt that he and his fellow villagers were excluded from economic opportunities associated with ecological restoration efforts on the land they had farmed throughout their lives.

Upset by the transitions underway, Wang countered state environmental scientists and planners’ ways of seeing and sensing. He offered an alternative aesthetic in which rural infrastructure signified beauty and belonging. Pointing to pictures he took of houses in his village he said:

Now look at these village houses. Look how beautiful they are. These three pictures, these are really important. You have to remember these. In our area, they are building resettlement housing.... When it is built, they will move us out of here. This transformation will take place in two or three years. Now on their exhibition boards of this project, our village is marked a slum area reform project [penghuqu gaizao]. A slum area reform project! This means that they would call a village as beautiful as this one, with beautiful homes, a slum. What is a slum? Real slums are crowded areas. They have houses made of temporary materials that are not good to live in. They are dirty with poor traffic conditions. They are in danger of fires. That is what a slum is. The government spends lots of money to help those people who live in poor houses to move into better houses. And this is supported by the central government. But now our village flies under this flag as well—a slum—a slum area reform project! Look at these good houses here in this photo. We are not a slum. Calling this village a slum is just an excuse to make us move.

In this, Wang articulated an alternative sense of place-based belonging that contrasts with an eco-developmental sublime. He also pointed to a contradiction within state policy wherein any site—no matter how infrastructurally sound—could be labeled a slum through simple classificatory techniques.

In the case of restoring the Lake Dian basin, state environmental scientists and planners’ aesthetic senses shaped their techniques of delineating and reading historical records, creating novel landscapes, and displacing villagers. Their techniques of optimization and beautification flex state capacities to order nature, society, and space.56 Yet, even though an eco-developmental sublime has strong powers of signification within state circles, there are limits to its aesthetic resonance. As Wang Jie’s photovoice commentary suggests, those most affected by the state-directed conservation efforts often express alternative ways of seeing and sensing. I explore these alternative aesthetics in chapter 5 through examples of what I call a “rural-ecological sublime.” Despite limitations to eco-developmental significatory power, this chapter shows how an aesthetic regime shapes state scientists and planners’ techniques of ecological restoration and contributes to reproducing an unequal citizenry. Their techniques not only operationalize power symbolically but are also crucial to municipal state territorialization of rural spaces.

In the following chapter, I detail how ecological protection zoning and urban-rural planning processes facilitate the extension of municipal state power over rural land. The chapter also discusses political-economic dimensions of developing land demarcated for ecological protection. Constructing novel landscapes and resettlement housing are costly endeavors. Infrastructural construction, as well as ongoing conservation-oriented land management, exceed the financial and managerial capacities of municipal governments. Yet municipal governments are beholden to provincial and central state authorities to carry out ecological protection zoning and comprehensive urban-rural planning.57 How do municipal governments, with limited institutional and economic capacity, plan, construct, and manage ecological protection areas? The following chapter analyzes how opportunistic municipal government bureaucrats turn this problem into an opportunity to extend their administrative reach over rural land through new political, economic, and governmental alliances.