Global Chinese Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. US$35.00, paper; US$140.00, cloth; US$34.99, ebook. ISBN 9780231199810.
Rooted in a Marxist-Leninist origin, ecological civilization has rarely been more conspicuous and consequential in China’s domestic and foreign policy. Debuted initially in 2007 as a national goal of Hu Jintao’s administration, this concept gradually gained traction over a decade, and was incorporated into the national constitution since the 19th National Congress in 2017. In 2022, the 15th United Nations Biodiversity Conference convened in Kunming with the theme “Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth.” Therefore, China’s eco-civilization pursuit is often perceived as a distinctively non-Western solution to the universal issue of climate change, for which the Global North ought to be historically more responsible in Beijing’s eyes.
Such observation, as per Robin Visser, is too hastily made through a Sino-centric lens. In Questioning Borders: Ecoliteratures of China and Taiwan, Visser scrutinizes the taken-for-granted notion of China’s ecological civilization. Through anthropological fieldwork and interviews with ethnic Han and non-Han writers from 2007 to 2019, she closely examines the environmental consciousness and ontologies captured in the ecoliteratures in Southwest China, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan. The discovery is quite counterintuitive. While Chinese exceptionalism in ecological civilization is indeed anti-imperialist against Western universalism, these “nation-state discourses … derive from imperialist cosmologies that replicate those of other empires” (3), and manifest especially vis-à-vis the Indigenous cosmologies and nomadic/hunter-gather livelihoods. Put differently, rather than a defined dichotomy between Western universalism and non-Western exceptionalism demarcated along the territorial borders, interactions between Han/non-Han, foreigners/Indigenous, and human/nature are better characterized by relational dynamics, which are fluid, opaque, and constantly unfolding.
Visser thus opens the discussion by proposing this relational ontology to correct the prima facie homogenous Chinese identity and fixated borders dividing the centre and the peripheries. Through a genealogy of Han Chinese civilizational consciousness from the ancient Zhou dynasty (1050–221 BCE) to Maoist China in the twentieth century, she elucidates a persistent agrarian logic of the core-periphery “Hanspace” supplemented by socialist developmentalism. In contrast to this analogist agrilogistics—the logic “governing agrarian, versus nomadic or hunter-gatherer, forms of settlement, civilization, and technology” (21) in Han groups, non-Han communities uphold animist or totemist ontologies (4). “Complex entanglements” (232) among these power-seeking actors with diverse ecological thoughts thus highlight the oft-omitted “inter-imperiality” instantiated in various Sinophone and Indigenous writing on “civilization, territoriality, indignity, and empire” (4).
To put Han and non-Han eco-writers in conversation, Visser investigates five bodies of ecoliterature. Chapter 1 analyzes Beijing’s imagination of Southwest China as an exotic “wild west” with abundant resources. While Indigenous writers from Bai, Wa, and Nuosu Yi perceive this place as home with animist cosmological powers, these local rituals and thoughts also inspire their interlocuters from Beijing to gain environmental consciousness to contemplate and criticize scientific developmentalism. Chapter 2 delves into the stark contrast between Mongolian and Han writers’ understanding of the grassland. Unlike the former, who perceive grassland as a place for hybrid cosmology and multispecies, the latter hold a more utilitarian view of the resource-rich periphery nourishing the centre. Chapter 3 explores the intercultural and multilingual literature on Xinjiang, characterized by the common theme of mobility and the use of dark humour. In chapter 4, eco-writers on Tibet express Indigenous worldviews that provide an alternative to the views underlying Sino-globalization. Finally, chapter 5 redirects our attention from borders on the lands to seaborne regions. It zooms in on Taiwanese ecoliterature on the environmental consciousness of islanders, Indigenous waterways, and activism in policy making.
Besides relativizing Sino-centric/Han-centric ecological thoughts and juxtaposing Sinophone literature with often marginalized, non-ethnic Han counterparts, Visser’s unprecedented contribution extends beyond the discipline of literature studies. Students of political science like me are particularly drawn by one of the questions posed by this book: “Can we divorce literary studies from realpolitik” (4)?
I believe Visser manages to demonstrate that the answer is no, and there are at least three ways political science can benefit from continuing this interdisciplinary pursuit. The first and most intuitive way is to apply such relational ontology to supplement, if not supplant, the conventional substantialist ontology. If the seemingly self-subsistent material entities, such as territorial boundaries, are noncategorical and subject to ongoing dynamics, it is perhaps more fruitful to treat relations as the unit of analysis for explanations. Such a “relational turn” has already gained traction in the international relations (IR) literature, and encouraged scholars to examine the notion of pluriversality, re-relating, and human/non-human IR (Milja Kurki, “Relational Revolution and Relationality in IR: New Conversations,” Review of International Studies 48, no. 5, 2022).
Second, relativization and deconstruction of concepts such as civilization and empire offer a pathway for IR theoretical refinements in at least two directions. On the one hand, historicizing concepts like “tianxia” and reconstructing the conceptual genealogy can capture the cultural differences often omitted in the eurocentric IR theories, which largely rely on European historical experiences with limited applicability to the Asian context (David Kang and Alex Lin, “US Bias in the Study of Asian Security: Using Europe to Study Asia,” Journal of Global Security Studies 4, no. 3, 2018). On the other hand, by probing how actors perceive and interact with the Other with different racial and/or civilizational identities, IR scholars might be able to take race and civilization into explanations for fundamental phenomena of international politics, such as war-making (Iain Johnston, “Racism and Security Dilemma,” International Politics 61, 2024), cooperation, and great power rivalry.
The final point is to see literature as an empirical strategy. Given the popularity of the text-as-data approach and automated text analysis, Questioning Borders can serve as a novel and critical database on China’s “discourses and processes constructing non-Han identities, civilizations, and literature” (14) in line with other databases on China’s Communist Party writings, official newspapers, and diplomatic documents.
Overall, Questioning Borders offers timely and thought-provoking scholarship with academic and political significance. This book is a must-read for those interested in rising China’s trajectory, ecocriticism, border studies, and the list goes on.
Zikun Yang
University of Cambridge, Cambridge