Urban and Industrial Environments. Cambridge, MA; London, UK: The MIT Press, 2017. xv, 229 pp. (Tables, map, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-262-53385-0.
Over the past few decades, as pollution has ravaged China’s air, water, land, and people (not to mention the non-human species also living there), scholarly attention has only infrequently focused on how residents understand and deal with pollution as a seemingly unavoidable feature of their lives. While there are excellent studies of urban environmental protests, NGO activity, environmental journalism, and legal activism, we know relatively little about how rural residents, in particular, respond to the severe industrial pollution that is widespread in parts of rural China. Anna Lora-Wainwright’s outstanding book goes a long way in addressing this gap in the literature. Her rich, nuanced, and powerful study of how villagers engage in “resigned activism” will be illuminating for anyone with an interest in the power dynamics that infuse environmental issues in communities worldwide.
Lora-Wainwright develops the concept of resigned activism to highlight how two attitudes and forms of engagement—resignation and activism—are more closely linked and interwoven than is typically assumed. The sense of powerlessness and resignation among the villagers she studied did not prevent them from taking a variety of actions to fight against, deflect, or otherwise respond to the chronic pollution they experienced on a daily basis. She found that villagers generally understood the health consequences of pollution but were forced by their circumstances to live in a space characterized by ambivalence, torn between the desire to escape the harmful effects of pollution and the necessity of just trying to make a living in a situation dominated by powerful actors who benefit from the polluting activities. In this context, instead of taking the form of collective resistance, activism most often comprises “the small steps individuals and families take to minimize the physical, psychological, and social effects of pollution” (xxix). And even though villagers sometimes do engage in protests and petitioning, they also shift their “attitudes and expectations to accommodate and normalize pollution” (xxix). Thus, “resilience in opposing pollution may coexist with resignation to it” (15). As this synopsis suggests, Lora-Wainwright’s analysis is richly textured, suggesting that rural discontent about pollution is both acute and widespread, and that this generates a fascinating array of responses that reveal much about the lives of the villagers that she studied.
The book is centered on ethnographic case studies in two villages and one town: Baocun village in Yunnan Province, Qiancun village in Hunan Province, and Guiyu town in Guangdong Province. In Baocun, the development of phosphorus mining and fertilizer production has led to horrifying levels of toxicity in the air, water, and soil, while also bringing about increasing stratification and inequalities. The chapter on Baocun illuminates the “unfolding processes of resignation” among migrants and poor locals, those who are pushed by circumstances and experiences to regard toxicity as a normal part of life. Three decades of dealing with pollution-friendly industry and government leaders left them disaffected and disillusioned, still searching for measures to reduce personal and family harm but with no sense that any larger change was possible. By contrast, the chapter on Qiancun highlights a variety of activist strategies employed by villagers concerned by the water pollution caused by lead and zinc mining. The wrinkle in this case is that many villagers were involved in small-scale mining and so targeted the larger mines run by outside interests. The result was “forms of engagement with pollution that are neither fully resigned nor fully opposed to it” (102). The third case study, on Guiyu town, explores how the electronic waste processing industry became thoroughly embedded within the local community, creating among residents varied and complex relationships with e-waste and the attendant pollution. Reliance on polluting e-waste work led many residents to devise ways of convincing themselves that the health effects were not so bad and that others were much more to blame for the pollution than they themselves were. In this case, there is no simple dichotomy between the perpetrators and victims of pollution.
The three case studies are preceded by a useful chapter on China’s “cancer villages.” Drawing on the extensive research of Chen Aijing, Lora-Wainwright develops the analytical lens through which she examines the subsequent case studies. At the core of this is the argument that “cancer villages” is “a cultural, social, economic, and political phenomenon,” as opposed to being a straightforward epidemiological designation. This realization opens the way for the rich analysis pursued in the rest of the book.
Three features of the book make it exemplary. First, it includes descriptions of, and reflections on, how the research was conducted, both throughout the book and in an appendix entitled “Methodological Strategies and Challenges.” These help to shed additional light on the lives of those she studied while revealing much about the challenges of doing ethnographic fieldwork. Lora-Wainwright’s transparency is commendable and should be practiced by other scholars. Second, the book does a masterful job of combining rich detailed descriptions with clear analytical argumentation. It not only develops the concept of resigned activism but also identifies a set of factors that influence attitudes and responses to pollution. Third, chapter 1 does an excellent job of situating the study within the literatures on social movements, environmentalism and environmental health, and China. The concluding chapter offers lessons and insights that will be of interest to scholars in these areas.
Resigned Activism is a fine work that is accessible and useful both for China specialists and for those who have relatively little understanding of the country. A final feature that should be noted is the attention throughout to the implications of the research findings for how we can work to reduce pollution and environmental injustices. The kind of nuanced understanding of “the conditions under which pollution is perpetuated” that this book provides is crucially important if we are to create a cleaner and healthier environment for all people (176).
Kenneth W. Foster
Concordia College, Moorhead, USA