Ecological Demolition : Dispossession and Sustainable Futures in the Chinese Countryside

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. This book reveals how China’s celebrated green transition is built on the displacement and demolition of rural communities, landscapes, and livelihoods to make way for new industry and urbanization. Drawing on eighteen months of archival and ethnographic research in Jiangsu province, Jia-Ching Chen traces how state-led planning, land clearance, and ecological construction reorganize life in the name of sustainability—shaping the experiences of resettled villagers navigating fractured kin networks as well as migrant workers hired to dismantle homes. Chen argues that ecological civilization produces not only low-carbon infrastructure but also new forms of inequality, exclusion, and dislocation. Centering the concept of “surplus ecologies,” the book offers a critique of statist environmental governance that reveals the recursive violence of green development. Bridging political ecology and urban studies, Ecological Demolition reframes debates on climate governance and environmental justice.