Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic,bilingual literature review

Abstract

This bilingual systematic review captures 10 years (2010–2020) of debates and evidence from human geography research that foregrounds the lived experiences of Chinese citizens in accounts of environmental change. In this first bilingual review of everyday environmental geographies, we analyse 157 papers from 10 English and 10 mainland Chinese journals, using a range of thematic categorisations to capture qualitative environment–society research on China. Given the quantitative disparity between Chinese (128) and English (29) papers, we focus primarily on the Chinese literature but bring this into conversation with work in English, identifying the conceptual and theoretical foundations and empirical insights of both, and considering current debates and gaps in environmental research in, and on China. Our review contributes to calls within geography to recognise the importance of regional knowledge production, the need to move beyond Anglophone linguistic and epistemic privilege, and the need for better knowledge to be produced that represents the diverse lived experience of people in China and pushes for better outcomes. In our discussion, we identify key areas for future theoretical, thematic, methodological, and empirical inquiry in environmental geographies of China.

Introduction

China's environmental challenges are stark, with extensive scholarship covering food and waste systems (Liu and Chen 2020), climate change mitigation and adaptation (Diprose et al. 2019), domestic energy and water demand (Jia and Zhu 2020; Zheng et al. 2016) and environmental degradation and pollution (Han, Currell and Cao 2016; Mah and Wang 2019). Environmental impacts of the state's environmental interventions are unevenly distributed. Large Chinese cities are conceptualised as sinks for resource consumption (Rogers et al. 2016), while rural areas are positioned as sites for offloading capitalist crises (Schneider 2017). Mega-project infrastructural developments (e.g., South-to-North Water Transfer Project, Rogers et al. 2016) and low-carbon infrastructural investments (Castán Broto et al. 2020; Lo 2014; Tyfield, Ely and Geall 2015) to support rises in resource demands are enacted with little consideration of what or who is demanding resources and services, or the long-term effects on ‘source’ communities. Many Chinese citizens are exposed daily to the ongoing effects of various forms of pollution (Mah and Wang 2019).

Contemporary scholarship on environment–society relations in China increasingly focuses on everyday life dynamics related to sustainable consumption and production (Liu et al. 2019b; Liu, Oosterveer and Spaargaren 2016), water demand (Liu, Browne and Iossifova 2022; Zhen, Rogers and Barnett 2019), energy and household retrofitting (de Feijter and van Vliet 2021), food (Zhang 2016), waste (Liu and Chen 2020) and socio-spatial inequalities (Browne, Petrova and Brockett 2017; Liu et al. 2019a; Robinson et al. 2018). Many scholars link lived experiences of socio-environmental change with political contestation and resistance (Iossifova 2015a; Larrington-Spencer, Browne and Petrova 2021; Liu and Lo 2022; Mah and Wang 2019) and intergenerational justice and care (Diprose et al. 2019).

The Chinese state's dominant environmental policies and rhetoric of infrastructural, economic, and technological imaginaries/interventions have been widely criticised for obscuring the diverse, place-based, everyday realities of resource use and disposal (Dombroski 2015; Iossifova 2015a, 2015b; Caprotti and Gong 2017). These realities are largely muted by prevailing quantitative, spatial or modelling approaches in environmental geography in China (Cheng and Liu 2022; Fan 2022). Asking questions about how Chinese citizens actively achieve environmental security for themselves, their families, and the community in everyday life can offer more profound insights into environmental governance in China. More in-depth, critical and qualitative research on lived experiences of environmental change in China is thus required. This will challenge dominant narratives that it is strong state control, techno-managerial and market-based mechanisms that should define environment–society relations in China.

This is the first bilingual systematic literature review that explores environmental geographical scholarship on the lived experiences of environmental change in China, published in leading English and mainland Chinese journals between 2010 and 2020. We characterise these literatures by identifying their themes, conceptual and theoretical foundations, and methodological approaches. Due to the disparity in the number of Chinese and English language studies in our collection (128 v 29), we focus largely on the Chinese literature, with the English literature serving as a counterpoint to consider current debates and gaps in environmental research on and in China.

Our aim is to initiate a bilingual dialogue within environmental geography during a challenging period for Chinese–Anglophone scientific collaboration (cf. Shih 2022; Welch 2021). We first explore the politics of knowledge production in Geography, highlighting that the geographies of China are frequently positioned on the periphery of an Anglophone mainstream. Following this, we outline our review methods before presenting the results. We conclude with some reflections on the chasms and intersections between Anglophone and Chinese scholarship, the political conditions in which geographical knowledge about everyday life and the environment in China is produced, and potential avenues for future research. Overall, this article contributes to the broader field of environmental geographies by emphasising regional knowledge production that transcends Anglophone linguistic and epistemic privilege, which enables the creation of more comprehensive knowledge that accurately represents the diverse lived experience of people in China and advocates for improved outcomes.

Worlding Chinese geographies

As Jazeel (2016: 657) argues, the projected universalism of theory both naturalises a sense that the West is the primary producer of theory and culture, and enlists the rest of the world as an empirical conscript to this theoretical modernity. Müller (2021) further identifies how Anglophone linguistic privilege within geographical scholarship and publishing shapes and disciplines epistemic traditions. There has been a range of interventions into the question of how, where, and by whom geographies of China are produced, including reviews of English (cf. An et al. 2016; Lin 2002) or Chinese literatures (cf. Zhu, Guo and Wu 2017). These do not focus on environmental geography, nor are there any systematic bilingual reviews of any particular human geographical topic. Nonetheless, this article is an extension of an existing dialogue across Chinese and English literatures developed in several key papers.

In her 2010 review of cultural geographies of China, Kong (2010) asked if the rise of China would impact the ways geography is practised and how key geographical concepts and theories may be reframed. In the same issue, writing on economic geography, Webber (2010: 594) suggested that the rise of China had the potential to disabuse the sub-discipline of many of its claims to universalism, arguing that ‘when a quarter of the world's economic geography is written in China, then the rest of the world is going to have to learn to read and understand its cultural underpinnings’. These propositions are ambitious, and over a decade later, warrant re-assessment.

The discipline is a long way from the conclusions of Leeming's (1980: 218) earlier overview of the Western study of Chinese geographies, which he defined as being in a ‘low-key, low-profile, and generally low-productivity state’. In the intervening years, English language geographies of China have expanded, but as others have argued, they remain marginal to the production of geographical knowledge both within and outside China (Bao and Ma 2010). Lin's (2002) review of Anglo–American disciplinary journals shows an increase in China-focused journal articles in the top 10 journals from just 0.17% of all papers in 1971–1980 to 1.58% in 1991–2000. Kong and Qian (2019: 49), reflecting on ‘Geography’ and ‘Urban Studies’ categories in the SSCI (ISI Social Science Citation Index) from 1990 to 2010, argued that ‘In terms of both productivity and impact, the discipline [urban studies, geography] is largely shaped by Anglophone countries, a small cohort of Anglophone institutions, and an elite of high-impact, in most cases Anglo-American, authors … [but] Anglo-American dominance does not necessarily mean that other research interests and orientations have been suppressed and stifled’.

A recent review of Chinese political geography identifies a one-way conversation between English language and Chinese scholarship (Liu, Wang and An 2020). The authors argue that political geography produced in China ‘is still regarded as an invisible and unexplored area for scholars outside China’ (ibid: 969). As Zhu, Guo and Wu (2017) note, it is still common practice for Chinese human geography papers to begin with a review of Western literature, which is then ‘applied’ to particular case studies in China. An et al. (2016) similarly reflect on the academic hegemony of Global North scholarship on China.

It seems a de-stabilisation of disciplinary norms, a re-evaluation of claims to universalism, and true dialogue between Chinese and English language geographies of China are yet to materialise in the ways hoped for over a decade ago by Kong (2010) and Webber (2010). That said, the hegemonic nature of Anglo–American and European geographical knowledge production, and the lasting characterisation of places like China as case studies or area studies that are too ‘placed’ to be relevant to broader disciplinary debates, is being challenged.

There is much more work to be done to develop new academic literacies and to commit to geographical knowledge production from the periphery (Jazeel 2017). In our discussion, we consider what such a commitment might look like for the environmental geographies of China. Our immediate aim is to consider a corpus of work conducted within China and published in Chinese academic journals, analysing its key concerns and relations to a similar corpus of research published in English.

Methods

This article asks: how is qualitative environmental geographical research on the lived experience of socio-environmental change represented and reflected within key Anglophone and mainland Chinese human geography journals? What are some of the conceptual bases of these studies and where are the spaces of interaction and distance? Following the development of a review strategy (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA), Moher et al. 2010; Liberati et al. 2009), the first two authors led a systematic review to identify and screen relevant articles from mainland ¹ Chinese- and English language geography journals that publish qualitative and mixed-method papers within our study scope.

Supplementary Table 1 shows the journals selected for systematic screening (10 Chinese, 10 English). The Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI, 2019–2020) was used to select the Chinese journals (eight from CSSCI categories of ‘human/economic geography’ and two from ‘natural resources and environment’). The SCImago Journal & Country Rank (SIR) – a publicly available portal developed from the Scopus database – was used to develop an equivalent search strategy in English. With the browsing options ‘Social Science’ (subject area), ‘Geography, Planning and Development’ (subject categories), and ‘all regions, countries and journals’ (target locality and types), we evaluated the aims of the first 10 English journals retrieved, retaining four top journals, with six other journals selected from the longer SIR list as we knew from our previous reading that they published work closely aligned with the scope of the review.

We acknowledge that our selection of journals may overlook important environmental geography debates in other high-quality (though not ‘top-ranked’), interdisciplinary Anglophone and Chinese journals, and risks reproducing some of myopia caused by the existing hierarchy of knowledge production. There are other journals, often interdisciplinary in nature or representing the broadest possible allied social science scholarship, that may also provide fruitful results in future reviews. What we present here is necessarily a first step in building better bilingual dialogue in Chinese environmental geography by systematically foregrounding the work of a group of scholars doing qualitative research in environmental geography. We draw on papers beyond the systematic review to inform our discussion of worlding Chinese environmental geographies and hope that other scholars will expand the scope of the review and take it in new directions.

Screening was conducted in Chinese (China National Knowledge Infrastructure, CNKI) and English (Scopus) databases following the PRISMA guidelines. Using ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ Boolean logic, we searched for papers published between 2010 and 2020 ² with the following terms in their title, abstract, and keywords list among the selected journals: China, environment, everyday, sustainability, society, energy, consumption, water, food, heating, pollution, climate change, adaptation, environmental planning, qualitative/interview ³ (see Supplementary Table 2 for the final list including translated terms). The combination of search terms was calibrated according to a preliminary review of the titles/keywords/abstracts of relevant articles across the Chinese and English literatures.

Both Chinese and English searches consisted of two rounds of screening and selection. The first identification round (once duplicates were excluded) identified 4448 articles from 10 Chinese journals and 205 from 10 English journals. The titles, keywords and abstracts were screened according to inclusion/exclusion criteria based on the aims and scope of the review. The final criteria for inclusion were: (1) topics directly related to people's lived experiences of the environment; (2) research scales concentrated on individual, household, village or community; and (3) using qualitative/interview/ethnographic methods (or involved in mixed methods) or doing conceptualisation. We excluded: (1) non-empirical and non-theoretical papers (e.g., regional analysis without methodological descriptions, editorials, review or methodological papers, and synopsis); (2) empirical studies that did not focus on mainland China; and (3) empirical papers indicating qualitative methods in the abstract but that a. did not conduct a qualitative analysis or b. had no clear methodological description.

For the relevant cases, we recorded title, abstract, keywords, authors and affiliations, year of publication, theoretical/conceptual framework, methods, and location. 128 Chinese papers (87 empirical, 41 conceptual) and 29 English papers (26 empirical, 3 conceptual) were selected for the final analysis. A summary of the relevant papers, search terms, characterisations is presented in Supplementary Table 3 and Figure 1. Notably, 95% of the selected Chinese literature was written by only Chinese scholar(s) working within China, whereas such type of authorship accounts for just 7% of the English literature. Chinese scholars based in Chinese institutions often cooperate with Anglophone scholars (14%) or overseas Chinese scholars (3%) or both (7%) to publish in the English language literature. By contrast, Anglophone scholars make up the majority of authorship for the selected English papers. These disparities in authorship and collaboration suggest a widespread neglect of regional knowledge production within environmental geographical scholarship.

Characterising Chinese and English everyday environmental geographies of China

We analyse key research themes from the Chinese and English papers and discuss the main conceptualisations and theoretical frameworks that underpin contemporary Chinese everyday environmental geography research. Due to the quantitative disparity between Chinese and English papers, our focus is primarily (but not solely) on detailing the Chinese literature in order to bring it into wider disciplinary dialogues.

Key research themes

Current conceptualisations of environmental geography in the Chinese language literature indicate that most scholarship has been conventionally rooted in the natural sciences, but draws methods and approaches from geography, psychology, life sciences, physics, and economics. Despite exploring environment–society relations, none of the papers we surveyed are explicitly labelled as or clearly conceptualise ‘environmental geography’. The final search results displayed a diversity of research themes relevant to many sub-disciplines in human geography, including tourism geography, urban geography, rural geography, economic geography, and cultural geography.

In the English-speaking context, environmental geography centres on ‘the interactions and relations of the biogeophysical environment with human societies’ by focusing on ‘environmental sustainability and well-being involving a wide range of human interactions that include political economy, social power, cultural identities, and others’ (Zimmerer and McSweeney 2020: 183). The breadth of the themes is partly due to the diverse ways ‘environment’ (huanjing) is conceptualised across both literatures, spanning the natural environment (ziran huanjing), material environment (wuzhi huanjing), community/neighbourhood environment (shequ huanjing), built environment (jiancheng/jianzhu huanjing), human settlement environment (renju huanjing), and living/residential environment (juzhu huanjing). Different connotations of ‘environment’ are sometimes concurrently considered in one paper. After a close reading of the selected papers, six key themes emerged. We classified papers according to their domain theme: rural transformation, urban planning and development, environmental policy and resource management, climate change and adaptation, food studies, and tourism studies.

Rural transformation

A number of Chinese studies explore the transformation of rural societies impacted by urbanisation, tourism development, landscape reformulation, ecological conservation and resettlement, and post-disaster reconstruction. To address the socio-environmental problems brought about by the decline of rural society (see Zheng and Liu 2018) and echo political calls for rural transformation and development, Chinese language studies are committed to understanding the diverse trajectories of and developing pathways for rural restructuring, rural revitalisation, and rural sustainability.

Empirically, Chinese papers focus on the lived experiences of resource use and environmental protection (Li et al. 2013; S. Liu et al. 2011), the evolution of dwellings and landscapes (Cai et al. 2018; Fang et al. 2012; Li et al. 2019; Wei 2019), and changing agricultural systems (Han, Cui and Min 2012). Both Chinese (Geng et al. 2020) and English (Zheng et al. 2014) papers consider how farmers, officials, and experts work together to promote ecological technology innovation. Tian et al. (2015, in English) specifically investigate the interaction between political, geographical, and individual factors in shaping land-use decisions of rural households.

Among Chinese papers, the modernisation of everyday life has been understood through analysing the evolution of vernacular dwellings and communal spaces (Fang et al. 2012; Li et al. 2019; Zhao and Feng 2016). S. Li (2016) argues that the spatial transformation of rural communities does not necessarily lead to farmers’ transformation into urbanites, because their everyday life has a ‘path dependence’ that appreciates lands and collective properties. The design and reconstruction of rural living spaces should acknowledge the collective memories of everyday life (Qian et al. 2018) and the adaptivity and resilience of rural communities embedded in everyday life (Wei 2019). Despite the growing concerns over environmental problems caused by changing lifestyles (Cai et al. 2018; Li et al. 2013; Zheng and Liu 2018), relevant Chinese articles are often descriptive and focus on the interventions in, rather than underlying socio-cultural drivers of, environmental pollution and how it is experienced.

Chinese scholars also seek to develop conceptual frameworks to capture the mechanism and dynamics of socio-spatial transformations in rural areas (e.g., landscape reformulation, Lin and Cai 2012; rural production space system, Wang and Li 2017; rural settlements restructuring, Tu and Long 2020). In response to the gaps between the changing ways villagers produce and live in processes of rural transformation, these conceptual efforts underline the connections and co-evolution between rural production spaces, living spaces, and ecological spaces.

Urban planning and development

A quarter of the surveyed literature focused on urban planning and development. Within the empirical Chinese scholarship, the lived experiences of changing urban built environments (inner-city redevelopment, housing relocation, urban renewal and displacement, and suburbanisation) have led to extensive debates on liveability and health (Gu and Chai 2012; Li and Chai 2013; Xia et al. 2020), urban memory, nostalgia and place identity (Li, Yang and Huang 2015; Liu, Zhu and Yuan 2012; Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019), rural–urban migration (Yin, Qian and Zhu 2016; 2019), and social inclusion and justice (X. Liu, Luo and Xu 2014; Yao et al. 2018). These studies endeavour to understand the entanglement of material transformation and the reproduction of cultures and social relations through analysing daily practices. The co-constitutive relations between everyday practices and urban nature are also discussed (Wang, Zhao and Zhu 2019).

Chinese literatures pay attention to people's everyday life in local, underserved or vulnerable neighbourhoods, such as urban villages (Tao, Cheng and Fu 2015), historic neighbourhoods (X. Liu, Luo and Xu 2014; Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019), local food markets (B. Liu 2020), danwei (work unit) communities (Li and Chai 2013). By analysing marginalised groups’ daily practices, Ye and Zhang (2015) account for the production mechanism of ‘urban informal spaces’ (i.e., informal settlements, slums, shanty towns and the symbolic spaces attached). Other papers explain how local communities have been negatively impacted by urban renewal projects, revealing the vulnerability of locals in negotiating with the government and developers (Yao et al. 2018). The heterogeneous spaces and practices of living, socialising, celebrating and consuming in Chinese cities point to the multiplicity and complexity of human–space interactions, calling for more inclusive, humanistic, and sustainable approaches to urban development, instead of demolition and displacement.

The English language literature has a much stronger focus on the empirical analysis of everyday practices of urban environmental transition and inequalities, drawing on concepts such as borderland urbanism (Iossifova 2015b), gated communities and enclave urbanism (Breitung 2012; Liao, Breitung and Wehrhahn 2018), revanchist (sensory) urbanism (Pow 2017), and social network transition (Hazelzet and Wissink 2012; Yu and Rosenberg 2020). Lin and Gaubatz (2017) examine migrants’ everyday use of urban space in Wenzhou; Amin and Richaud (2020) focus on everyday sensibilities and affective tensions in the mental health of migrants in the urban environment in Shanghai; and Pow (2017) considers urban exclusion from the perspective of neighbourhood sensory and metabolic inequalities.

English studies of social difference include Grant (2018) investigating how Tibetans in Xining assert their own meanings and rhythms, and satisfy their own place-making desires, while navigating urban regulations and sensibilities. Liu and Yuan (2019) explore the securitisation-driven redevelopment of Kashgar, Xinjiang, highlighting ethnic tensions between Han and Uyghur groups. Compared with Chinese studies that examine the lived experiences, and living spaces, of the elderly (Gu and Chai 2012; Li and Chai 2013), only Yu and Rosenberg (2020) discuss the growing housing inequalities and potential impacts on the older generation.

Environmental policy and resource management

An emerging collection of studies both in English and Chinese discusses the uneven impacts of environmental intervention programmes ⁴ promoted by the Chinese government over the last two decades in rural places by foregrounding residents’ everyday lives and livelihoods (Fan et al. 2014; Wang et al. 2018) and local/traditional ecological knowledge (Tang and Gavin 2015; Zhou, Su and Chen 2019). Sun, Chen and Huang (2020) identify three principles of negotiating conflicts of interest in rural environmental interventions: ecological rationality (see also Zheng et al. 2014), legality, and reasonableness in relation to the logics of everyday life and local cultures. Their findings resonate with Gomersall's (2020) discussion of how villagers contest the intersubjective norms that define the governor-governed relations during resettlement.

Despite the common interest on understanding the remaking of human–nature relations from the bottom-up, we find that the English literature offers deeper insights into the everyday politics of national environmental and resource projects. Mobilising assemblage thinking, Webber and Han (2017) conceptualise China's water management institutions as a ‘water machine’, involving various actors (government departments, universities, corporations, international institutions) and the cooperative activities between them. Clarke-Sather (2017) engages with Foucault to examine political power over water governance through analysing centralised piped water and decentralised state-led rainwater harvesting. Yu et al. (2016) evaluate two local irrigation institutions – collective management and private contracting system, concluding that different groups of water users and their socio-political backgrounds have shaped, constrained, and redirected local irrigation institutions. Other studies probe how a higher-level eco-development planning process interacts with the (re-)emergence of traditional ecological knowledge and resource management institutions (Tang and Gavin 2015; Xie et al. 2019).

Particularly, the Chinese studies tend not to address lived experiences, perceptions and adaptability of practices related to air pollution (or, indeed, any type of pollution or toxicity). These topics have received increasing attention in the Anglophone literature, for example, Li and Tilt’s (2019) research on public engagement with smog in urban China; Aunan et al. (2019) exploring hidden hazards of household air pollution in rural areas; and Mah and Wang's (2019) examination of how people live and work with petrochemical pollution in Nanjing.

Climate change and adaptation

Climate change and adaptation feature strongly in both literatures, linking with mobilities including climate migration (Cao and Chen 2012) and environmental resettlement (Qi et al. 2013; Rogers and Xue 2015; Zheng 2013). Zheng (2013) clarifies distinctive connotations of climate migration (caused by short- or long-term climate change), eco-resettlement (for the purpose of ecological protection) and environmental migration (encompassing the first two). In China, environmental resettlement projects in ecologically marginal regions usually serve multiple national/regional goals, including environmental protection, socio-economic development, and poverty alleviation (J. Li 2016; Rogers and Xue 2015; Zheng 2013).

Amongst these studies, the changing livelihood strategies and everyday practices of rural households involved in resettlement projects are discussed with reference to the vulnerability and resilience of local communities, shedding light on the broader policy framing of eco-compensation, poverty alleviation, migration, and climate change. According to the English papers, resettlement in China, despite being considered as a climate change adaptation measure by authorities, is positioned as an uneven distribution of mobility endowments and entitlement across populations (Tebboth, Conway and Adger 2019), inadvertently amplifying (rather than alleviating) household vulnerability to climate change in practice (Rogers and Xue 2015). The (unexpected) impacts of climate change on rural societies also raise questions about rural revitalisation (Yang, Yang and Gao 2019) and knowledge production in livelihood activities (Klein et al. 2014).

Conceptually, there are a number of contributions from the Chinese literature that outline China's contributions to global climate change governance debates (Cao and Chen 2012; Pan 2012; Song et al. 2019; Wu et al. 2014). Given the complexity of China's relations with other countries, these studies commonly call for international dialogue and cooperation in climate legislation, policy-making and research. However, climate justice has been rarely mentioned, with the exception of Cao and Chen (2012), who note the vulnerability of marginalised groups in climate change.

Food studies

A loose theme forms around food production (Horlings and Marsden 2011), food consumption (Wang et al. 2018), food security (Zhang 2011) and food system (Guo, Wang and Ma 2019; Zeng and Wang 2019). The overarching theoretical and practical commitments of these studies is to construct integrated frameworks of sustainable food production and consumption that bring relief to wider socio-environmental and resource stresses in China and beyond. Based on a review of Western food geography, Zeng and Wang (2019) argue for a relational paradigm to explore sustainable food systems in China. In questioning ecological modernisation, Horlings and Marsden (2011) propose a new type of regionally embedded agri-food eco-economy that involves the interweaving of market organisations, active farmers and consumers’ participation. Only one empirical paper (in English) taps into urban everyday food practices, examining how intergenerational relations are performed in domestic spaces and in relation to wider family geographies (C. Liu 2017).

Tourism studies

Tourism studies comprise a large share of Chinese environmental geography research. In contrast, none of the reviewed English language literature focus on socio-environmental impacts of the tourism industry (though we are aware of such research in other journals).

The reviewed Chinese literature attends to a range of socio-environmental shifts related to tourism, including local adaptation and livelihood change (Sun, Pang and Wang 2020; Yu, Yang and Yang 2013), spatial and environmental justice (Sun, Chen and Huang 2020; Zhuang, Du and Ye 2020), power and disempowerment (Han et al. 2013; Hu and Bao 2016), spatial production and identity construction (Guo and Huang 2020; Guo and Wang 2015) and rural gentrification (Tan and Xu 2018). The intersection of tourism and everyday life is reflected by papers that analyse: how everyday practices of travellers influence the economy, landscape and governance of rural communities (Tan and Xu 2018); how everyday spaces and practices of local residents respond to/interact with tourism industries (Guo and Huang 2020; Guo and Wang 2015; Hu and Bao 2016; Sun, Pang and Wang 2020; Yu, Yang and Yang 2013); and how daily activities are endowed with symbolic meanings on the journey (Xie and Fan 2017).

Key conceptualisations

The theoretical foundations of the Chinese papers we reviewed link to many sub-disciplines of human geography: material geography (Wang, Zhao and Zhu 2019), critical geography (Luo and Zhang 2017; Yin, Qian and Zhu 2016; 2019), humanistic geography (Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019), behavioural geography (Wang and Wang 2010; Zhang and Chai 2013), rural geography (Tu and Long 2020; Wang and Li 2017; Zhang and Feng 2016), food geography (Zeng and Wang 2019), and new cultural geography (Liu, Zhu and Yuan 2012; Qian and Zhu 2015). A growing body of literature engages with theories from broader social sciences, including economics, ecology, and environmental sciences (Kahn 2011; Xia et al. 2020), sociology and urban morphology (Tao, Cheng and Fu 2015; Zhang, Wang and Li 2012; Zhang and Chai 2013), environmental psychology (Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019), and environmental anthropology (Han, Cui and Min 2012). Acknowledging the diversity of conceptualisations, here we identify three prominent theoretical orientations in current Chinese environmental geographies.

Human–earth systems

Human–earth systems (rendi xitong), or human–earth areal system (rendi guanxi diyu xitong) is one dominant theoretical focus of Chinese geography research. Established by Wu Chuanjun, a notable Chinese geographer, since the 1980s human–earth systems, has been used extensively to understand the complex and dynamic interactions between the natural environment (inorganic and organic natural elements) and human activities (and associated social, political, economic, cultural and technological structures) (Lu and Guo 1998; Wu 1991).

Chinese geographical studies ‘take the human-earth systems as the research subject, consider the people and the geographical environment in a specific area, and research on the influence of the geographical environment on people and the adaptation, utilisation, and transformation to the geographical environment’ (Wang, Li and Li 2017: 2009). A wide range of developmental problems, such as environmental pollution, groundwater over-exploitation, land degradation, food security, and poverty, are considered a sign of unhealthy or tense human–earth/land relationships (Wang and Liu 2001). Thus, solving sustainable development problems has become the core focus of research on the integration of human–earth systems (Fan 2022).

Although human–earth systems studies concern the mutual constitution of ecology, production and life (‘sansheng’), research under this banner is generally conceptual and quantitative (Liu et al. 2020; Shi, Song and Cheng 2019). This is due to its sweeping nature (regarding the perception of human–earth relationships, human–earth systems theory, and the co-ordination of human–earth systems, Y. Liu 2020), the common research methods used (categorising, zoning, modelling, and evaluating) and the underlying motivation to contribute to regional planning and management (Lu and Guo 1998). Human–earth systems thinking and its emphasis on the systematic, dynamic, and processual features of environment–society relations are so deeply embedded in approaches to human–environment relations that they permeate to the analysis of the everyday – people's engagements with their land and environment are often framed as part of this broader calculation (Liu et al. 2019).

Thinking space and place

The second notable theoretical orientation of Chinese environmental geographies is space and place. In response to rapid rural transformation and urban renewal, Chinese researchers frequently mobilise space- and place-based theoretical frameworks developed outside of China to grasp the relationships between human activities and environmental changes in various spaces of everyday life (e.g., home, village, market, community). It is probably only the suburbanisation of living spaces, a conceptual framework proposed by Zhang and Chai (2013), that speaks back to the broader Anglophone theoretical debates of suburbanisation by arguing for qualitative, critical and systematic examinations of everyday life.

Space-related theories (e.g., Lefebvre's theory of the production of space, Harvey's discussion of spatial inequality, urban rights and the spatial fix from the perspective of new Marxist geography, spatial justice, and spatial resilience theory) are used to tease out the power relations inscribed in spatial changes. Despite obvious political sensitivities, English and Chinese scholarship commonly calls for addressing environmental justice issues through analysing spaces and practices of everyday life (Mah and Wang 2019; X. Liu, Luo and Xu 2014; Sun, Chen and Huang 2020; Wang and Wang 2010; Yao et al. 2018; Zhang, Wang and Li 2012). Moreover, place-related concepts, including a sense of place, placeness, place attachment/dependence and place identity, are drawn on to examine the tangible and intangible bonds between people and their everyday life spaces (e.g., local markets, B. Liu 2020; Liu, Zhu and Yuan 2012; bridges, Li, Yang and Huang 2015; historic neighbourhoods, Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019).

The home is a key site where everyday practices are examined with reference to people–place relations. Chinese scholars explore the interiority of the home in terms of materiality and symbolism. Zhang et al. (2018) on jia zhi wupin, qinggan yu yiyi (materials, emotions and meanings of home) notes: ‘home is not just the centre of material supply that is full of living resources, carrying the milepost of life experiences, but even more the place where the emotional and social significance is rooted, providing material and spiritual energy for humans wrapped up in love and dignity’.

The focus on home spans different research themes, from rural transformation (Zhang and Feng 2016; Zhang et al. 2018), urban planning and development (Luo and Zhang 2017; Yin, Qian and Zhu 2016, 2019), and tourism and everyday life (Guo and Huang 2020). Yin, Qian and Zhu (2016) use representational and non-representational theories to examine how different groups of residents living in Kangbashi New Town, a place once portrayed as a ‘ghost city’, negotiate the meanings of home through everyday practices beyond social representation and authorised discourses. By doing so, the authors criticise the Western media for dissolving, rather than constructing, Chinese homes (ibid). With a focus on the reorganisation of physical space, cultural reimagination and identity construction, Guo and Huang (2020) study how tourism development, driven by national poverty elimination policies, local government power and consumption forces, impact home in Zhudi village, Yunnan Province. The capitalisation of the minority home reproduces and reshapes the social relations, cultural meanings, and human–land relationship (ibid).

English language studies, despite also considering the construction and transformation of urban spaces, leverage different theories focused more on the flexible and uneven nature of urban change. Iossifova's (2015b: 19) concept of borderland urbanism prioritises lived experiences of urban change in Shanghai, showing how socio-material spaces are claimed, appropriated, and continuously negotiated. Articulating borders as processes rather than fixed lines, Liao, Breitung and Wehrhahn (2018) explore the bordering and re-bordering of suburbanising Guangzhou, focusing on liminal spaces between villages and commodity housing. Hazelzet and Wissink (2012) argue that community and neighbourhood are not necessarily connected, evidencing how social networks persist beyond the neighbourhood. Enclave urbanism has sparked a lively academic discourse on the Chinese urban form (Iossifova 2015b; also reflected by Ye and Zhang (2015) in Chinese). This literature focuses on the physical and social dynamics of urban forms that create exclusions and inclusions (Breitung 2012; Grant 2018).

Understandings of sustainability

Competing understandings of sustainability abound. Human–earth systems informs the conceptualisation of, and policy-making for, sustainability (Y. Liu et al. 2020; Song et al. 2019), as a coordinated human–earth relationship is considered the basis of sustainable development (Liu, Zhang and Feng 2017). He et al. (2020) argue that rural sustainability science is an applied discipline that studies rural human–earth relations and particularly accounts for the interactions between rural production, rural environment, and farmers’ lives. Chen et al. (2019) highlight the sustainable nature of new-type urbanisation that accounts for human rights in everyday life. In tourism studies, Ma, Song and Zhang (2012) compare traditional tourism, low-carbon tourism, and LOHAS (lifestyles of health and sustainability) tourism, arguing that the latter is more acceptable to consumers and can promote alternative travel and consumption patterns. In food studies, Zeng and Wang (2019) leverage relational geographies to understand sustainable food system.

Some conceptual studies challenge Western theory-making by exploring theoretical and methodological innovations based on empirical evidence in China. This is marked by attempts to mobilise traditional Chinese philosophies about the harmonious relationships between humans and nature (tianren heyi or tiandi renhe) in sustainability theory (Shi, Song and Cheng 2019; Zuo, Ma and Tao 2011). In public discourses, traditional eco-philosophical heritage has been invoked to construct a sense of cultural and national continuity along with the development of environmental policies (e.g., the government framework of ecological civilisation, Hansen, Li and Svarverud 2018).

In the English literature, sustainability is approached differently. There is a strong tradition of political ecology research on China (see Yeh 2009) that explores the uneven socio-environmental power relations of the Chinese state's sustainable development interventions. Building on this tradition, Xie et al. (2019) consider eco-development practices in China, paying attention to grassroots voices on the local environment. In water governance and hydropolitics, there is a strong critical theory thread within many papers that builds on, and critiques, more conventional notions of fragmented authoritarianism. This extends to assemblage thinking (Webber and Han 2017), visceral urban politics (Pow 2017), and governmentality and apparatuses of security (Clarke-Sather 2017; Gomersall 2020). In contrast, in climate-related research social capital remains the dominant frame (Yu et al. 2016).

Discussion

Our systematic review of Chinese and English environmental geography journals builds on an array of literature within geography highlighting the need to document inequalities in knowledge production (Müller 2021; Jazeel 2017, 2016; Kong and Qian 2019; Webber et al. 2021). By introducing mainland Chinese scholarship and some of its conceptual underpinnings to the broader geographical community, we seek to shift the norms of knowledge production within a difficult moment for Sino–Anglophone scientific collaboration (Shih 2022; Welch 2021). As outlined below, conceptual, empirical, and methodological divergences and crossovers offer a way forward for worlding Chinese everyday environmental geography. We outline our thoughts on new research directions and disciplinary work (in terms of what can/should be studied and how) and through this make an attempt to grapple with a geopolitical context that is reshaping all environmental geographical research in, and on, China.

Social and environmental justice is a common concern. It is not always expressed in precisely the same terms and may be somewhat muted in Chinese papers, but it is there nonetheless. We see much potential here in terms of the ‘what’ of research around socio-environmental justice, including (1) climate justice, particularly with respect to displacement; (2) lived experiences of pollution; (3) the politics of rural spaces and continued marginalisation of farmers; (4) implications of an ageing society including for inequality and justice in the city; and (5) thinking through food security in everyday life. Engaging in these shared interests and questions is an opportunity for Chinese and non-Chinese scholars to reflect and perhaps reconcile different understandings and vocabularies of ‘sustainability’.

There are other topics where the ‘what’ of research will require more work and be more difficult to sustain. The entanglement of everyday sensory/embodied experiences and social exclusion in urban environmental change is discussed by both the Chinese (Wang, Aoki and Xu 2019; Ye and Zhang 2015) and English literature (Pow 2017) and should be taken forward. Research on how ethnic minority communities respond to modernising, urbanising state projects (Grant 2018; Sun, Pang and Wang 2020) is likely more difficult. For obvious reasons, the Chinese literature tends to emphasise cultural diversity and positive interactions between ethnic minority groups and the majority Han, rather than focusing on tensions and social differences as found in English literature (see Liu and Yuan 2019). Given powerful Party-state discourses of national reunification, ethnic unity, and obedience to the Party's discipline, we recognise that mainland Chinese scholars are constrained in the ways that they can do research on, and talk about, power and politics (see also Gare 2012).

Another priority for greater dialogue arises from our observation that the critical approaches to power evident in Anglophone studies have little purchase in the Chinese literature. In English, these are extensively mobilised to unpack how everyday practices (of living, working and socialising) are imbricated in metabolic inequalities (Pow 2017), housing inequalities (Yu and Rosenberg 2020), urban exclusion and segregation (Lin and Gaubatz 2017) and socio-environmental justice (Mah and Wang 2019). The political dimensions of environmental change are central to the English language scholarship. In contrast, Chinese language qualitative studies of everyday life and environmental justice can be largely descriptive. Within the emerging Chinese scholarship that attends to the politics and power relations of socio-environmental governance (Sun, Chen and Huang 2020; Zhuang, Du and Ye 2020), the inadequate participation of local communities in state-led planning and development projects is emphasised. The unevenly distributed access to well-being and socio-economic benefits across different stakeholders thus provides a potential site where critical approaches developed in the Anglophone academia (e.g., political ecology, governmentality) could be mobilised, reconsidered and even contested by Chinese geographers.

We see the home, spaces of everyday life, domestic activities of food, energy and water consumption, and lived experience of environmental changes as key sites for cross-fertilisation, collaboration, and engagement. The Chinese literature has flexible connotations of ‘home’ that encompass not only individual's sharing domestic space, but that link ‘home’ to community, society and the nation (home-country, jiaguo, Guo and Huang 2020; Yin, Qian and Zhu 2016). This resonates strongly with broader literatures on feminist geographies of home (Blunt and Varley 2004) which conceptualise ‘home’ as a nexus through which wider social, political, and ecological relations flows (cf. Day Biehler and Simon 2011; Gormon-Murray and Lane 2011), and as a starting point for analysing power and socio-spatial inequalities. A focus on everyday life, lived experiences and diverse notions of ‘home’ can offer a deep understanding of the complexities and politics of China's socio-environmental transformations.

In our review, only three Chinese language papers consider gender (Guo and Huang 2020; Qin 2010; Sun, Pang and Wang 2020), when it is strongly recognised that environmental interventions, urban and rural planning, climate impacts, and environmental pollution are all highly gendered processes. Feminist research in China has been appreciated by specific CSSCI indexed journals such as Collection of Women's Study (Funü yanjiu luncong), though as this review reveals such approaches are not often mobilised within environmental geography research. Research that builds upon Chinese and Anglophone traditions in dialogue and that positions itself at the intersections of family/gender studies, and feminist environmental, urban, and everyday geographies, will enable a deeper exploration of social differentiation of environmental change in China.

One of the key observations arising from this review is that a central organising concept of the Chinese literature – human–earth systems – has received little to no attention in the English literature we reviewed, even for English papers co-authored by Chinese-speaking scholars. One recent exception is Fan (2022), who outlines its conceptual origins and practical applications, but the author positions it as an apolitical, scientific epistemology, rather than a way of seeing nature and people that can have (and has had) profoundly uneven and political effects for communities. Human–earth systems reflect distinctive ontological and epistemological traditions in Chinese geography and the enrolment of environmental geography in state development thinking and interventions.

On the other hand, while Western theory is extensively used in the Chinese literature, it often translates poorly. For instance, Lefebvre's work on the production of space is widely cited, but its specific politics are blurred, omitted or perhaps misunderstood. Far greater dialogue is needed on how geographic theory travels between and within China and the rest of the world, how it is translated and gets reinvented, how scholars address the political work that theory can do, and the empirical questions that arise when we mobilise different kinds of theory.

Any discussion of worlding Chinese everyday environmental geography needs to grapple with the strong policy orientation of Chinese academic research. Chinese geography is oriented towards providing conceptual tools and empirical findings to serve major development agendas advanced by the Chinese state at different levels (see Cheng and Liu 2022; Fan 2022; Liu, Browne and Iossifova 2022; Qian and Zhang 2022). Chinese literatures that investigate social responses to environmental policies (e.g., plastic bag use, Chang et al. 2011; ecological resettlement, Qi et al. 2013) demonstrate the applied nature of much Chinese environmental geography knowledge production. Many concepts used by Chinese scholars (rural revitalisation, ecological civilisation, ecological resettlement and pro-poor tourism) emerge from, or are underlined by, official discourses and are often uncritically repeated. The extent to which these concepts conceal everyday environmental dynamics in China also needs to be examined. As Cheng and Liu (2022: 2) ask in relation to Chinese world regional geography and foreign area studies, ‘what geographical knowledges are being produced in/through this process, [and] might they become sites of other forms of hegemony and marginalisation?’ The process of worlding Chinese environmental geography should not underwrite or reinforce ‘elitist uneven representations’ (ibid: 14–15).

Here we must also reflect on methodological choices. Quantitative analysis using surveys, models, and statistical software continues to dominate the Chinese environmental geography literature (Qian and Zhang 2022), containing a ‘powerful assumption that geographical research can be used to guide the rational allocation of productive factors and to optimise the relationships between people, environment, and built spaces” (ibid: 4). Many papers claim mixed methods, but have a thin qualitative component. The English literature is in contrast, largely qualitative. Across both literatures there are only a small number of place-based ethnographic studies that provide particularly rich descriptions of lived experience (Amin and Richaud 2020; Grant 2018; Wang, Zhao and Zhu 2019). We and others (Bao and Ma 2010; Qian and Zhang 2022) recognise there are many reasons why quantitative analyses are preferred, such as the specific requirements of PhD submission, publishing norms, financial or other gains from ‘objective’ scientific methods that inform national planning, and avoiding political sensitivities.

We also recognise that the window for non-Chinese scholars to do place-based ethnography in China, particularly in border regions, is narrow. One possible pathway is for Chinese and non-Chinese scholars to work collaboratively to do in-depth qualitative research that continues to interrogate the profoundly uneven effects of the state's environmental interventions and rhetoric on individuals and communities: to define key questions together, to share data, and to share the conceptual and analytical processes. This requires careful and ongoing assessment of fieldwork risks for all parties involved (Menga 2019), especially in light of the uncertain developments in cross-border data sharing due to recent strengthening of Chinese data regulations (cf. Lewis 2023), and an equity-focused approach to authorship (Liboiron et al. 2017).

Creative approaches to research that lessens fieldwork risks warrant further exploration. For example, a bilingual version of a meta-ethnography used to synthesise household sustainability research (Head et al. 2016) exploring more deeply the themes identified in this systematic literature review could be developed, alongside creative and critical use of quantitative, spatial and secondary data that provides traces of inequalities experienced in everyday life (Robinson et al. 2018). This type of mixed methods research can be and is currently being conducted collaboratively across national and institutional boundaries. Beyond the opportunities for research collaboration identified, those based in Anglophone institutions also need to adopt a relational and ethical approach to worlding Chinese environmental geography. This approach should involve amplifying, citing, promoting, and supporting the efforts of Chinese scholars who are actively developing critical human geographical theory and research within China in whatever ways they can.

Conclusion

As this review has only just begun to reveal, there is a lively body of Chinese research tapping into the key issues of environmental geography that is currently at risk of being ignored, uncited, undervalued, and underestimated. As observed in other sub-disciplinary debates (An et al. 2016; Bao and Ma 2010; Liu, Wang and An 2020), a largely one-way conversation in knowledge production and uneven dissemination of intellectual ideas is evident in research on lived experiences of environmental change in China. Classic theoretical and empirical work produced in English (both original and translated) is widely used and discussed in Chinese language research, though not in an even manner. The Anglophone research community then largely uses China as a source of data, interprets these data with ‘Western’ theory and publishes this analysis in English. The Chinese language documents referenced in the English literature often consist of archival or policy materials, rather than the work of Chinese academics writing and publishing in mainland Chinese journals. With a few exceptions that we are aware of in other journals (see Webber et al. 2021), Anglophone environmental geography largely neglects the specifics of Chinese scholarship and knowledge generation.

So, what can we practically do as a community of environmental geographers? First, is for Anglophone scholars to more widely cite and promote the work of mainland Chinese scholars who are engaged in qualitative environmental geographical research (see Ahmed 2013). Second, is to engage with different linguistic and socio-political conventions for describing social phenomena, ideally through bilingual reading and bilingual labelling of the analysis of lived experiences. Third, is to be aware of, and sensitive to, political restrictions (overt or otherwise) that shape knowledge production in different places and to look for where these can be circumvented or used creatively. Four, we can continue to develop cross-institutional research partnerships that take seriously the situatedness of knowledge production and progress research around these nascent research themes in careful, and collaborative, ways. We have suggested some pathways for this (zooming in on Chinese conceptualisations of ‘home’), but there will be many more. There is much more at stake here than just citational politics (Ahmed 2013) and Anglophone linguistic privilege in academic publishing (Müller 2021), though both are very important. What is also at stake is how critically minded, qualitative environmental geographies of China, which directly engage with the lived experiences of collaborating academics and research participants, can be thoughtfully illuminated within an increasingly challenging global geopolitical context.

Despite the many challenges in fostering meaningful bilingual conversations and collaborations, we would like to conclude on an optimistic note regarding the global exploration of everyday environmental geographies in/on China. For Chinese scholars working within China, there is an opportunity to engage in justice-led inquiry into the everyday experiences of marginalised individuals and groups as they grapple with the effect of rapid urbanisation, industrialisation, environmental change and climate change. This may involve engaging with a range of qualitative and ethnographic approaches which can also take the form of modified versions (see, e.g., Pink and Morgan 2013, ‘short term ethnography’) as well as wider creative and possibly participatory methods. This requires critical reflection on some of the dominant paradigms for understanding and talking about poor areas, ethnic minorities, and other marginalised groups and discussion about the political ‘work’ concepts like human–earth systems do. Non-Chinese scholars have an opportunity to learn geography differently: to engage with different kinds of theory-building, to build meaningful collaborative projects on social and environmental justice, and to better understand the lived experience of different groups within Chinese society.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-peg-10.1177_27539687231219008 - Supplemental material for Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-peg-10.1177_27539687231219008 for Worlding Chinese environmental geographies: A systematic, bilingual literature review by Qi Liu, Nahui Zhen, Sarah Rogers and Alison L Browne in Progress in Environmental Geography