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Paper short abstract

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among contemporary Chinese journalists, this paper explains how reporters addressing the non-linear complexities of climate change find stable enough realities to generate political positions.

Paper long abstract

In 1937, Mao Zedong observed that China, long dominated by feudalism, had "undergone great changes in the last hundred years and is now changing in the direction of a new China, liberated and free, and yet no change has occurred in her geography and climate." (Mao 2007 [1937]: 70). Climate change has since destabilized such modes of thinking about nature and society. The climate's innate instability has not only been compounded by humans, but also there is a growing understanding of the importance of the non-equilibrium dynamics (Behnke, Scoones and Kerven 1993, Ostrom 2009) and of incertitude in understanding the climate (Lahsen 2005: 895).

Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork among contemporary Chinese journalists reporting the science and politics of climate change, this paper shows how a destabilizing phenomenon with nonlinear and uncertain dynamics can be drawn upon to explore how one might proceed to develop a political position without closing down uncertainties and ambiguities and without establishing a singular narrative of a situation.

The paper shows that some Chinese journalists have created such a position: in their terms, an "edgeball" space - a word from ping-pong, used to describe politically sensitive journalism. Such edgeball spaces, the paper argues, create situations where an outcome is not known in advance: a necessary condition for politics (Massey 2005, 11-12). The paper thus attempts to investigate the interplay of epistemological and ontological positions in China's changing political and geophysical climates - and how and when this interface creates stable enough realities for people to generate political positions.