Presentation short abstract

This proposal repositions China’s recent green-growth by highlighting the local responses to these eco-industries, while elaborating their contemporary environmental and labor realities across suburban Shanghai and Suzhou.

Presentation long abstract

This proposal repositions China’s recent green-growth agenda within the environmental and labor realities of suburban Shanghai and Suzhou. Buased on rapid urbanization since 1980, it investigates how rural waterways and riverine towns around the Yangzi Delta have become front-sites for green-tech deployment, and how such shifts intersect with broader eco-conservation. Most of these projects claim to “recover” the “native” environments that conveys cultural values for the “sustainable human-nature harmony.” Early fieldwork, however, suggests that these eco-efforts—notably fishing bans intended for pollution control—bring unforeseen social and economic repercussions. In many rural communities, residents are increasingly pulled into part-time city work, eroding traditional shoreline livelihoods and reshaping identities tied to water.

Echoing the panel question on “taxing the green,” this project interrogates what sustainability means in contemporary China: who profits, who bears costs, and what social and environmental factors are rendered unsustainable by top-down green initiatives. Employing interdisciplinary and ethnographical works on riverine fishing communities, it centers on three cases of water stewardship—shoreline design, solar-energy integration, and fishery prohibitions—on the social and environmental costs embedded in “civilizing” the landscape with green tech. Following these bottom-up voices, the research traces how local communities adapt to the "green turn," the extent to which fishing households incorporate this transition into daily life, and their strategies to tackle demands from authorities. By foregrounding the multiple local contexts, the study illuminates the complexities of sustainability regarding riparian surroundings, highlighting both the benefits and trade-offs of green innovation in transitional urban–rural settings of modern Yangzi Delta.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how workers, activists, and academics in Hong Kong and China exposed the toxic conditions in Apple's outsourced factories. It critiques the promise of “green futures” as a strategy for extracting value, disciplining behavior, and framing national and planetary futures.

Presentation long abstract

When the “suicide express” began at Foxconn factories in China in 2010, there was widespread media criticism of Apple’s indifference to the harsh labor practices in its outsourced factories. These suicides were soon forgotten until Foxconn worker and migrant poet Xu Lizhi jumped from a building in 2014 and appeared on the cover of Time Magazine under the title, “The Poet Who Died for your Phone.” However, these moments of liberal journalistic outrage over worker suicides obscured, or outright ignored, a history of activism and protest in Hong Kong and across China about other deadly issues: the toxic materials used on production lines, the dangerous dust in polishing rooms, neurological deformities, and factory explosions. Building on Nicholas Shapiro's concept of the "chemical sublime,” this paper explores how workers, activists, and academics used various media, political theater, and chemo-ethnographic reports to reveal the slow and sometimes fast violence of an industry long based on lethal chemicals. I argue that uncovering these histories of activism can teach us a lot about Apple’s discursive framings of “responsibility” in its yearly supplier reports, its current claims to be “greening” its supply chain and cloud storage facilities, and its efforts to establish a carbon-neutral future for the world's largest tech giant. Uncovering these histories assists the panel’s larger political project of exposing how Apple and other electronics companies are deploying the promise of “green futures” as a strategy to extract value, discipline behavior, and frame national, and planetary futures.

Presentation short abstract

This historical/ethnographic research found that while a sociotechnical imaginary of achieving both economic and environmental prosperity was co-produced alongside solar panels installation in China, it is contested by unexpected consequences, such as land-use conflicts and electronic waste.

Presentation long abstract

“Power from above, crops from below; a single field, where two incomes grow.” This slogan, circulating during the expansion of ground-mounted solar PV systems in rural China, encapsulates the “green prosperity” imaginary driving China’s solar photovoltaic (PV) development: generating green electricity while creating economic benefits. This paper examines the formation of this imaginary through state-society negotiations and reveals how it is continually taxed and contested.

Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this study investigates China’s burgeoning “solar PV landscape.” Driven by subsidy programs (e.g., feed-in tariff) and target-setting policies (e.g., 2030 carbon peaking), various actors—including local governments, state-owned energy companies, rural elites, and villagers—have been incentivized to develop PV projects. While the pursuit of economic benefits from solar PV installation is shared by all actors, an imaginary of achieving both economic and environmental prosperity was co-produced alongside the physical installation of solar panels across China. However, by scrutinizing the social and material entanglement of the “solar PV landscape,” I argue that this sociotechnical imaginary is constantly contested by unexpected consequences, such as industrial pollution from PV panel manufacturing, land-use conflicts arising from their installation, and looming electronic waste challenges.

Following Ang’s (2025) concept of “polytunity,” which reframes environmental, social, and political challenges as opportunities for change, the fragility of China’s green prosperity imaginary offers space for alternative visions. By spotlighting the wants and needs of local communities, this research points towards more inclusive and participatory renewable energy development, breaking free from techno-centric and state-centric paradigms of sustainability.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the imagined anxiety and populist narratives surrounding the less plastic policies and a projected future of less waste in Hong Kong, East Asia.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the populist imaginaries and narratives surrounding non-plastic containers, new disposal habits and a projected future of less plastic waste in Hong Kong, East Asia. Looking into social media forums, green organization websites and corporate campaigns that collectively respond to the government policies, this paper explores the imagined anxiety, ecological anticipations and green practice predictions. Ultimately it examines how global narratives of climate change and national emission reduction adapt to new waste policies and yet clash with everyday cultural habits.

The government in Hong Kong, China was pushing a policy that would ban the sale and provision of many disposable plastic products for dine-in services in 2024. At the same time, it was launching a waste charging scheme that required households and corporates to purchase designated garbage bags to motivate recycling and reduce the overall amount of municipal solid waste. Both of which were subsequently deferred due to enormous controversies surrounding potential difficulties involved in implementation. Some of these controversies include netizens uploading video images on the failures of paper straws and bio-cutleries online, corporates expressing higher cost concerns, and green organizations calling for more reuse than a material replacement of disposable plastic products.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation reinterprets South Korea’s developmentalism through a posthumanist lens, seeing materials, technologies, species, and climate as active agents. It moves beyond human-centered accounts to show how human–non-human entanglements shaped modernization.

Presentation long abstract

Scholarship on East Asian developmentalism has traditionally explained industrialization through the actions of state, market, and social actors. Environmentalist critiques reframed developmentalism as generating inequality and ecological harm, and critiques of environmentalism have highlighted its entanglement with statist and growth-oriented power. Yet these approaches all remain anthropocentric, centering human actors and treating nature, animals, machines, materials, and climate as passive background conditions. Such assumptions constrain historical analysis in an era marked by climate crisis, ecological disruption, pandemics, and AI-related inequalities—conditions that blur the boundary between human and non-human.

This presentation proposes a posthumanist reinterpretation of South Korea’s developmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s. It repositions construction materials, seed varieties, electrification and home appliances, highways, river-improvement and land-reclamation projects, factory farming and livestock diseases, petrochemical substances, waste, and climatic events such as typhoons and droughts as active agents rather than mere policy objects. Examining how these non-human entities intervened in the design and trajectory of developmental programs reveals developmentalism as a relational and material process shaped by heterogeneous temporalities and material dynamics.

This perspective also moves beyond environmentalist narratives. Non-human entities are not framed as victims or objects of protection; water, soil, wind, pathogens, machines, waste, and weather appear as forces that reorganize space, redirect policies, and interact—sometimes productively, sometimes disruptively—with human intentions. By challenging the anthropocentric assumptions shared by both developmentalist and environmentalist frameworks, this posthumanist approach offers a new analytical lens for understanding how humans and non-humans together co-produced the historical conditions and consequences of South Korea’s developmental project.