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.