Abstract
This chapter focuses on literary and cultural studies to show how Chinese literary scholars contribute to the larger conversation regarding China’s “practice of environing” and the construction of China’s eco-civilization. Zooming in on Lu Shuyuan, the most prominent ecocritic in China, and his home-grown ecocritical thinking as a case study to illustrate a syncretic yet Chinese oriented ecocriticism, the author examines the way in which Lu addresses issues of marginality and disenfranchisement in a poetic genre called “moonlight poetry” (dagong shi) composed by rural migrant workers. Viewing migrant poets through the prism of his Tao Yuanming study, Lu contributes to the current discussion of Global Environmental Humanities by illustrating the importance of the role premodern cultural tradition plays in the contemporary postmodern environmental imagination.
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- 1.
Dillinger, “Biggest Contributors To Global Warming In The World By Country.”
- 2.
Petras, “China: Rise, Fall and Re-Emergence as a Global Power.”
- 3.
Wang, He, and Fan, “The Ecological Civilization Debate in China.”
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Ibid.
- 7.
Ibid.
- 8.
Jacques, When China Rules the World, 196–197.
- 9.
Lu, The Ecological Era and Classical Chinese Naturalism, ix. The term Shangri-la is a British colonial invention that originated in the novel Lost Horizon (1933). This term then was picked up by imaginative entrepreneurs in Yunnan who adopted the term and turned Zhongdian County (中甸县) into Shangri-la (香格里拉). So Shangri-la has always been associated with a kind of non-Western utopia.
- 10.
It first appeared in a paper “Literary Ecocriticism” (“Wenxue de shengtaixue piping”) in the Journal of Foreign Literary Criticism.
- 11.
Marinelli, “How to Build a ‘Beautiful China’ in the Anthropocene,” 371.
- 12.
The Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme is an intergovernmental and interdisciplinary research program. It was launched by UNESCO in 1971 to tackle the population, resources, and environment problems facing the whole world. For more information, see Anon, “The Chinese National Committee for MAB.”
- 13.
Huang Zongying and Wang Meng, for example, founded the China Environmental Literature Research Association in 1991. In 1992, this association changed its name to The Promotion Association of Chinese Environmental Culture. This association heralds the onset of ecological literature in China. The literary magazine Green Leaves was launched in 1992.
- 14.
Sima Yunjie, “On the Study of Ecological Wenyixue,” 12.
- 15.
Zhang, “Wenyi shengtai xue,” 69–74.
- 16.
The term “cultural ecology” was coined by American anthropologist Julian Sturd (1902–1972). See “The Concept and Method of Cultural Ecology,” 30–42.
- 17.
Zhang, “Wenyi shengtai xue,” 69–70.
- 18.
Ibid., 73.
- 19.
Glotfelty and Fromm, The Ecocriticism Reader, xviii.
- 20.
Ibid., 73.
- 21.
Xia, “China as a ‘Civilization-State’,” 43–47.
- 22.
Lu, The Ecological Era and Classical Chinese Naturalism, 94.
- 23.
Ibid.
- 24.
Lu, “Why do contemporary Chinese poets only look Westward.”
- 25.
Wei, “Thoreau and I.”
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Seto. “What Should We Understand about Urbanization in China?”
- 28.
Lu, Tao Yuanming de youling, 264.
- 29.
Liu, Corporate China 2.0, xxii.
- 30.
There were still 30.46 million rural people living below the national poverty line at the end of 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. “China brings nearly 13 mln people out of poverty in 2017,” XinhuaNet.
- 31.
Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity, 3–4.
- 32.
Lu, Shengtai piping de kongjian, 45.
- 33.
Slovic, “Landmarks in Chinese Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature.”
- 34.
For more on Lu’s spiritual ecology, see Wei, “Chinese Ecocriticism in the Last Ten Years,” 540–541.
- 35.
Morton, The Ecological Thinking, 4.
- 36.
Ibid., 2.
- 37.
Heise, “Comparative Literature and the Environmental Humanities.”
- 38.
Anon, “Lu Shuyuan jiaoshou huo 2018 nian ‘Kebu gongtong fuzhi jiang’ fabiao ganyan.”
- 39.
Yang, “Migrant Poets are an Emerging Power.”
- 40.
Zheng, Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Blog.
- 41.
Lu, Tao Yuanming de youling, 266–267.
- 42.
Ibid., 265.
- 43.
Ibid.
- 44.
Zheng, Zheng Xiaoqiong, 137.
- 45.
Ibid.
- 46.
Lu, Tao Yuanming de youling, 268.
- 47.
Lu, The Ecological Era and Classical Chinese Naturalism, 121.
- 48.
Wang, “The Deep Convergence between Constructive Postmodernism and Chinese Marxism,” 87.
- 49.
Cui, “Hua Dao China: Innovation for Chinese Civilization,” 146–151.
- 50.
Lu, Shengtai piping de kongjian, 98–102.
- 51.
Laozi, Chapter 28.
- 52.
Lin Yutang’s 1948 translation, Terebess Asia Online, https://terebess.hu/english/tao/yutang.html
- 53.
Ibid.
- 54.
World Economic Forum, “China’s new forests will be the size of Ireland,” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/01/china-is-creating-new-forests-the-size-of-ireland/
- 55.
Marinelli, “How to Build a ‘Beautiful China’ in the Anthropocene,” 380–381.
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Chang, Cj. (2019). Building a Post-Industrial Shangri-La: Lu Shuyuan, Ecocriticism, and Tao Yuanming’s “Peach Blossom Spring”. In: Chang, Cj. (eds) Chinese Environmental Humanities. Chinese Literature and Culture in the World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18634-0_2
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