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Chinese Environmental Humanities pp 209–235Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Ecomedia Events in China: From Yellow Eco-Peril to Media Materialism

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Part of the book series: Chinese Literature and Culture in the World ((CLCW))

Abstract

This chapter explores ecomedia events such as the Kunshan and Tianjin chemical explosions in 2014–15 to offer a counter-politics to the discourse of Yellow Eco-peril, which depicts China’s environmental crisis through a racialized Eco-Otherness. Proposing a methodological shift to media materialism by turning attention to time, body, matter, and the social life of things and objects, we aim to critically reconnect China to the very systems of globalized production and consumption—the deep earth mining, the factory work, the digital consumption practices—that have propelled and intensified China’s stupendous development and its ecological challenges. Linking “old” forms of resource extraction to new lives of digital dependency, media materialism presents new critical possibilities for environmental humanities in China, across Asia, and globally.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Commodity fetishism and the possibilities and limits of revolutionary resistance have indeed been the two dominant tropes in Leftist readings of the film. See, for example, Aaron Bady, “A Snowpiercer Thinkpiece, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously, But For Very Serious Reasons”; Gerry Canavan, “‘If the Engine Ever Stops, We’d All Die’: Snowpiercer and Necrofuturism.”

  2. 2.

    A representative example of this view is found in Elizabeth Economy, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future. See also “China’s Environmental Crisis,” https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/chinas-environmental-crisis, which features a lead image, shared widely throughout the journalistic world, of two older men pulling a cart of coal in the dead of winter in Shanxi Province, with ominous coal towers spewing pollution into air thick with smog.

  3. 3.

    The “Made in China” development model has been thoroughly documented in policy, scholarly and journalistic circles. Only in recent years have we seen critical work on global waste imports to China. Since the 1980s China has been the world’s largest importer of waste. In 2012, for example, up to 56 percent of global exported plastic waste ended up in China. Imported plastic waste alone reached a peak of almost nine million tons in 2012. Proactively seeking to rectify this situation, in July 2017, the Chinese government announced a new policy banning 24 types of waste under four categories: certain types of mining slag, household waste plastics, unsorted waste paper and waste textiles. The policy went into force on January 1, 2018. This has sent shockwaves through the global trade in waste recycling. For an early report, see http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/press/releases/toxics/2017/Chinas-ban-on-imports-of-24-types-of-waste-is-a-wake-up-call-to-the-world%2D%2D-Greenpeace/. The best filmic treatment of waste in China is found in Wang Jiuliang’s 2016 masterpiece, “Plastic China.” See https://www.plasticchina.org. One of the first studies on recycling and the global circulation of waste in China is found in Adam Minter, Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade. For an excellent, more recent ethnographic discussion on rural pollution, including e-waste in China, see Anna Lora-Wainwright’s groundbreaking, Resigned Activism: Living with Pollution in Rural China.

  4. 4.

    We see Yellow Eco-peril as part of the long-standing racist narratives regarding China (and Asia more broadly) primarily produced and propagated by the West. More recently, thanks to China’s economic rise, these narratives have proliferated in diverging ways in a global context, leading Franck Billé to pluralize the term as “Yellow Perils.” See Franck Billé, “Introduction,” in Yellow Perils, 5.

  5. 5.

    Alain Badiou, Being and Event.

  6. 6.

    Dan Schiller, Digital Capitalism.

  7. 7.

    See, for example, “The Tragedy of the Village that Built Kunshan Zhongrong.” China Labour Bulletin, Aug. 20, 2014. Survivors of the Kunshan Disaster Face Grim Future, China Labour Bulletin, Aug. 13, 2014.

  8. 8.

    A plethora of Chinese-language reports appeared on social media platforms in China, but were quickly removed by the government.

  9. 9.

    Drone footage of the immediate aftermath of the explosion can be found on many You Tube sites. For two examples, uploaded by New China TV on August 14, 2015, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBjbqnAt1BI and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5GsQXPOcPA

  10. 10.

    Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska, Life after New Media, xviii.

  11. 11.

    Eco Media, 5.

  12. 12.

    Life after New Media, xv.

  13. 13.

    Sean Cubitt, Finite Media, 3.

  14. 14.

    Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz, Media Events, 7.

  15. 15.

    Andreas Hepp and Nick Couldry, “Introduction: Media Events in Globalized Media Cultures,” in Media Events in a Global Age, 11.

  16. 16.

    Dayan and Katz, Media Events, 1.

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 5.

  18. 18.

    Karen Michelle Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway, 53.

  19. 19.

    See the images included in, for example, Oliver Wainwright, “Inside Beijing’s Airpocalypse—a City Made ‘almost Uninhabitable’ by Pollution.”

  20. 20.

    “A Snowpiercer Thinkpiece, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously, But For Very Serious Reasons.”

  21. 21.

    Roh, David S., Betsy Huang, and Greta A. Niu, “Desiring Machines, Repellant Subjects,” in Techno-Orientalism, 226.

  22. 22.

    Ibid., 226.

  23. 23.

    Rob Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film.”

  24. 24.

    Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media, 21.

  25. 25.

    Jack Linchuan Qiu, Goodbye ISlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition.

  26. 26.

    Sheldon H. Lu, “Introduction: Cinema, Ecology, Modernity,” in Chinese Ecocinema, 2.

  27. 27.

    Ibid., 1.

  28. 28.

    A Geology of Media, 1.

  29. 29.

    Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media, xvi.

  30. 30.

    Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms, 9.

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 7.

  32. 32.

    Vibrant Matter, xiii–xiv.

  33. 33.

    The Marvelous Clouds, 3.

  34. 34.

    A Geology of Media, 5.

  35. 35.

    Cubitt, Finite Media, 177.

  36. 36.

    Diana Leong, “The Mattering of Black Lives: Octavia Butler’s Hyperempathy and the Promise of the New Materialisms,” 11.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 10.

  38. 38.

    Ibid., 11.

  39. 39.

    Parikka, A Geology of Media, 42.

  40. 40.

    Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor.

  41. 41.

    “Attuning to the Chemosphere: Domestic Formaldehyde, Bodily Reasoning, and the Chemical Sublime,” 369.

  42. 42.

    This section of the chapter draws on a range of work on Black Lung. In English, see, “Deadly Dust: The Silicosis Epidemic among Guangdong Jewelry Workers and the Defects of China’s Occupational Illnesses Prevention and Compensation System,” China Labour Bulletin CLB Research Series: No. 1 December 2005 and “The Hard Road: Seeking justice for victims of pneumoconiosis in China,” CLB Research Series, April 2010. On this history of silicosis and pneumoconiosis in the Appalachia and the United States since the Depression, see David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, Deadly Dust: Silicosis and the On-Going Struggle to Protect Worker’s Health. The best study in the UK context is found in Arthur McIvor and Ronald Johnston, Miner’s Lung: A History of Dust Disease in British Coal Mining.

  43. 43.

    “Da’ai qingchen,” 2014.

  44. 44.

    Christian Sorace, “Paradise Under Construction”: http://www.chinoiresie.info/paradise-under-construction/. Accessed July 4, 2018.

  45. 45.

    Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 57.

  46. 46.

    Cubitt, Finite Media, 119.

  47. 47.

    Parikka, A Geology of Media, 87.

  48. 48.

    Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 57.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 57.

  50. 50.

    Cubitt, Finite Media, 119.

  51. 51.

    Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 6.

  52. 52.

    See, for example, 2015 TIANJIN PORT CHINA HUGE EXPLOSION, HD Every Angle Synced.

  53. 53.

    Shanshan Dong, “Tour American’s Home Destroyed by China Blast,” NBC News, August 20, 2015, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/tianjin-blasts-tour-american-survivor-dan-van-durens-wrecked-home-n412986. Accessed July 4, 2018.

  54. 54.

    “How Are the People Who Took Videos of the Tianjin Explosion? (Tianjin Baozha Paishe Shipin de Ren Dou Zenmeyang Le?),” Zhihu.

  55. 55.

    Kember and Zylinska, Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, 77.

  56. 56.

    Ibid., 77.

  57. 57.

    Jussi Parikka, “Deep Times of Planetary Trouble,” 285.

  58. 58.

    Parikka, A Geology of Media, 102.

  59. 59.

    “Visualizing the Anthropocene,” 226.

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 230.

  61. 61.

    Larissa Hjorth et al., Screen Ecologies: Art, Media, and the Environment in the Asia-Pacific Region, 5.

  62. 62.

    Hjorth et al., 18.

  63. 63.

    Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, Korean Global Film.”

  64. 64.

    Cubitt, Finite Media, 180.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., 181.

  66. 66.

    Ibid., 180.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., 178.

  68. 68.

    This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, 169.

  69. 69.

    Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller, Greening the Media.

  70. 70.

    Lora-Wainwright, Resigned Activism.

  71. 71.

    Thomas Bird, “China’s bike sharing bubble has burst—drone photography captures its casualties rusting in ‘bicycle graveyards.’”

  72. 72.

    Bryan Tilt, The Struggle for Sustainability in Rural China: Environmental Values and Civil Society.

  73. 73.

    There is a quite vast and diverse literature on digital fetishism. For one widely cited and circulated example, see Wu Ming, “Fetishism of Digital Commodities and the Hidden Exploitation: The Case of Amazon and Apple.” http://www.metamute.org/community/your-posts/fetishism-digital-commodities-and-hidden-exploitation-cases-amazon-and-apple, most recently accessed on July 20, 2018.

  74. 74.

    Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, 99.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Ralph Litzinger

  2. Media and Communication Studies, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Fan Yang

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  1. Ralph Litzinger
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  2. Fan Yang
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  1. Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, NY, USA

    Chia-ju Chang

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Litzinger, R., Yang, F. (2019). Ecomedia Events in China: From Yellow Eco-Peril to Media Materialism. 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_10

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