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Sponsored by the LEC-SCAU-GIGCAS Joint Institute for the Environment

Ecological Civilization, Urbanization and the

‘Agriculture-Food-Water Environment Nexus’

Workshop at JIE, South China Agricultural University

8th - 9th January 2018

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Contents

Abstract: 3-7

Workshop Programme: 8-10

Participants Bio’s and Presentation Titles

- Wen Tiejun 11

- Luo Shiming 12

- Robert Biel 13

- Shi Yan 14

- Prasenjit Duara 15

- Wang Mingming 16

- Zou Yi 17

- Nigel Clark 18

- Cui Shenghui 19

- Ali Cheshmehzangi 20

- Xu Honggang 21

- Qian Junxi 22

- Leigh Martindale 23

- David Tyfield 24

Accommodation details 25

Contact information 26

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“Taking a driving seat in international cooperation to

respond to climate change, China has become an important

participant, contributor, and torchbearer in the global

endeavour for ecological civilization,”- Xi Jinping,

Communist Party Conference, October 2017

Abstract and Outline

Since being initially announced in 2007, ‘ecological

civilization’ has emerged as a leading slogan of the Chinese

central government, guiding its increasingly ambitious and

highly-funded programmes of environmental activity. The

slogan has since been spelt out in several detailed policy

documents, but it remains a term without clear meaning,

and with much development and substantiation still to go in

the coming years.

As noted by global observers of environmental change (e.g.

Sullivan et al. 2016), in this respect alone ‘ecological

civilization’ is a broad policy programme that deserves

significant global attention – and all the more so as China’s

new ‘One Belt, One Road’ initiative takes off, exporting

major infrastructural investment across the eastern

hemisphere. For what ‘ecological civilization’ comes to

mean in practice will significantly shape the environmental

footprint not just of a rising China (comprising nearly one

fifth of humanity and soon the world’s largest economy),

but also the trajectories of socio-economic, technological

and cultural development of much of the rest of the world

besides. Ecological civilization, in other words, will

profoundly affect the global responses to the definitive (and

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currently worsening) socio-environmental challenges of the

21st century, with impacts likely much further into the future.

But ‘ecological civilization’ is of interest also potentially far

beyond these short-term material issues, simply

compounding its likely long-term significance. In particular,

the novel conjunction (in both Chinese and English) of

‘ecological’ and ‘civilization’ not only speaks directly to

these epochal challenges, but also to crucial debates within

culture and academia grappling with ways to conceptualize

and think productively with our emergent global

responsibilities. In studying these concerns, issues of food

– or, more specifically, the complex systems of the food-

agriculture-water-environment nexus (Zhu et al. 2017,

hereafter the ‘Nexus’) – are also particularly pressing and

insightful, bringing what can too easily appear abstract and

distant issues into vivid somatic and diverse cultural

significance.

‘Ecological civilization’ strongly resonates with the broader

issues of an emergent Anthropocene and its corollary of a

technoscientific post-humanism. As a corollary, and

especially when refracted through issues of the Nexus, it

also points directly to major debates about ‘planetary

urbanism’ and the future socio-ecological metabolisms

amongst city, countryside and ‘wilderness’ (terrestrial and

maritime). In its explicit, if still undeveloped, gesturing to

projects of revival of traditional Chinese concepts (including

neo-Confucianism, as well as Taoism and possibly the Indian

import of Buddhism) with a focus on human-nature

harmony, ecological civilization also dovetails growing

interest in the cultural effects of a re-ascendant China on an

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emergent ‘global’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’; and, potentially, in

ways that are crucial for the development of new paradigms

with which meaningfully to address the global problems

(including those of the environment, of course) that have

been incubated by Western-dominated thinking (Duara,

2014; Beck, 2015).

Moreover, in foregrounding the concept of ‘civilization’ – a

term that has fallen dramatically out of favour in dominant

academic and political parlance, in the wake of post-colonial

critique and post-modern deconstruction – ecological

civilization also proposes the rejuvenation of ways of

thinking that privilege issues such as the longue durée,

‘grand narrative’ (and grand project) and a proudly cultural

sensibility that also resonate with work at the forefront of

current academic work (not least in the West).

This is a fascinating but highly (perhaps essentially)

contested space. On the one hand, ‘civilization’ still raises

the hackles of many, for whom it augurs a slide into

dangerous acceptance of a ‘clash of civilizations’, amidst

(and perhaps feeding) the global political turbulence of the

present. On the other hand, a concerted critical

reengagement with ‘civilization’ also resonates with

developments at the very cutting-edge of research of socio-

environmental change (Tyfield, 2017), including: Big History

(Christian & McNeill, 2011; Spier, 2016) and long-run global

histories and ‘civilization studies’ (Morris, 2011; Wengrow,

2011; van der Leeuw, 2012); ‘more-than-representational’

theory (Lorimer, 2007; Jones, 2008) and an anti-utopian

pragmatic politics (Dryzek, 2004; Unger, 2007; Bernstein

2010; Barnett & Bridge, 2013); the new mobilities paradigm

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(Sheller & Urry, 2004, 2016; Buscher et al., 2017) and

‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2015; Han & Park,

2015); and governance of uncertain and complex futures

(Fazey et al., 2016; Urry, 2016; Wise et al., 2014) or new

methodologies of ‘situated practical wisdom’ or phronesis

(Flyvbjerg et al. 2013). Research into ecological civilization

also emerges as a key focus and arena for inter-cultural

discourse and ‘traffic’ (Duara, 2014) to develop the new

conceptual and practical resources needed to grapple with

the emergence of global complex systems.

Accordingly, this two-day workshop – convening at a space

specifically established for leading international

collaborative research on the environment, the Lancaster-

SCAU-GIGCAS Joint Institute for the Environment (JIE) in

Guangzhou – draws together a small and select group of

leading thinkers from China, the West and elsewhere on

issues around ‘ecological civilization’ and the Nexus, and

cognate issues listed above, to push forward conceptual

development of research agendas and intercultural

dialogue in this key arena. In particular, discussions will

focus across four overlapping issues:

- Global eco-politics and culture and the changing

meaning of ‘civilization’

- Changing rural/urban relations and metabolisms

- Complex and diverse socio-environmental agri-food

futures

- The circulation of knowledge between the West and

China

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We are delighted to host as keynote speakers:

- Professor Wen Tiejun 温铁军(Renmin University)

renowned expert on social-economic sustainable

development and rural issues and leading light in

China’s grassroots efforts to revive rural

communities and economies; and

- Professor Nigel Clark (Lancaster University),

leading global theorist of the Anthropocene and

the longue durée of human-environmental-

planetary relations.

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Workshop Programme

Monday 8th January 2018

Morning

Chinese delegates arrive in Guangzhou (international

arrive over the weekend)

1.15pm - Welcome

Introduction: David Tyfield & Leigh Martindale –

“Ecological… civilization…”

2pm

Keynote 1: Wen Tiejun – Ecological civilization and

agriculture

3pm - Break

3.30pm

Session 1/roundtable: Ecological Civilization and

agriculture

Luo Shiming, Robert Biel (Skype from UK, -8 hours),

Shi Yan

5.30pm - Close

6pm - Dinner

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Tuesday 9th January 2018

9am

Session 2/roundtable: Ecological civilization, cultural

traffic and the longue durée

Prasenjit Duara (Skype from US, -13 hours), Wang

Mingming, Zou Yi

11am - Break

11.30am

Session 3/roundtable (1): Ecological civilization and

urban/rural relations

Cui Shenghui, Ali Cheshmehzangi

12.50pm - Lunch

2pm

Keynote 2: Nigel Clark – Ecological civilization and the

Anthropocene

3pm - Break

3.15pm

Session 3/roundtable (2): Ecological civilization and

urban/rural relations

Xu Honggang, Qian Junxi, Leigh Martindale

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5.15pm

Closing remarks / Round-up / Journal information:

David Tyfield

5.30pm - Close

6.30pm

Dinner for those staying in Guangzhou

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Participants Bio’s (in order of appearance)

Wen Tiejun - Renmin University of China, Institute of

Advanced Studies for Sustainability

Tiejun Wen is a renowned expert

on social-economic sustainable

development and rural issues,

especially in policy studies,

macro-economic, geo-strategy

of south-south cooperatives, and

long-term inclusive growth.

Wen, who also is executive dean

of China’s Institute of Rural

Reconstruction of China, Southwest University, has

received numerous honours and awards, including the First

Rank Award for Science and Technology Progress from the

Chinese Ministry of Agriculture and the First Rank Award

for Teaching and Education from the Beijing Municipal

Government.

As Executive Secretary General of the Chinese Society for

Restructuring the Economic System, he is leading China’s

grassroots efforts to revive rural communities and

economies. As agricultural economist Wen Tiejun won his

fame recently not as a theory maker, but as the creator of

China’s first free farmer’s training centre – the Yanyangchu

Countryside Construction Institute in Hebei Province.

Keynote Speech Title: National Eco-Civilization

Strategy & Rural Regeneration

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Luo Shiming – South China Agricultural University,

College of Agriculture

Luo Shiming main research fields

include: (1) sustainable

agroecosystems and ecological

agriculture practices, (2) biodiversity

used in agriculture, (3) allelopathy

among crops and weeds, and (4)

computer simulation in crop

production system. He has delivered

courses on Agroecology, General Ecology, Advance in

Ecology, and Systems Analysis in Ecology. He has trained

more than 50 M.S. and Ph.D. students and published more

than 160 articles and 14 academic books.

He was the President of SCAU from 1995 to 2006, and

Director of the Institute of Tropical and Subtropical Ecology

in South China Agricultural University from 1994 to 2014.

He used to be the Vice President of China Agronomy

Society, Vice President of Scientists’ Association of

Guangzhou, Vice President of China Ecology Society, and

Executive Vice President of International Allelopathy

Society.

He got an award from the Ministry of Education as the

Outstanding Teacher of Higher Education in China, 2007.

He also received his Honorary Doctorial Degree from

Pennsylvanian State University, USA at the same year.

Presentation Title: Agroecology approach for

sustainable agriculture development in China

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Robert Biel – University of Central London,

Development Planning Unit

Specialising in international political

economy, systems theory, sustainable

development and urban agriculture

Professor Biel has been a member of

DPU staff since 1997-8 - having

previously taught at School of Oriental

and African Studies (SOAS) and

Birkbeck College. He now works part-

time, teaching on the Masters course in Environment and

Sustainable Development, directed by Adriana Allen. His

book ‘The New Imperialism’ (2000) dealt with structural

issues in North-South relations and has been translated (in

a new revised edition in 2007) into Arabic and Spanish. In

‘The Entropy of Capitalism’ (Leiden: Brill, 2012) proposes a

novel synthesis between systems theory and political

economy. As a practitioner of low-input agriculture as well

as an activist in the Transition Towns movements, Robert is

particularly interested in how the crisis can act as a trigger

for a new community resilience, a subject tackled in his

latest book: ‘Sustainable Food Systems: The Role of the

City’ (2016). Together with Yves Cabannes, Robert has

played a role within the DPU's funded research,

consultancy and teaching on the issue of urban agriculture.

Presentation Title: Linking Marxism with Sustainable

Agriculture through Dialectics

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Shi Yan – Proprietor of ‘Shared Harvest’ CSA Farm,

Beijing.

Shi Yan, the executive director of

Shared Harvest (Beijing) Ecological

Agriculture Service Ltd, received her

PhD from the Renmin University

School of Agricultural Economics and

Rural Development, and has finished

her postdoctoral research at Tsinghua

University’s School of Social Sciences.

As a young PhD student at Renmin University, she founded

China’s the very beginning CSA Farm in China, growing and

distributing organic vegetables to city consumers and

renting plots of land to city folk interested in getting their

hands dirty. Since then, 1000 similar CSA farms have

opened across the country. She has since moved on to

establish Shared Harvest in Tongzhou and Shunyi in 2012.

She has been inspiring a healthier and more sustainable

way to feed us. She is a pioneering force and active

promoter behind the Chinese organic community-

supported agriculture (CSA) movement.

She has also published one book “My Alternative Farming

Experience in America” and Chinese translations of three

related books: Farmers of Forty Centuries: Organic Farming

in China, Korea, and Japan; Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s

Guide to CSA; and Slow Money.

Presentation Title: CSA: A Way to Link Smallholders to

Sustainable Markets

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Prasenjit Duara – Duke University, History

Department

Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar

Tang Chair of East Asian

Studies at Duke University. He

was born and educated in

India and received his PhD in

Chinese history from Harvard

University. He was previously

Professor and Chair of the

Dept of History and Chair of

the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of

Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles

Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research

Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015).

In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural

North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won

the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of

the AAS, USA. Most recently, he has published The Crisis of

Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable

Future (Cambridge 2014). He has edited Decolonization:

Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A

Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy

and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been

widely translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the

European languages.

Presentation Title: An Agenda for Ecological

Civilization—Debates and Problems

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Wang Mingming – Peking University, Department of

Sociology

Wang Mingming,

professor of anthropology

at Peking University, has

conducted extensive

fieldwork in the cultural

areas of South Fujian and

Taiwan and Southwest

China as well as rural South

France. His primary

research interest is in the vernacular traditions. In

recent years, he has dwell upon ethnographic studies

of the life worlds in which, as he has argued, the

categories of persons, objects, and divinities are

highly related as both ontologies and ecologies. He

has published extensively on the anthropology

of China, non-Western perspectives of the others, and

civilizations including The West as the other (2007)

and Biography and Anthropology (2010).

Presentation Title: Persons are incomplete without

others: a human ecology of the three 'unions of

contraries’

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Zou Yi - Fudan University, Centre for Historical

Geography

Zou Yi is associate professor

of historical geography at

Fudan University. He

acquired Ph. D. in history in

the Institute for Chinese

Historical Geography Studies

at Fudan in 2006, and then

stayed on to work there. His

research interests include the study of historical

geography and social economy in the Ming and Qing

Dynasties and the Republican era, especially the study

of traditional rural society and modern urban

development. He has a published monograph entitled

The Tea Industry and the Local Community in Huizhou

since the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1949). His

published papers include The Operation of Social

Public Services in Cities during the Qing Dynasty: A

Sample Survey on Fire Fighting & Prevention Services

in Hangzhou City, Industrial Agglomeration and

Consolidation of Urban Location: The History of Tunxi,

A City of Tea Trade in Huizhou (1577-1949).

Presentation Title: A Review on the Multi-ethnic

Governance of Qing Dynasty through the Integration

of Farming and Nomadic Regions

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Nigel Clark - Lancaster University, Lancaster

Environmental Centre

Nigel Clark is Chair of Social

Sustainability and Human

Geography at the Lancaster

Environment Centre. He is the

author of Inhuman Nature:

Sociable Life on a Dynamic

Planet (2011) and co-editor of

Atlas: Geography, Architecture

and Change in an

Interdependent World (2012),

Material Geographies (2008) and Extending Hospitality

(2009).

Current research interests include pyrotechnology,

planetary capitalism, the politics of strata, and speculative

geophysical thought around the idea of the Anthropocene.

In particular, Nigel is concerned at how social life is shaped

and perturbed by physical forces by using the idea of the

`Anthropocene’ – the notion of human beings as geological

agents. Nigel’s research is thus focused on research

questions asking how our species acquired its geological

agency? What physical forces we’ve tapped into and joined

up with? How humans have used fire to transform ̀ earthy

materials’ - and in the process, how have we shaped our

social and physical worlds?

Keynote Speech Title: Confronting the Anthropocene:

Society, Politics and the Earth in Western Thought

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Cui Shenghui – Chinese Academy of Science, Institute

of Urban Environment, Xiamen

Cui is the Vice Director and Professor of

the Key Lab of Urban Environment and

Health at the Institute of Urban

Environment, Chinese Academy of

Sciences.

Dr. Cui obtained his BSc degree in

biology at Fujian Normal University in

1994, MSc degree in environmental science at Xiamen

University in 1997, and PhD degree in environmental

planning and management at Xiamen University in 2003.

Before joining the Institute of Urban Environment, CAS, he

served as Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Beijing Normal

University from 2004 to 2006. Dr. Cui has been working on

“Urban Ecological Process and Control”. He acted as PIs for

a Key International Cooperation Project and a General

Project of National Science Foundation of China (NSFC),

and as PIs for sub-projects under National Key Basic

Research Program and the International Cooperation

Research Program of CAS. He has published over 130

papers in scientific journals, including Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences of the United States of

America. More than 40 papers were published in SCI

journals.

Presentation Title: Transboundary Environmental

Footprints of Food Consumption in Urbanized China

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Ali Cheshmehzangi – University of Nottingham

Ningbo, Department of Engineering

Dr Ali Cheshmehzangi is currently

the Head of the Department of

Architecture and Built Environment

at The University of Nottingham

Ningbo China. He is also Associate

Professor of Architecture and

Urban Design, focusing on research

and teaching topics of sustainable

urbanism, integrated urban design,

eco city development, and smart-eco transitions of cities in

China and the EU. He is co-author of a book titled

‘Designing Cooler Cities’, and also a co-author of a

forthcoming book titled ‘Eco-Development in China’.

Ali is also Director of Urban Innovation Lab (UIL) in Ningbo,

a new set-up for innovative research in the field of

urbanism, focusing on big data, urban climate, and urban

planning and design. He is an urbanist by heart and by

profession, with qualifications, practice experience and

research profile in urban design, sustainable urban

planning and development. In 2015, he developed a

comprehensive planning toolkit, called ‘Integrated

Assessment for City Enhancement (iACE)’, which is utilised

particularly for planners and policy makers and is currently

working on numerous eco-city projects with Chinese

partners.

Presentation Title: Eco-Development Directions in

China: Future Urbanism in the hands of Innovation?

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Xu Honggang - Sun Yat-Sen University, School of

Tourism and Management

Professor, Ph.D. School of Tourism

Management, Sun Yat-sen

University. Her interests are mainly

in tourism geography studies,

including the tourism lifestyle

mobilities, sustainable tourism

development and tourism planning.

She has published over 100 journal papers both inside Chin

and international journals.

Servicing as associate editor of Tourism geographies and

editor boarding member of Tourism Management,

Mobilities, Journal of Sustainable tourism, and ect. She is

the vice chairman of Chinese tourism geography

commission and member of Tourism and Recreation

Commission of International Geography Union. In 2016,

she obtained Wolf Roy Wolfe Award for Contributions to

the Advancement of Recreation, Tourism and Sport

Geography by the AAG Recreation, Tourism and Sport

Specialty Group, March 2016.

She is also active in applying knowledge to practice. For

example, she has been leading the formulation of national

accreditation programs for wetland tourism, wellness

tourism and ecotourism in China, advising on sustainable

tourism in Huangshan and Hongcun world heritage sites.

Presentation Title: Eco-Civilization from the

Perspective of Eco-tourism

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Qian Junxi - Hong Kong University, Department of

Geography

Junxi is a social and cultural

geographer who works at the

intersection of geography, urban

studies and cultural studies. He

holds a BSc in Urban and Regional

Planning from Sun Yat- sen

University, China (2010), and a

PhD in Human Geography from

University of Edinburgh, Scotland (2013). Prior to

joining the University of Hong Kong, he worked as a

Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in Singapore

Management University, Singapore, advised by Prof

Lily Kong. Junxi's research interests include place

politics, urban public space, modernity, religion,

China's ethnic minorities/frontiers, and China's recent

urban transformation. Most of his published works

partake in one or several of these themes.

Presentation Title: Civilising the ecology? Discourse of

nature and environment in China's rural renaissance

movement

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Leigh Martindale – Lancaster University, Lancaster

Environment Centre & JIE, Guangzhou

I am a PhD student whose

research examines China’s

recent project of ‘Ecological

Civilization’ and its

relationship with small-scale

green movements,

specifically ‘Alternative Food

Networks’ (AFNs).

The hope of the project is to assess and explore

Ecological Civilization potential formation through the

lens of Chinese AFNs. Indeed, the emergence of the

new and diverse forms of food procurement that are

occurring in China, as a response to fears of food

safety, can perhaps offer not only insights into what

Ecological Civilization might become, but also

alternatives ways of thinking regarding the thorny

question of how AFNs (in the West) are able to scale-

up.

I have also publish on the Anthropocene, exploring

the notion of human beings acting as geological

agents.

Presentation Title: What is Eco-Civilization? A Food-

Based Perspective

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David Tyfield – Lancaster University, Lancaster

Environment Centre & JIE, Guangzhou

David’s research develops

interests in the normative and

political/power dimensions of

the processes of knowledge

production and their

interaction with issues of

global cultural political

economy, especially regarding

critical analysis of the

emergence of a globalised "knowledge-based"

economy, climate change and the rise of China. He

has been studying the process of low-carbon

transition in China since 2007, especially regarding

urban mobility. This has culminated recently in

Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China: Global Crisis,

Innovation & Urban Mobility (Routledge, 2017). As of

2017/18, he is leading a programme on ‘Oeconomics

for the Anthropocene’ at Lancaster’s Institute for

Social Futures. He is also an editor of Mobilities

journal.

David is an Executive Director of LEC-SCAU-GIGCAS

Joint Institute for the Environment, having lived in

Guangzhou to establish it from 2014-16.

Presentation Title: Ecological… Civilization..: a new

agenda

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Accommodation Details

Address: (Nearest metro station: Wushan 五山)

广州市天河区五山华南农业大学竹园宾馆

Zhuyuan Hotel, South China Agricultural University,

Wushan, Tianhe, Guangzhou, China.

Location of Workshop: (5-10 minute walk from hotel)

Room 614, Science and Technology Building, College

of Natural Resources and Environment, South China

Agricultural University

(华南农业大学资源环境学院科技楼 614会议室 )

Zhuyuan Hotel

Workshop

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Contact details

Re Programme/Talks:

David Tyfield – d.tyfield@lancaster.ac.uk, WeChat:

davidtyf

Re Travel/Logistics:

Leigh Martindale – l.martindale1@lancaster.ac.uk,

WeChat: leighmartindale

Jinghan Wang – j.wang38@lancaster.ac.uk,

Phone: 13651722861