A SPARK IN THE SMOKESTACKS
Environmental
Organizing in Beijing
Middle-Class Communities
Jean Yen-chun Lin
Neighborhood organizations have long been understood as sites of collective action in democratic contexts. But what happens when middle-class home ownership springs up for the first time in an authoritarian setting? What does associational life rooted in new middle-class housing communities look like? Can urban homeownership cultivate civic skills and capacity for organizing under authoritarian rule? In what ways and to what extent does the state shape homeowners’ sense of civic responsibility?
Centering on three newly constructed gated homeowners’ communities in Beijing—which I refer to pseudonymously as Community Meadow, Community Rose, and Community Marigold—this book tells a story of associational life among the emerging middle class in urban China. By delving into these housing communities’ histories and conversations, and following the grassroots development of their respective movements, this investigation reveals how Chinese housing communities can act as “schools of democracy,” cultivating civic skills among homeowners and building civic capacity in communities through informal civic life. As a result, middle-class communities have become wellsprings for collective organizing in this most unlikely of places.
The premise for this book arose from observing these three gated housing communities, located in different parts of Beijing, facing similar situations during the five-year span from 2006 to 2011. Communities Meadow, Introduction
Rose, and Marigold were each located near a landfill reaching maximum capacity, with an incinerator slated to be built to manage the trash problem. In all three cases, community organizations formed and mobilized in opposition to the incinerator projects. How these organizations came into being—and what made some of their efforts more successful and more durable than others—are questions I hoped to answer when I first headed to Beijing in 2009.
A COMMUNITY TOUR
The first time I visited Community Meadow, on the west side of Beijing, it was a very cold day in the dead of winter. It was my first venture into one of the middle-class homeowners’ gated communities that are now common throughout Chinese cities, a historical trend described in chapter 1. Because middle-class gated communities in China are referred to as “communities” in conventional literature,1 I use the word “community” when describing these housing complexes. This concept is similar, in the physical sense, to the idea of a “tertiary-street community”: residential units organized in aggregations of low-traffic intersections and street blocks that are accessible by pedestrians without requiring them to cross a major road.2 In this setting, several gated communities make up what I refer to as a “neighborhood”: a larger area in which several gated communities are situated, incorporating local amenities, schools, parks . . . and landfills.3
I arranged for the visit after learning that Community Meadow homeowners had organized to protest against incinerator construction, which led the government to postpone the project until further environmental evaluations were made. At the time of our meeting, the homeowners were still anxiously waiting to hear back from municipal agencies. I was fortunate to be able to access this community through a personal connection with a staff member of an environmental nonprofit organization. Had it not been for his work with homeowners on trash separation that year, I—a California resident with roots in Taiwan—would have been unlikely to establish contact with local residents. The trip gave me the opportunity to understand the newly formed associational relationships through the eyes of homeowners, to learn how they made sense of their surroundings, including shared spaces in the gated community, the local restaurant and event space, the polluting brick factory nearby, and the landfill.
The gated community was different from what I had pictured when imagining housing for thousands of people adjacent to a landfill. I expected to find a run-down, underdeveloped area, but the surroundings were spacious, with blocks of attractive, newly constructed buildings. Beyond the concrete walls that enclosed the community, the residential buildings were each around eight stories high, with dozens of buildings arranged in clustered complexes spanning the equivalent of several city blocks. The buildings were bright and colorful—orange and yellow—juxtaposing the gray sky.
I approached a security guard at one of the entrances to the community. He directed me to a clipboard on which all visitors were required to sign in, reflecting surveillance that would only intensify in the years to come. Walking through the complex, I passed by community courtyards in which a handful of older residents walked with their grandchildren, all wearing winter coats and face masks. A community pond was surrounded by small stone stools. The landscaping was meticulous and beautiful, despite the freezing temperatures, and I was in awe of the vastness of the grounds and the abundance of shared communal spaces. In Beijing—a city known for its congested sidewalks, streets, traffic, and public transportation—it is uncommon to experience such spaciousness. While there are sizable city parks, I had never before seen such large residential community spaces (figure 0.1).
Although I was beginning to understand how the space fostered interaction among residents, it was hard for me to imagine that an environmental resistance movement had emerged in this quiet community. I was still more surprised after meeting the movement’s unlikely leader, Huang laoshi (“teacher”), profiled in chapter 3 and 4. Huang laoshi, then seventy years old, had a stern demeanor, walking and talking briskly.4 He told me that, like many of the other community homeowners, he had saved money to buy one of the newly built commodity apartments (shangping fang) in preparation for retirement. He had moved in less than five years before my visit and lived with his wife, daughter, son-in-law, and a grandson, whom he cared for during the day. Family life seemed to keep him occupied, yet he had somehow found time to organize for collective action.
I encountered the first of many seeming contradictions in the community’s approach to waste management when we passed by a long row of trash and recycling bins near one of the community entrances. The Beijing municipal government was promoting trash separation—a policy that
Source
FIGURE 0.1. Community Meadow, a typical middle-class gated community in urban China.
: Photos provided by homeowners.
started around the time of the 2008 Olympics, when an influx of international visitors overwhelmed Beijing landfills—encouraging urban residents to recycle to alleviate the growing urban waste problem. Curious about the success of this effort, I lifted a few of the lids and saw trash in every bin, regardless of whether it was labeled as trash or recycling. It was striking that a community that would protest the city’s plans to deal with excess trash through incineration was slow to participate in this individual-level effort to reduce the volume of its trash. Later, as explained in chapters 3 and 4, I came to better understand how little information many of the residents had acquired and how difficult it was for them to assemble effective, coherent, and consistent environmental proposals.
Exiting the gates of Community Meadow, we crossed the street to a restaurant, where we met with two of Huang loashi’s friends, Ms. Yu and Mr. Wu. While Ms. Yu was also a resident of Community Meadow, Mr. Wu lived in a gated community across the street, Community Pine. Although each community contained around two thousand households, Ms. Yu, who was in her late forties and employed as a university administrator, seemed to know people throughout the larger neighborhood area encompassing several gated communities, including Community Pine and nearby Community Willow. “She’s like the auntie of the neighborhood,” Huang laoshi told me, indicating the trust she had earned throughout the adjacent gated communities. The two homeowners had initially met on the online forum of Community Meadow, which Ms. Yu had joined to meet other homeowners and organize bulk purchases of home improvement items among residents. This strategy of connecting residents beyond community gates, further explored in chapter 3, turned out to be a powerful tool for amplifying resistance efforts.
Ms. Yu was the first to describe the landfill, located less than a mile away, to me. “You know, you don’t smell the stench now,” she told me, referring to the winter months, “but I sleep with a wet towel on my face in the summer, and the windows have to be closed. I consistently have nightmares about porta potties!” I tried to imagine this all-pervasive odor, but nothing at the time seemed particularly amiss about this neighborhood, which reminded me of my own California home with its walkability and the residents’ easy familiarity with one another and with the restaurant owners and staff.
After our meal, Ms. Yu spoke with the servers about holding an event in the restaurant’s upstairs space, exhibiting her networking skills as the
unofficial neighborhood event planner and liaison. I left with Mr. Wu, the third homeowner at the table, a Beijinger in his late seventies with a thick local accent. He took me for a drive around the neighborhood in his clunky car, which seemed out of place among the sleek new residential buildings. Mr. Wu spoke passionately, arms waving, as he cruised down the middle of the quiet street with little regard to traffic lanes or signs.
Just beyond the neighborhood, he pointed out a crumbling brick building, telling me it was an old Japanese-era brick factory that currently emitted a lot of pollution.5 It was evident that he viewed local air quality with great concern. He told me that he was excited that his forty-year-old son, who lived with him in Community Pine, was also starting to become interested in environmental issues. He asked if I had any articles on incinerators in the United States that I could share with his son, demonstrating an understanding that these issues were frequently discussed outside China. I was impressed with his expansive view of the topic.
Upon arriving at the landfill, we parked on the side of the street, next to a row of small, gray, single-story concrete houses. Mr. Wu explained that landfill workers lived in these tiny dwellings, which contrasted sharply with the bright and modern buildings of the gated communities. The air was thick with woodsmoke from their chimneys, though I noticed that Mr. Wu did not comment on this form of air pollution. Despite the freezing temperature, some of the workers had their doors open, which, from the smoke coming out of them, I perceived to be a measure to reduce the toxicity of the indoor air.
As we walked past these homes, Mr. Wu spoke expertly on seasonal wind directions and nearby weather stations that tracked meteorological data. Around us, plastic bags were strewn everywhere. They littered the hill we trekked up to view the landfill and were speared on the twigs of barren shrubs. It was the first time I had seen a landfill up close. It was more a large pit than a mound, and some of the trash was covered with tarps (figure 0.2). Everything seemed to be frozen. Although I understood that the landfill’s proximity was worrisome for residents, I couldn’t entirely understand why there had been such an uproar.
It was only on my second visit that I truly comprehended how the presence of the landfill affected homeowners. When I stepped off the bus in the heat of July the following year, I was immediately met with a wall of humidity infused with the pungent stench of rotting trash. I saw the landfill
FIGURE 0.2. A landfill in winter.
in the winter, but I most certainly smelled the landfill in the summer. The odor permeated every corner of Community Meadow. It was unbearable to walk around without a face mask, and even then, it was as if the putrid air was stuck within the mask, endlessly recycled.
Encountering the stench in the summer made the descriptions provided by the three activists much more vivid for me. For the first time I came to understand the significance of the fact that Community Meadow, Pine, and Willow homeowners had purchased their properties without knowing that the landfill was there. As described in chapter 2, purchasing one of these homes at the time did not necessarily involve visiting the site, because many gated communities were still under construction. Aside from confirming that the school district was good and hearing from the developers that the area had “good winds, good water,” the homeowners with whom I spoke had learned very little about the area before moving in. Having purchased their homes in the early 2000s, they had not benefited from the now-widespread prevalence of online mapping. Even when I began fieldwork in Beijing in 2009, neither Google Maps (not blocked in China at the time) nor the local Baidu Maps was reliable. Buildings and residential complexes were mushrooming so quickly across the city in the early 2000s that mapping technology was struggling to catch up.
THE SPECIAL CASE OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTEST
Community Meadow residents and their Pine and Willow neighbors were not the only homeowners to encounter a smelly landfill surprise followed by unannounced incinerator construction in the mid-2000s. Community Marigold (toward the northwest of the city) and Community Rose (in the east) encountered the same problem. As discussed in chapter 1, such environmental threats were stains on the rising trends of middle-class accomplishment, wealth accumulation, and improved quality of life. Despite the considerable achievement of homeowner status, newly middle-class residents could not escape landfills and incinerators in their backyards. Urban trash problems were so ubiquitous that one homeowner described the situation to me as “not even being able to move elsewhere in the city, because incinerators were following us everywhere.”
The incinerator protests in these communities reflect a larger trend of environmental resistance in China coinciding with rapid urbanization across
cities. Of all the mass protests that mobilized ten thousand or more participants in China between 2000 and 2013, more than half were documented as environmental incidents.6 According to another estimate, protests against environmental pollution in the early 2000s increased at an annual rate of 29 percent.7 Most environmental incidents involve only crowds of a few dozen or brief demonstrations that are quickly dispersed, but a few evolve into larger-scale mobilizations.
Based on my estimates, at least two dozen specifically middle-class protests against factory pollution or construction projects involving more than several hundred people were documented by the Chinese media between 2006 and 2014. A prominent case was the anti-paraxylene protest in Xiamen (in southern China) in 2007, where construction for a chemical plant had started without local residents being notified. City officials claimed that environmental evaluations by an expert panel had been completed before the project was green-lighted. Large-scale protests primarily comprising urban middle-class residents and “white-collar workers” were reported by various media outlets. Over the next eight years, similar antiparaxylene protests erupted in the cities of Dalian, Kunming, Chengdu, Ningbo, and Maoming.
Although mass collective action on environmental issues is still rare in China, it has the distinctive feature of being generally tolerated by the state. Environmental grievances are among the more permissible issues for collective action in the view of the Chinese government, as opposed to protests against human rights violations or religious demonstrations, which are perceived as problematically political. 8 While environmental collective action can also be political in nature, the state is rarely its direct target. Environmental protesters are more likely to focus on construction companies, management companies, or lower levels of government than on central authorities.
Because of this relative tolerance, in contrast to other types of protests that are denied media coverage, environmental protest events sometimes escape censorship. In China, where the state controls the media, government officials dictate what type of coverage and narrative framing are allowed. Articles covering protest events are often published online, then quickly taken down. Because of these government–press dynamics, journalists use different strategies for different types of activism in response to varying degrees of state control. For example, to bypass censorship, local
journalists may cover events occurring far away in other towns. Local media, on the other hand, self-censor or hide information about protests happening in their vicinity. It is not uncommon for the local press to report local protest stories only after they have been extensively covered by more remote publications.9
This delayed and circuitous reporting pattern is reflected in the experiences of Beijing homeowners in the three communities discussed in this book. Even when their anti-incinerator organizing timelines overlapped, they did not hear about one another’s struggles until after the events had ended. There was some limited local press coverage of each organizing effort, but the focus of such stories was often the engineering problem of urban trash, rather than the social and political organizing efforts of the homeowners.
The trash problem is one of many environmental issues China has begun to confront over the past three decades. Because the central government has focused its environmental efforts on problems arising with rapid urbanization, citizen protests can at times align with the government’s environmental initiatives.10 As a result, despite official reluctance to recognize protests in the media, environmental organizing provides a unique opportunity for Chinese citizens not only to form associational bonds but also to mobilize for collective action with less likelihood of state interference than with other types of protests.
The Beijing anti-incinerator protests discussed in this book are a special case within this special case, reflecting the confluence of homeowner identity and environmental awareness. The Xiamen anti-paraxylene protests did not originate in residential communities; rather, information was circulated predominantly by opinion leaders, scientists, and public intellectuals.11 In Maoming, anti-paraxylene protesters were from backgrounds of lower socioeconomic status, including rural farmers, unemployed youths, and shop workers. 12 The three anti-incinerator protests, in contrast, shared features with NIMBY (“not in my back yard”) movements in the United States, in which homeowners resist land development or construction projects in their neighborhoods. On the surface, it might seem that the primary motivation of these Beijing homeowners to oppose incinerator construction was to protect their property values. However, if this was the entirety of the explanation, then the landfill stench that had been plaguing residents since they moved in would also have triggered substantial NIMBY resistance,
but it did not. Environmental health concerns and perceptions of collective responsibility appear to have been the homeowners’ motivation.
This book’s deep dive into the experiences of three gated communities reveals that a sense of collective identity was a precondition for environmental action. It is important to note that NIMBY protests are not only location based—they are also made possible by strong place-based identities.13 The experiences of these communities offer a glimpse into the process of placebased identity formation, or what I refer to as “becoming homeowners and neighbors.” When faced with the landfill stench in their first year living in their new communities, homeowners did not yet have the civic capacity to mobilize for collective action. Three years later, however, owing to the connections established and skills developed in these communities, organizing had become a possibility, even though state responses (including soft or hard repression) shaped both the durability of community organizing and homeowners’ sense of civic duty beyond their gates.
BECOMING A MIDDLE-CLASS HOMEOWNER IN CHINA
The mid-2000s is a unique time period to observe in urban China because of the massive wave of housing commercialization, described in more detail in chapter 1. The scope of this urban transformation in Beijing is staggering: thousands of new homeowners moved into hundreds of new gated communities in the same city at around the same time. Cities across China began implementing housing reforms in the 1980s, profoundly restructuring the known way of life for urban residents. Prior to the reforms, urban housing was provided mainly by the “work unit” (danwei) or, simply put, the workplace. Urban residents rarely encountered neighborhood amenities or conceived of social responsibilities outside the danwei. Their sense of belonging was centered on the work unit, rather than on their homes or neighborhood.14 After all, they did not own their housing. Residents were organized by occupation, living in spaces regulated by state-owned enterprises and local governments. Health care, education, and employment were all provided by the workplace. Work-unit residents had little control over the quality of their housing, and homeownership was not possible as an ordinary citizen under the danwei system.15 Urban lives looked similar for most—differences in social class based on housing or lifestyle were hardly discernible.
ENVIRONMENTAL
ORGANIZING in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities, where many firsttime homeowners found their new neighborhoods facing waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, Jean Yen-chun Lin demonstrates how a risi ng middle class acquires the capacity for organizing in an authoritarian context. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organizing.
“By offering a textured account of the way space enables civic life to flourish in China, this beautiful book urgently reminds us that even in nondemocratic contexts, people can do great things when they join together to put their hands on the levers of change.”
— HAHRIE HAN, STAVROS NIARCHOS FOUNDATION PROFESSOR OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, INAUGURAL DIRECTOR, SNF AGORA INSTITUTE, JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY
“Transcending conventional depictions of environmental justice politics, A Spark in the Smokestacks provides a rich and compelling portrait of how three communities in Beijing were able to mobilize their civic capacity to fight environmental harms. Lin’s impressive study deserves broad attention in sociology, political science, environmental studies, and beyond.”
— EDWARD T. WALKER, AUTHOR OF GRASSROOTS FOR HIRE: PUBLIC AFFAIRS CONSULTANTS IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
“By systematically examining the intersection of environmental activism and the development of middle-class communities in China, A Spark in the Smokestacks offers fresh evidence and original insights on a very important topic. Lin’s extensive and systematic comparative analysis and prolonged fieldwork have produced rich empirical evidence and in-depth analysis. This book will be a welcome and valuable addition to the fields of China studies and contentious politics.”
— XI CHEN, AUTHOR OF SOCIAL PROTEST AND CONTENTIOUS AUTHORITARIANISM IN CHINA
JEAN YEN-CHUN LIN is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, East Bay.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK cup.columbia.edu
Cover design: Noah Arlow Cover image: Shutterstock
