China has become renowned in recent years for a model of top-down, technocentric and efficient environmental policy. On the ground, however, policy making and implementation – as well as the ideas and worldviews that shape them – are constantly being negotiated, redefined and contested.
In a recent book, China’s Camel Country, anthropologist Thomas White uncovers how traditional camel pastoralism in western Inner Mongolia has transformed in the eyes of policy makers. From a source of environmental degradation, it has come to be seen as a precious cultural heritage worthy of conservation. This process has displayed all of the above dynamics. It demonstrates the complexity of environmental policymaking in a country as vast and diverse as China.
Dialogue Earth sat down with White to discuss his research and its significance in understanding how environmental policies are made and re-made in China.
Much of your book focuses on the re-definition of camel-based “pastoralism” in Chinese official discourse – from a source of ecological problems to a unique cultural heritage. Tell us about how this unfolded and its relevance to Inner Mongolian environment and culture.
Thomas White: Pastoralism refers to an extensive kind of animal husbandry that tends to rely on collectively managed, natural grasslands. It has long been treated as problematic in Chinese official discourse, since it has been seen as “backward” and relatively economically unproductive. In recent decades, it has also been accused of destroying the grasslands and causing desertification, although this is disputed by many ecologists. As a result, since the beginning of the 21st century, pastoralism in China has faced a variety of restrictions, including on the number of animals that herders can keep, as well as when and where they can graze their animals. In some cases, pastoralists have even been resettled away from the grasslands.
For many ethnic Mongols in Inner Mongolia, pastoralism remains a central part of what it means to be Mongol, even though the actual proportion of ethnic Mongols who are pastoralists is quite small. In my book I show how in Alasha, a region in the far west of Inner Mongolia, local Mongols sought to push back against the policies targeting pastoralism by reframing it as a distinctive form of local heritage. This meant focusing on the heritage value of camel husbandry, since the camels are strongly associated with arid and remote Alasha. Partly as a result of these efforts, and others which I discuss in the book, the camel was exempted from some of the strict limits on livestock numbers.
This emphasis on the local, however, also involved a de-emphasising of ethnic identity. That represented a strategic adaptation, on the part of those who wanted to defend pastoralism, to the broader political climate in China, in which the distinctive identity of ethnic minorities has increasingly been seen by the state as something problematic.
In the book I also discuss how this emphasis on pastoralism as heritage in Alasha has largely been confined to camels, because they are locally distinctive. This has meant that the sheep and goats on which most pastoralists in the region actually depend both for cash and for food have not been exempted from the state’s restrictions on pastoralism that are part of its environmental policies.
At the same time, you show how the emphasis on the heritage of pastoralism in Inner Mongolia is not simply nostalgia for old times, but also associated with progress and modernisation. Tell us a bit more about what you call “techno-pastoralism”.
As well as by foregrounding the heritage value of camel husbandry, advocates of pastoralism in Alasha tried to find other ways to make the case that this way of life should be supported by the state rather than targeted as backward and environmentally destructive. One of these was to propose a vision of mobile pastoralism enabled by technology, involving satellite tracking of camels and automatic watering troughs, for example. I refer to this as “techno-pastoralism”. This vision is an argument against the increasing enclosure of the grasslands with fences, which has been government policy in recent years.
According to its proponents, techno-pastoralism is ecologically beneficial, since camels would be free to adapt their movements according to the grass available, and fencing would not restrict their movements. Instead, they would be monitored via computers, with urbanised herders occasionally travelling to the countryside to round them up when necessary. This idea of technology-assisted pastoralism on open rangeland is also seen as in keeping with fundamental “nomadic” principles, since it enables the free movement of camel herds, as opposed to the more intensive version of animal husbandry on enclosed land which the state has promoted.
However, techno-pastoralism also aligns itself with the state’s vision of urbanisation as modernisation, since it imagines herders managing their animals remotely from the city. The proponents of techno-pastoralism were trying to counter the stigmatisation of pastoralism as backward and belonging in the past. But I think there are also problems with this vision, since it downplays the skills and knowledge of herders themselves. Techno-pastoralism does not conceive of herders as possessing “traditional ecological knowledge” about the grasslands or skills in livestock husbandry; instead, pastoralism is reimagined as something that happens with little human input.
Recently, however, there has been more emphasis on the skills involved in camel husbandry. This is bound up with a shift to camel dairying, catering to demand in Chinese cities, which the local government has been promoting as a key pillar of its rural development strategy. This is something that I address in the last chapter of the book. For a while, herders from across the border in Mongolia were being hired to train locals how to milk camels, since in many parts of Alasha these skills had been forgotten.
What do all these dynamics tell us about the nature of environmental protection and policy making in China? Is it a top-down process or shaped by bottom-up pressure, or a blend of both?
Recently, some scholars have emphasised the top-down, coercive nature of environmental governance in China. But I think it’s also important to realise that environmental policies are often implemented in quite locally-specific ways in China, even if the broad policy goals are set by the central government.
Much of the commentary on China’s environmental governance in pastoral regions has focused on certain policies such as “ecological migration” (resettlement away from the grasslands), since these are the most dramatic, and can involve coercion. But these policies have not been applied everywhere, and in many places herders instead have had to contend with increasing limits on the number of animals they can keep, for example. These limits have themselves not been applied consistently, even within Alasha. Local officials have sometimes been wary of applying these policies too strictly, to avoid social unrest, and also because it is not clear what livelihoods are available to herders if they cannot herd animals.
In addition, across pastoral regions, herders have sometimes been able to find ways around grassland conservation policies when they are implemented. For example, by putting out their animals to graze at night to avoid detection.
So when it comes to the actual implementation of environmental policies in China, I think it is a very complex picture, and on-the-ground research is vital to understand whether, how, and where certain policies are implemented, and to what degree locals are able to push back or get around them.
How has the advent of the Belt and Road Initiative – sometimes called the “new Silk Road” – reshaped pastoralists’ understanding of their place in China’s past, present and future? And how has this shaped their relations with the state?
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is heavily associated with Chinese foreign policy. But my work has shown how it has also been important domestically, particularly in China’s borderlands. Those who would defend pastoralism in Alasha have drawn on the ideas of the Silk Road to emphasise the importance of the region’s camels to Chinese history. If camels once represented backwardness and remoteness, they can now be associated with a history of Eurasian connectivity, to which China sees itself returning. So camels now point to the future as well as the past.
Alasha has long been thought of as something of a remote backwater, but this has been changing with the BRI. The emphasis on connections between China and Eurasia has led to a reimagining of the position of Alasha within China, since it now can be thought of as a kind of gateway, rather than the back of beyond. New infrastructure in the region, which has been linked to the BRI, is making it more connected both to other parts of China, but also to neighbouring Mongolia.
Mongol scientists interested in supporting camel husbandry have also been using the rhetoric of the BRI to promote exchanges with camel scientists in BRI countries. The idea of the New Silk Road has been important here. These exchanges with international camel scientists have often centred around the development of camel dairying, which is where many see the future of camel herding in the region. So what we see are attempts to reframe a once stigmatised livelihood – camel husbandry – as something which is aligned with the signature policy of Xi Jinping, and as something which contains significant economic potential. This is yet another way in which Mongols in Alasha have attempted to defend pastoralism.
