Campaign-style environmental enforcement that involves the destruction of infrastructure has become increasingly common. Scholars have theorized such crackdowns as a form of bureaucratic control. These explanations are compelling, yet incomplete. This paper adopts an infrastructural lens to call attention to the fact of infrastructural demolition. I argue that the reduction of existing infrastructure to rubble is a way of clearing space for other kinds of infrastructure, specifically natural infrastructure, which has become central in the pursuit of ecological civilization. The creation of natural infrastructure requires calculative tools, which work to obscure the profoundly political nature of the natural infrastructure that they create through spatial zoning, ecological functional zoning and ecological conservation red lines (ECRLs). The article then scales down to two case studies of villages in post-earthquake Sichuan that are within ECRLs and designated for the function of providing ecosystem services. In both, infrastructure within scenic areas that was previously encouraged by the state and central to village livelihoods was suddenly destroyed following ecological civilization enforcement campaigns. The arrival of natural infrastructure marks a national-scale infrastructural time that promises a new future in which village-controlled scenic areas have no part, leading to a ruination of their imagined futures.

Situated far from coastal cities and foreign concessions, Chengdu yields insights into the role of the local press and its specific publics in the political evolution of the late Qing and early Republic. Despite its remote location, Chengdu developed its own modern press in the late Qing, relying on print entrepreneurs and modern journalists recruited from the ranks of the local literati and traditional sociability, in particular teahouses. They all played a role in forming a modern reading public which came to understand itself as a distinct local political community in dynamic interaction with national politics and transnational networks. The local press evinced three successive but intertwined ideals of publicness: as a link between the state and the people and a vector of enlightenment, as a professional forum for public opinion and as a tool for political mobilization. In solidifying public opinion around the local community, the press served as a forum and catalyst for political activism in the 1911 Railroad Protection movement and the 1919 May Fourth movement, events which were shaped as much by local dynamics as they were by national developments.

With rapid urbanization worldwide, most people now live in cities, but the effects of urbanization on knowledge about the natural environment is not well studied. Due to the importance of Cymbidium to Chinese traditional culture, we tested how urbanization influences the distribution of orchid knowledge across various knowledge domains at risk of loss due to declining orchid populations. Participants in the Cymbidium trade were interviewed in three distinct urbanization-level jurisdictions in Sichuan, China: Puge (low urbanization), Huili (moderate urbanization) and Chengdu (high urbanization). Using photographic cue-cards of nine Cymbidium taxa, we assessed aggregate and specific knowledge held by 91 orchid collectors/traders across the urbanization gradient. Contrary to expectations, we found that urbanization and orchid knowledge were positively related, but this varied by knowledge type, with moderate urbanization showing significantly higher knowledge in two domains. Our findings suggest that a generalizable understanding of how urbanization affects knowledge must account for differences in knowledge types and geographic/cultural scales, with implications for biocultural diversity conservation in an increasingly urban world.

The Chengdu plain of south-west China lies outside the main centres of early domestication in the Huanghe and Yangzi valleys, but its importance in Chinese prehistory is demonstrated by the spectacular Sanxingdui bronzes of the second millennium BC and by the number of walled enclosures of the third millennium BC associated with the Baodun culture. The latter illustrate the development of social complexity. Paradoxically, however, these are not the outcome of a long settled agricultural history but appear to be associated with the movement of the first farming communities into this region. Recent excavations at the Baodun type site have recovered plant remains indicating not only the importance of rice cultivation, but also the role played by millet in the economy of these and other sites in south-west China. Rice cultivation in paddy fields was supplemented by millet cultivation in neighbouring uplands. Together they illustrate how farmers moving into this area from the Middle Yangzi adjusted their cultivation practices to adapt to their newly colonised territories.

After more than three decades of extremely rapid industrial growth, China faces an environmental public health crisis. In this article, I examine pollution in the rural industrial sector and its implications for community health. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in an industrial township in rural Sichuan, including interviews with government officials, environmental regulators, industrial workers and local residents, I explore how community members understand the linkages between air and water pollution from nearby factories and their health and well-being. The article has two main goals. The first is to examine the various ways in which uncertainty about pollution sources, about the severity of pollution levels and about the links between pollution and human health shapes villagers' experiences of pollution on a day-to-day basis. The second goal is to examine the rising trend of “individualization” taking place in China today and explore how this process is related to people's experiences of toxic exposure. I consider the implications of this trend for how social scientists should approach the study of environmental illness in contemporary China.

A revisionist literature on the Great Chinese Famine has emerged in recent years. These revisionists focus primarily on the question of agency. They claim that that neither poor weather nor the excesses of local cadres can explain the extent of mortality; rather, responsibility lies squarely with Mao and the CCP leadership. Using county-level data on mortality, output, rainfall and temperature for Sichuan province, I argue that this revisionist view is unconvincing. Weather admittedly played only a minor role, and the zealotry of the Party centre contributed significantly to the death toll. However, variations in mortality between Sichuan's counties appear to have been essentially random – suggesting that differences in local cadre responses to central government policy were decisive in determining the scale of famine.

Records of the Vulnerable Chinese mountain cat Felis bieti are known from the eastern border of the Tibetan Plateau, mostly from Qinghai province, but also from other areas further north, east and north-west. Disagreement regarding the reliability of some records has led to uncertainty about the species' distribution. In order to obtain information about its current distribution and status we conducted surveys in various Chinese provinces and evaluated former records and specimens. Forty-five specimens and living individuals were examined, and 189 records were gathered from local sources. Our data confirm that this cat is endemic to China, and occurs in montane forest edge, alpine shrubland and meadow habitats. At present it is confined to the provinces of eastern Qinghai and northern Sichuan. Its wild populations are facing a number of threats and environmental pressures such as poaching, use of chemical rodenticides, and environmental changes. We recommend moving this species to Category I of Chinese law, enforcement of its protection in reserves, and the establishment of new reserves, specifically for this species, in areas in which it is currently unprotected.