Beyond Localized Environmental Contention: Horizontal and Vertical Diffusion in a Chinese Anti-Incinerator Campaign

Abstract

Environmental contention is mounting all across China. In particular, protests against environmentally hazardous construction projects have become a frequent phenomenon, spreading well beyond China’s major cities. While these protests are gaining academic attention, they have mostly been analysed as separate phenomena in isolation from each other. Moreover, such grievance-based environmental contention has largely been investigated separately from ‘environmentalist’ activism underpinned by environmental organizations and broader environmental concerns. Yet recent protests against the construction of facilities such as waste incinerators and industrial facilities reveal the emergence of linkages and diffusion processes between cases and actors that challenge depictions of Chinese environmental contention as a necessarily purely localized and parochial affair. This article examines this new development in Chinese environmental activism through a detailed case study of an anti-incinerator campaign centred on a village in Hebei Province. It shows how linkages emerged horizontally between local residents and community activists involved in anti-incinerator campaigns elsewhere, and vertically between villagers and members of China’s nascent ‘no burn’ community, a group of actors highly critical of waste incineration in China. This article concludes that both types of linkages were crucial for the development and success of the villagers’ campaign. Although the opportunity for upward scale-shift based on active intra-community collaboration remains highly constrained, vertical ties and non-relational horizontal linkages ensure that the impact of environmental campaigns reaches beyond the immediate localities in which they occur.