From grey mountains to gold mountains: ecological civilization discourse and the legitimation of environmental transition in Jinyun County, China

This paper uses a case study of China’s Jinyun County in Zhejiang Province to analyse how the country’s local governments translate and legitimize the nation’s ecological civilization discourse. Rather than focusing solely on top-down accounts that emphasize national policy narratives and institutional design, this paper explored how ecological transition was discursively constructed, adapted, and made meaningful within specific local contexts. Employing a discourse-historical approach within critical discourse analysis, this paper analysed the Jinyun County Government Work Reports (2016–2025) alongside community-level interviews and institutional oral histories from Gao Fan Village and Xiandu District. The paper examined the discursive strategies employed by local authorities to reframe ecology as a developmental asset linked to tourism, the ecological industry, rural revitalization, and village beautification. The findings indicate that ecological transition results from the interplay of environmental governance, discursive transformation, market restructuring, safety regulation, and tangible improvements in daily life. This article contends that ecological civilization serves as a legitimizing communicative framework that renders broader political–economic transformations coherent, credible, and publicly meaningful within the context of contemporary Chinese environmental governance.