China and the environment: The question of scale

This introduction analyzes the question of scale in relationships between China and the environment. Scholars across fields have long debated the role of scale, revealing how different scales—from political-economic systems to global processes—shape environmental change. China, with its vast size and global significance, provides a crucial case for investigating these dynamics and relations. First, dominant environmental narratives are interrogated, revealing contradictions between China's historical environmental legacies and its capacity for long-term ecological resilience as it becomes further incorporated within global capitalism. Following this, it introduces the contributions to this “Special Issue on China and the Environment” through the multiple lenses of scale, drawing on insights from environmental sociology, geography, and ecology. Environmental-sociological formulations of scale foreground micro, meso, and macro scales that correspond with different actors, processes, and relations. Overlapping with this understanding, geography and ecology see scale in terms of size, level, and relation and as situated in space and time. This introduction analyzes scale as both a critical framework for understanding China and the environment and as a method for circumventing contradictions embedded in common narratives of China and the environment. These include historical narratives that posit either degradation or resilience, as well as narratives that emphasize China's particularism or challenge Chinese exceptionalism. We argue for a politics of scale as a method for analyzing China's relationship with the environment. In this, we call for explicit attention to the multi-scalar processes and relations across space and time, which can account for historical context, uneven power dynamics, and socio-ecological relations.