Book Review: Circular Ecologies
Book review of Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China, by Amy Zhang (2024)
Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China, by Amy Zhang (2024). Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press.
In the last 20 years, Chinese cities have faced a waste crisis emblematic of the paradoxes of rapid socio-economic development. Even as personal consumption, state-led capitalism, and export-driven industrialization have brought unprecedented prosperity to China, these dynamics have also turned waste management into a pressing urban challenge. In 2018, World Economic Forum projected that China’s household waste would double that of the United States by 2030 (2), emphasizing the urgency of rethinking ecological governance. Amy Zhang’s Circular Ecologies offers a timely ethnographic intervention, interrogating how Guangzhou’s pursuit of the “sustainable world city” status illuminates the contested intersections of waste, labor, and power found within China’s versions of urban environmentalism. Building on works in political ecology, STS, and governance studies, Zhang reframes the problem of waste not as a technical one but rather as a prism for analyzing the contradictions of ecological modernization, revealing how state-led and grassroots-initiated efforts both collaboratively reconfigure perceptions of value and marginalize informal labor in contemporary China.
Zhang’s analysis is rooted in the politico-economic reality of post-reform China; the state’s prioritization of urban consumerism and export-oriented growth after the 1980s transformed metropolises such as Guangzhou into zones of capital accumulation, yet infrastructural planning lagged behind the deluge of waste generated by the country’s newly affluent middle-class households. This contradiction, as Zhang argues, exposes the fissures in China’s technocratic environmental governance—which seeks to align ecological sustainability with market-driven growth, while obscuring the livelihoods and ecological balance sacrificed in the process. The book’s central contribution, thus, lies in its refusal to treat waste as a mere byproduct of development and as a case specific to China; instead, Zhang positions it as a relational materiality that mediates state power, capital flows, and subaltern and more-than-human forms of agency.
Circular Ecologies unfolds across five ethnographically rich chapters, each exploring a different dimension of Guangzhou’s evolving waste-management regime. From these chapters, three interrelated themes emerge that define the book’s core contribution to existing anthropological scholarship. The first theme centers on Zhang’s analysis of the state’s reliance on techno-scientific solutions to environmental crises. As illustrated in Chapter 2, Guangzhou’s waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerators exemplify how state-led environmentalism depoliticizes ecological issues by presenting them as technical problems to be solved through innovation. By framing incineration as a “green” fix, the state obscures the systemic causes of waste—such as overconsumption—and relocates the attendant environmental harm to rural and marginalized areas, where incinerators are typically located. Zhang situates this further within broader anthropological critiques of neoliberal environmental governance, showing how technocratic approaches not only legitimize state authority but also deepen spatial and class-based inequalities. Through this analysis, she exposes the contradictions at the heart of China’s state-led and developmentalist model of achieving ecological modernity.
Informal labor and the hidden circuits of value, the second theme, emerge from the book’s focus on marginalized actors—informal scrap collectors (Chapter 1), migrant sanitation workers (Chapter 4), and eco-enzyme brewers (Chapter 5)—whose labor sustains Guangzhou’s circular economy yet remains excluded from official narratives. Zhang reveals how the state’s aestheticized urbanism (“waste-free cities”) ignores these workers, even as their informal networks enable material circulation and disposal. Informal scrap traders who are unlicensed refer to themselves as “guerrillas” (youjidui) and their work, which often happens in the early morning to avoid inspections and street patrols, as “guerrilla warfare” (dayouji). Early in the morning, the guerrillas’ trucks arrive just as urban patrols were ending their shifts. Unlicensed waste workers quickly formed informal marketplaces to trade scrap materials, often bribing local officers to look the other way so that they can remain in business (39). Operating unlicensed micro-enterprises in a legal gray area, these informal workers navigate forms of spatial displacement so as to ensure the circulation and deposal of waste in metropolises like Guangzhou (42). Registered sanitation workers, on the other hand, face marginalization and social stigma and are often seen as dirty and inefficient, especially in light of Guangzhou’s citizen-led recycling initiatives (109). This tension between visibility and erasure represents a form of infrastructural violence, revealing how a developmentalist model of the circular economy might prioritize abstract resource flows over the lived experiences of waste workers and residents on China’s urban peripheries.
Chapter 3 further examines the politics of middle-class activism and explores how discourse shapes environmental conflict. Zhang analyzes how middle-class homeowners in Guangzhou opposed the construction of a waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerator by framing their resistance in narrowly technical terms—focusing on emissions data, health risks, and scientific uncertainty. Middle-class and peri-urban homeowners in the megacity’s Huadu District—possessing greater sociocultural capital than informal waste workers—amplified concerns about the inseparability of body and land (90). Identifying themselves as laobaixing (“commoners”), these activists were galvanized by circulating rumors about the WTE facility and petitioned municipal authorities for information on how the site selection would affect local health (99). They argued that greater scientific and bureaucratic transparency could help dispel the public’s suspicion and reduce the spread of rumors (100). Navigating China’s constrained political landscape, these citizens strategically avoided overtly political language in order to sidestep censorship. Rather than mobilizing around claims of rights, harm, or distributive justice—as is common in environmentalist movements in liberal democratic contexts—their protests were cast in the ostensibly apolitical language of scientific critique and bureaucratic procedure. This mode of engagement, as Zhang asserts, is not merely a capitulation to state authority but reflects a sophisticated political tactic: the use of technical expertise as a form of contention that enables agency within the framework of state-led environmentalism.
In this context, Zhang complicates prevailing anthropological accounts that often portray China’s middle class as complicit with state governance or motivated purely by self-interest. While some scholars interpret such protests through the framework of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard)—a term coined in 1980s California to describe propertied residents’ resistance to unwanted local infrastructure, yet which seldom leads to broader political engagement—Zhang reinterprets this concept through the lens of China’s distinct political and discursive context; she demonstrates that what may seem to be narrow, place-based activism confined to middle-class peri-urban communities is, in fact, embedded within a broader negotiation over the legitimacy of state-sponsored science and the limits of public participation.
Indeed, Zhang’s ethnographic intervention situates these homeowner protests within a broader discursive formation that she terms “dialogue across space” (gekong duihua), in which citizens and the state engage through mediated, technocratic channels. Zhang compares this mode of engagement with what linguistic anthropologist Francis Cody describes as a “discursive public” (2011)—a large-scale political subject formed through shared concerns and mediated communication. In Zhang’s account, the middle-class citizens’ invocation of scientific rationality and bureaucratic procedural language constitutes a kind of public, allowing them to participate in ecological governance without directly confronting the political authority of the state. In relation to the activism against the WTE facility on the Guangzhou periphery, Zhang shows that such engagement occurred both online and offline, often through institutionalized channels such as citizen-authored news editorials and online forums. In these spaces, participants assessed and questioned WTE technologies and related policies from a technical perspective (96–97). In this way, the book offers a nuanced rethinking of environmental activism under state-led ecological governing models, enriching anthropological debates on agency, discourse, and the forms of political life possible within state-managed ecologies.
In the conclusion of Circular Ecologies, Zhang explores the grassroots practice of eco-enzyme brewing, through which many Guangzhou residents ferment organic waste—typically kitchen scraps or produce—into cleaning agents (130). Historically, these efforts emerged within middle-class neighborhoods (xiaoqu), where community members sought to address the root causes of the waste crisis by reducing household waste at its source. Community-funded workshops taught participants to make eco-enzymes (also known as “garbage enzymes”), thus framing waste not as a nuisance but as a resource for ecological experimentation. Organized by former anti-incineration activists, these workshops again strategically emphasized fermentation techniques while adroitly sidestepping political discourse (132). Rather than directly confronting the state’s waste-management policies, participants pursued alternative forms of engagement through experimental collaboration with non-human agents such as microbes—an approach that reframes environmental action as an everyday intervention grounded in more-than-human relations. Offering a compelling example of the author’s engagement with multispecies ethnography, the chapter examines the interplay between human agency and microbial life—as an invisible form of labor in the transformation of waste. The grassroot-environmentalist practice of eco-enzyme brewing, grounded in everyday practices and traditional Chinese agricultural knowledge, reconfigures waste not as a disposable byproduct, but as a material for ecological regeneration, positioning microbial agents as active participants in the decomposition process.
Circular Ecologies makes three significant contributions to the anthropology of work. First, it provides a compelling political ecology of waste, revealing how waste materializes power relations and exposes broader political economies, particularly in the context of China’s rapid urbanization. Zhang examines the depoliticized sustainability narratives perpetuated by a state-led techno-optimistic model and explores how waste contributes to spatial inequalities. Second, through an examination of labor precarity and informal economies, Zhang highlights how waste-management policies disproportionately affect waste workers, linking urban informality and environmental justice. Lastly, Zhang revises simplistic portrayals of state-led environmentalism, showing how fragmented sovereignties and contested knowledge regimes shape China’s environmental governance. By focusing on the materiality of waste and labors of the human and non-human actors involved, Circular Ecologies updates anthropological understanding about how environmental issues are negotiated and re-imagined in contemporary China and, in doing so, enriches current debates on labor, ecology, and governance.
Reference
Cody, Francis. (2011) “Publics and Politics.” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (September): 37–52.
