“Actually Existing Sustainabilities” in Urban China: National Initiatives and Local Contestations

While the United States under the Trump administration frames environmental initiatives and related governance measures as detrimental to economic development, China thinks the opposite. Since the 1990s, the Chinese national government has promoted a series of urban sustainability initiatives starting from the Hygiene City and the Garden City to more recent campaigns of the Eco-City, the Low-Carbon City, and the Smart City. Under these newer initiatives, China frames sustainability as an important strategic tool to upgrade industries in its urban areas and facilitate its economic restructuring to assure a postindustrial, consumer-oriented society. This article reviews these Chinese urban sustainability initiatives and their underlying rationales and examines their implementation on the ground. Drawing from field research of Dongtan and Tianjin Eco-cities, this article explores how urban sustainability initiatives change people's livelihoods in ways that are expected and unexpected. Based on the Chinese experience, this article wraps up with a discussion of the varying meanings of “actually existing sustainabilities” in the context of the Global South. The varying meanings of “actually existing sustainabilities” also suggest that China cannot, and should not, be understood from the North American and Western European sustainability research tradition that assumes a reactive middle-class environmental movement and a bottom-up, egalitarian disposition in a postindustrial, neoliberal context.