Running in Circles?: Visions of Circular Economies from Mao to Xi
Monday, March 24, 2025 | 4:00PM-5:30PM | SOS B40 | RSVP

Join us for an engaging discussion on development, waste and environmental governance in China moderated by Prof. Joshua Goldstein, EASC Director and Professor of History and East Asian Languages and Cultures. Our speakers will explore how visions of a “circular economy” have been integral to the PRC state’s visions of development across decades of tumultuous and transformative change. From Mao-era policies of "comprehensive utilization" that sought a uniquely Socialist solution to the elimination of wastes to today’s China where hundreds of waste-to-energy incinerators are presented as a circular solution to the country’s explosive growth in post-consumer wastes, our speakers explore over 50 years of “circular economy” in China. 

Panelists

Amy Zhang 
Bio: Amy Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at New York University. She is an anthropologist and political ecologist whose research investigates environment, technology, labor, and urban life. Her first book Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China (Stanford University Press, 2024), is a study of the implementation of technologies and infrastructures to modernize a mega-city's waste management system, and the grassroots ecological politics that emerged.  

Talk: Waste’s Technopolitics in Urban China
Starting in the early 2000s, Chinese policymakers came to see waste management as an object of environmental governance central to the creation of “modern” cities, and experimented with the circular economy, in which technology and policy could convert all forms of waste back into resource. This talk traces the impact of the deployment of WTE incinerators in Guangzhou, as the preferred technological solution for realizing the circular economy. The building of new WTE incinerators on the city’s peri-urban edge, elicited a diverse range of techno-scientific engagement by both villagers and the middle-class. Experiments with the circular economy facilitated not only displacement but new forms of techno-scientific articulations and engagements between rural and urban dwellers. 
 

Brian Spivey
Bio: Brian Spivey is a historian of modern China whose research focuses on the study the environmental and social changes brought about by China’s dramatic and uneven industrialization in the twentieth century. He completed his PhD in History at the University of California, Irvine in 2023 and was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at UC Irvine from 2023-2024. This year, he will begin a multiyear research postdoc at the Centre on China in the World at The Australian National University. His book project, Pollution Revolution: Maoism, Environmentalism, and the Consequences of Industrialization in Modern China, is a history of the origins and character of concerns about environmental degradation and sustainability in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

Talk: Comprehensive Utilization: Eliminating Waste and the Socialist Solution to Pollution
In this talk, Brian Spivey examines how the resource management framework of "comprehensive utilization" (综合利用) evolved in Maoist China from the 1950s to the 1970s. In the resource-scarce 1950s, comprehensive utilization emerged as a frugal, anti-waste philosophy aimed at maximizing industrial output through holistic production planning that eliminated any and all waste. In the early 1970s, Chinese leaders retranslated this framework as their primary solution for reconciling industrial growth with environmental protection, positioning it as the cornerstone of a Maoist environmentalism.