China’s “Cancer Villages”: The Social, Political, and Economic Contexts of Pollution

Chapter 2 examines the emergence of China’s “cancer villages”—village-sized clusters of high cancer incidence—and their significance. It overviews how media accounts discursively shaped their social, political and epistemological nature. It develops a typology of cancer villagers based on a close analysis of a selected number of cases examined in recent qualitative research (Chen et al 2013). These relatively high-profile, politically active cases provide a useful background against which to compare the less visibly active case studies examined in later chapters. They illustrate a broader range of activist practices, but they also show that such strategies are often ineffective. Ultimately, these examples suggest that “cancer villages” are not an epidemiologically uncontested label but rather a cultural, social, economic and political phenomenon. Further, they prove that scientific evidence is not the most important element in gaining redress. Rather, it is socio-economic contexts, the persistence of the local population’s complaints and their ability to threaten social stability which largely determines the ways in which polluting firms and the local government may respond. This point is further supported by the book’s three case studies, in which scientific evidence plays a relatively minor role in villagers’ reckonings about environmental health effects and in their demands for redress.

“Undermining” Environmental Health: “Madness,” Struggles for Clean Water, and the Challenges of Intervention

Chapter 4 describes the diachronic evolution of lead and zinc mining in Qiancun village and its effects. Mining entrenched socio-economic stratification and caused shifting and uneven environmental health impacts. It affected livelihood pathways available to the local population, their perceptions of the benefits and effects of mining, and the ways in which they valued the environment. This chapter takes a closer look at how dynamics of resigned activism overlapped with marginalisation and accusations of “madness” waged against one of the foremost figures in local activism. It explores the intersections between one issue which particularly troubled locals—provision of safe drinking water—local politics and lack of trust in local officials. While concerns with water served to unify the local population, which reinforced feelings of resignation. Finally, the chapter elucidates some of the dynamics animating the interdisciplinary project of which my fieldwork was part and some of the elements which shaped what experimental intervention pathways were explored and embraced at an early stage in this ongoing project.

“Toxic Culture”: The Spectrum and Origins of Resigned Activism

Chapter 3 begins to flesh out the contours of resigned activism through the case of Baocun village, a major site for phosphorous mining and fertiliser production. It shows how industrialisation deeply diversified the local population, ranging from poor migrants to wealthy business owners and bore unequal effects on them: while some are better positioned to take advantage of opportunities, others suffer a precarious existence affected by socio-economic marginality and the slow violence of environmental health harm. It focuses most closely on unfolding processes of resignation among the migrant population—who stand to suffer the most from pollution—and poor locals. The chapter illustrates how financial dependence on polluting activities is a form of “disaffective labour” (cf. Hardt 1999) which pushes migrant workers and poor locals to take pollution and their precarious position for granted. They regard toxicity as a part of the natural environment and environmental afflictions on the body as “normal”. In this context, the value of life and parameters to define it are slowly but firmly altered.

Situating the Study of Rural China’s Environmental Health Activism

Chapter 1 situates the book vis-à-vis relevant literature on social movements, environmentalism, environmental health and these areas as they relate to China. In the first part, it suggests that environmentalism may take very diverse forms and it is powerfully shaped by its cultural, social, political and economic contexts. These contexts in turn affect the ways in which locals value environment, health and development and the extent to which they may be uncertain about pollution’s health effects. In light of this, the chapter presents “resigned activism” as a conceptual tool for bridging analyses of activism and resignation, and for showing how they merge across a wide range of villagers’ attitudes and everyday practices. In the second part, it outlines some of China’s environmental challenges and burgeoning environmentalism. It argues in favour of looking beyond the obvious environmental agents (NGOs) and strategies, towards less visible environmental subjectivities.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws comparisons across the three sites and it highlights common dynamics and processes, such as the normalisation of pollution, moulding of new parameters of health and new expectations for a “good life.” It closes by returning to the main themes of the book and to their implications for the social science study of environmentalism and of contemporary China. It reflects on the wider global responsibility for the forms of pollution and suffering described, and on the importance of looking beyond conventional forms of activism and of taking local contexts seriously. It puts forth some suggestions for how academics might contribute to empowering communities affected by pollution.

E-Waste Work: Hierarchies of Value and the Normalization of Pollution in Guiyu

The last substantive chapter examines a third case study which differs in important ways from the first two. Unlike Baocun and Qiancun, Guiyu town is a well-known, indeed a notorious environmental health hotspot. Pollution is caused by a vast and complex cottage industry processing electronic waste. Chapter 5 explores how such “e-waste work” became closely embedded within the local community, family and social relations, as domestic and work spaces were inextricably blurred. It disaggregates the black box of “e-waste work” to show how it evolved over time, the great diversity that composes the sector, how the government attempted to regulate particular activities within it and why their efforts were not fully effective. It shows that, as in Baocun and Qiancun, the economic benefits and environmental costs of these activities are unevenly distributed. By describing a range of diverse e-waste workers engaged in a spectrum of more or less polluting work, the chapter illustrates how locals fashion counter-discourses of relative harm to excuse their practices and avoid blame. In these circumstances, as in Baocun, toxicity is naturalised and parameters of health are adjusted to normalise and accept widespread pollution-induced ailments.