Green Orientalism, Brown Occidentalism and Chinese Ecological Civilization: Deconstructing the Culturalization of the Anthropocene to Nurture Transcultural Environmentalism

Among the many things the Anthropocene is changing about human ways to live and think, one can include our understanding of human cultures and of their relations. Facing the Anthropocene and its diverse manifestations (climate change and rising temperatures, biodiversity loss and oceans acidification, etc.), there is a strong temptation to resort to predefined cultural assumptions to provide ready-made narratives of guilty scapegoats and unlikely saviours satisfying our religious need for radical alternatives and our exotic craving for deep otherness. This essay aims to critically analyse the various attempts to culturalize the Anthropocene with a focus on Green Orientalism and Brown Occi-dentalism—as we will coin the different culturalist narratives surrounding the notion of “Chinese Ecological Civilization”. Our goal is to promote the idea that the ubiquity of ecological issues calls for the Transculturality of Environmentalism. To achieve such a task, the deconstruction of the “onto-culturalism” of contemporary sinology is necessary.


Chinese Ecological Civilization: Why Are We Comparative Scholars Still So Pious?
In 2007 China became the leading emitter of CO2 in the world, and since 2013 its CO2 emissions per capita have been higher than those of the European Union (Olivier et al. 2014, 24).It comes as a striking manifestation of the PRC government's specific "regime of truth" that during the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2007, the year when China became the leading CO2 emitter, Hu Jintao officially promoted for the first time the concept of "ecological civilization" (shengtai wenming).One year before, Pan Yue, the former vice-director of the Environmental Protection Bureau, claimed that it would be the task of Chinese culture to set the agenda for this new civilizational turn that would replace the former "Western industrial civilization" which, because of its inherent "cultural bias" (anthropocentrism, dualism, etc.), led to environmental catastrophes (Pan Yue, 2006a).
However, considering that Chinese environmental problems have not decreased but instead increased (Yuan Yang 2016), that the country's CO2 emissions have grown steadily since then (from 1.9 billion tones in 2007 to 2.9 billion in 2020), its energetic-mix is still primarily based on coal production and consumption (not only is its economy is still coal-dependent domestically (Greenpeace 2022), but also internationally, as China has become the main exporter of coal plants in the world via the Belt and Road Initiative) ( paper will inquire into the system of belief that makes the concept of Chinese Ecological Civilization so attractive for many scholars.And specifically, it will examine how we, as cultural studies scholars, are still so pious about all things Chinese.Nietzsche wanted to question our will to truth; here we would like to question our will to err, our longing for being mistaken.
The need to deconstruct the concept of Chinese Ecological Civilization comes from the fact that this narrative demonstrates the "postcolonial" and "postmodern" tendency to culturize the Anthropocene.Critically addressing Chinese Ecological Civilization as a narrative resting on the dual framework of "Green Orientalism" and "Brown Occidentalism", we will point to the fact that only a transcultural understanding of our environmental predicaments can help us to face their global ubiquity.

The Concept of Ecological Civilization in China: Pan Yue, Tu Weiming and People's Daily
It was Hu Jintao who, during the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, first promoted the concept of "Ecological Civilization" at the highest official level in 2007.In that same year several definitions of the concept emerged (albeit globally redundant, with some minor variations): "Ecological civilization is a new stage of human civilization development, the new model of ethical socialization that follows the industrial civilization" (Li Jing-yuan et al. 2007); and "Ecological Civilization is the cultural ethical model that implies a harmonious symbiosis between Human Being and Nature, between Human Beings themselves, and between Human and Society.This is a virtuous cycle whose aims are a global development and a continual prosperity."(People's Daily 2007) The concept became an integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan in 2011 and, in 2013, during the third plenary session of the 18th Party Congress, it was included as one of the five national objectives (which were socialist economic construction, political construction, cultural construction, social construction, and ecological civilization construction).In 2014, the constitution of a Small Leading Group (SLG) (Miller 2008(Miller , 2014) )  In 20 years, China has achieved economic results that took a century to attain in the West.But we have also concentrated a century's worth of environmental issues into those 20 years.While becoming the world leader in GDP growth and foreign investment, we have also become the world's number one consumer of coal, oil and steel-and the largest producer of CO2 and chemical oxygen demand emissions.
The culturalist aspect of the concept of Ecological Civilization is manifested in the fact that, according to Pan Yue, environmental problems in China are due to the adoption of the Western model of development: We live with Chinese culture, but our modernization drive is based on Western logic.However, it's not a wise choice to copy the Western model of industrial modernization, especially in China, because that model will result in serious conflicts with the environment and resources in such a developing country as China.(Pan Yue 2006b) Since environmental threats come from the "West", to reduce the exposure of Chinese society to environmental risks it will be necessary to curb "Western cultural influence" and promote instead "Chinese cultural tradition".As Pan Yue (ibid.)put it: "it's necessary to turn to the traditional Chinese culture for a correct guideline in our modernization and our cultural structure and to make the ecological wisdom in the Chinese civilization an important component of the ecological civilization." The notion that there is an important ecological component in Chinese civilization per se is quite a recent idea in China: it has been notably advocated by Yue's concept with Tu Weiming's claim to contend that the PRC's environmental policies are rooted in a traditional concern for nature that is specific to Chinese culture: the "Taoist" notion that "men and nature are one" and that men "must coexist peacefully with Nature, and not try to dominate" is "one of the most essential components of Chinese tradition and China's most important contributions to humanity" (People's Daily 2015).The culturalist aspect in this claim lies in the hypothesis that it is in mainly virtue of its inherent "Western-cultural" component that industrial development is threatening natural environments and that, as a consequence, by changing its cultural DNA, liberated from Western influence, national development in China will become ecological.
Recently, this concept has increasingly become a metric to be analytically assessed, and Chinese researchers have proposed quantifying the amount of "Ecological Civilization" implied by the management of watersheds (see Chen at al. 2022).However, in this paper we will address "Chinese Ecological Civilization" as primarily a "philosophical" concept.Acknowledging the fact that "Ecological Civilization" refers, in today's PRC, to a political platform promoting environmental legislation at different national and regional levels, we will critically discuss the conceptual content and cultural narrative on which it is based.

Ecological Civilization and Brown Occidentalism
First, the claim about the inherent "Chineseness" of "Ecological Civilization" is to be understood in reference to the larger framework of "Occidentalism".Occidentalism consists in perceiving the West as being deprived of soul and consciousness, alienated by monetary greed, corrupted by carnal luxury, and driven by the cold logic of mechanical materialism and disincarnated rationalism: The mind of the West is often portrayed by Occidentalists as a kind of higher idiocy.The same Occidentalist logic led Heidegger to embrace Nazi ideology: "Concerning 1933: I expected from National Socialism a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety, a reconciliation of social antagonism and a deliverance of Western Dasein …" (Heidegger 1993a, 162).
The "proverbial" decline of the West and rise of the East (so widespread in the "sinosphere" nowadays-Schneider 2018) was already "prophesized" by Liang Qichao more than a century ago in the framework of his racialist understanding of history (Liang 1984, 16-17 3 ): The Chinese race of mine is the most powerful one on Earth.English and French can't tame it, and can't prevent its global prominence; as the saying goes: the East is rising while the West is declining.
Along the same lines, one can also make reference to the Manifesto for a Reappraisal of Sinology and the Reconstruction of Chinese Culture written by Zhang Junmai, Tang Junyi, Mou Zongsan, and Xu Fuguan.In this Manifesto, as noted by the editors of the Sources of Chinese Tradition, the New Confucian scholars "give an analysis of the weakness of the modern Western civilization, including its obsession with rapid progress and unlimited expansion" (Chan et al. 2000).Indeed, according to the authors of the Manifesto: the strength of the West's cultural spirit lies in its ability to push ahead indefinitely.However, there is not secure foundation underlying this feverish pursuit of progress.Along this pursuit of progress there is a feeling of discontentment and of emptiness.In order to fill this emptiness, the individual and the nation constantly find new ways for progress and expansion.At the same time external obstructions and an internal exhaustion of energy cause the collapse of the individual and the nation […] The second element the West can learn from the East is all-round and all-embracing understanding or wisdom […] Wisdom is needed to comprehend and to deal with all the unprecedented changes of life.
The Western world is in great need of this wisdom … (Mou et al. 2000, 55055) From this perspective, "the West", being idealistic and mechanical, is unable to understand changes, unable to understand life: while what the authors of the Manifesto meant by "life" was a cultural and moral life, it would be easy for later Confucians like Tu Weiming to give to this idea an environmental twist and elaborate (without coining it as such) the narrative category of "Brown Occidentalism".
"Brown Occidentalism" is the application of (negative) Occidentalism to environmental issues: it goes with the idea that "the West" in general is responsible for all our current climatic and ecological issues (global warming and loss of biodiversity), i.e. essentially non-green or intrinsically "brown": Anthropocentrism The problem with demonizing (so-called) "Western culture" for "our" past environmental evils and eulogizing (so-called) "Eastern wisdom" for "our" future ecological salvation is that it is de-socializing and de-historicizing the Anthropocene.Such a culturalist approach to the Anthropocene makes us unable to understand when and why the Anthropocene started and what are its sociological underpinnings (notably regarding the links between ecological harms and economic inequalities, see Oxfam 2015).Moreover, at the cultural and historical levels, it should be common sense that linking the Anthropocene with Plato or Augustine is rather preposterous for a civilizational process emerging after the Industrial Revolution.Regarding Western Europe, one needs to remember that the medieval economy was notorious for its low ecological footprint precisely because it was dominated by Christian principles of frugality.In contrast to the claim that the so-called "traditional Western idea of the division between soul and body" caused ecological degradation, it was during the anti-Cartesian, anti-Platonic, and deeply secularized 19th and 20th centuries that massive environmental disruptions occured.Negative environmental Occidentalism, i.e. "Brown Occidentalism" and positive environmental Orientalism, i.e. "Green Orientalism" (both concepts being our own coining) show how cultural essentialism is altering our reading of the current global environmental crisis: importing into environmental debates the trend of culturalizing global issues.
Understandably, such an emphasis on "culture" can be very appealing for cultural studies scholars and satisfy their deterministic idealism ("ideas are ruling the world").However, the notion that the superstructure-ideology named "culture" can transform the infrastructure-economy named "development" seems so un-Marxist that we may wonder how it can be so specifically Chinese.Perhaps this should not surprise us, since it reveals both the depth of Marxist Sinicization (Xu 2012; Rockmore 2019) and the lasting impact of the late Qing self-strengthening movement.The notion of Ecological Civilization and its claim about the necessary "turn to the traditional Chinese culture for a correct guideline in our modernization" can be understood as the "greening" of the old saying: "Chinese learning for fundamental goals; Western learning for practical means".Buruma and Margalit rightly stressed the Occidentalist nature of this project and its delusional ideology: So the nineteenth century Chinese establishment scholars founds an ingenious formula: Western knowledge for practical matters, such as weaponry, and Chinese learning for spiritual and moral affairs.It was a hopeless undertaking.You cannot separate one kind of knowledge from another, cannot import what is merely utilitarian while keeping out the potentially subversive ideas that go with it.… Misguided or not, the classification of Western knowledge as purely practical confirmed the notion of a cold and mechanical Occident.(Buruma and Margalit 2005, 3839) One cannot create coal plants and cars on the basis on the Analects or Yijing; like it or not, for that and most of the industrial outputs that contributed to alleviating poverty in China due to its massive manufacturing sector one needs Newton, Clausius, Boltzmann, Poincaré, and so on.By which we don't mean "Western science", but modern science as such.No amount of Laozi will be able to absorb the CO2 emitted by Chinese factories to propel the export economy feeding the military building up of the nation.The science of industrialization as well as its detrimental environmental effects know no border and do not belong to any national culture.Brown Occidentalism is the idea that development in its negative environmental consequences is culturally "Western" and economically "capitalist", while development in its positive social consequences (such as: alleviating mass poverty) is specifically Chinese and necessarily "socialist".The positive and negative outcomes of the same process receive different cultural labelling depending on the political motives of the narrator.

Ecological Civilization and Green Self-Orientalism
Second, the concept of Chinese Ecological Civilization should be understood in relation to the broader culturalist assumptions according to which "the essence of the Asian ethos is 'a holistic harmony' in contrast to the European inclination to dualistic individualism" (Sakamoto 2002) and "traditional Chinese culture stresses the unity and harmony of nature and man."(Zhang 2004, 14).For Lu Shuyuan, the edification of an "ecological spirituality" (shengtai jingshen) is necessary for the Chinese to re-appropriate everything that was lost during the process of modernization (and Westernization) in China (Lu 2001).
In this regard, the notion of "self-Orientalization" (coined by Arif Dirlik) may be even more appropriate than the notion of Occidentalism to characterize such a culturalist self-identification: "While […] the term Orientalism has been used almost exclusively to describe the attitudes of Europeans toward Asian societies, I would like to suggest here that the usage needs to be extended to Asian views of Asia, to account for tendencies to self-Orientalization" (Dirlik 1996).Self-Orientalization is in itself a naïve and tragic attempt to protect oneself from the transcultural hybridization coming with globalization: naïve because one cannot protect "our culture" from globalization when our economy is an integral part of it; tragic because, on the pretext of resisting "foreign hegemony" it contributes to homogenizing internal cultural diversity and solidifying domestic social control: Culturalist essentialism, regardless of its origins in the state or with intellectuals, serves to contain and to control the disruptive consequences of globalization.This has been the case also with the Confucian revival, in which Confucianism appears, on the one hand, as a dynamic ideological force in the development of capitalism, and, on the other hand, as a value-system with which to counteract the disruptive effects of capitalist development […] The assertion of 'Chineseness' against this uncertainty seeks to contain the very dispersal of a so-called 'Chinese culture'….This strategy of containment is the other side of the coin to the pursuit of a 'Chinese' identity in a global culture.(Dirlik 1996) If it is true, as Rey Chow contends, that the promotion of "Chineseness" is based on the claim of one's own "naturality", then the concept of Ecological Civilization is the logical expression of the PRC's Green Orientalist and Brown Occidentalist narratives: In the habitual obsession with 'Chineseness,' what we often encounter is a kind of cultural essentialism-in this case, sinocentrism-that draws an imaginary boundary between China and the rest of the world.Everything Chinese, it follows, is fantasized as somehow better-longer in existence, […] more valuable, and ultimately beyond comparison.
[…] The Chinese that is being constructed is […] a nonmimetic, literal-minded, and therefore virtuous primitive -a noble savage.(Chow 2000) The green (self-)Orientalist narrative of Chinese Ecological Civilization is both a way to put the blame for environmental degradation on the culture of the Other (associated with industrial modernization) and to produce an exotic alternative for a Western audience by encapsulating heterogenous classic texts into an attractive sino-packaging.And there is no denying of the fact that it convinced some Western scholars, as evidenced by Scott Slovic's statement (Gaffric and Heurtebise 2013): What is unique in China are the core elements of environmental reverence that were articulated many centuries ago by Chinese philosophers and poets and are remembered even today in the twenty-first century.
When we speak today of the emergence of an ecological civilization in China, we are, in a sense, referring to a re-assertion of traditional Chinese values rather than the creation of entirely new concepts, vocabularies, or attitudes.(Slovic 2013) Green Orientalism and Brown Occidentalism go hand in hand: if it's Oriental then it's green, if it's Western, then it's brown-such an a priori opposition channels our reading of texts and analysis of reality in an uncritical way.It seems thus all the more necessary to methodologically deconstruct and qualify the "culturalist" claims entailed by the discourse of Chinese Ecological Civilization.

Philosophical Deconstruction of Ecological Civilization
First, it should be remembered that, as Robert P. Weller said, "'Nature' and 'environment' entered the Chinese vocabulary in their modern forms only early in the twentieth century …" (Weller 2006, 4).This is not to say that it is not possible to find in Chinese classical texts, especially in Daoism and Neo-Confucianism, many elements that can positively contribute to enrich our understanding of "man and nature" relationships.Many of Zhuangzi's sayings can be read in this way: The people have their constant inborn nature.They are one in it and not partisan, and it is called the Emancipation of Heaven (命曰天放 -mìng yuē tiān fàng) […] In this age of Perfect Virtue men live the same as birds and beasts, group themselves side by side with the ten thousand things.(Zhuangzi 2013, 66) However, giving to Zhuangzi's ideal description of human life an environmentalist dimension may be anachronistic: Zhuangzi's aim was less to condemn technological progress (the Industrial Revolution, as we know, started more than two thousand years later…) than to criticize Confucian moralists who wanted to refine human mores through the observance of numerous social rituals.
For Zhuangzi, "virtue" will come spontaneously to all those acting in accordance with天/Tian.However, we should remember that this word has many meanings: Heaven, Sky, Nature, Destiny, etc.In the above-mentioned 2015 People's Daily article, to anchor the principle of Ecological Civilization in Chinese classical texts, it is said: "2,000 years ago, Zhuangzi issued the statement 'Tian and Men are One', meaning, at its core, that we should live in harmony with nature" (People's Daily 2015).However, Sinologists know that "Tian and Men are One" (tiānrénhéyī) cannot be found Zhuangzi's writing.But, more importantly, interpreting "天"/"Tian" in an environmentalist way seems rather misleading.
Let's note that post-colonial critics have long insisted upon the fact that the missionary understanding of Tian as God was a kind of Orientalism.It is argued that since "Tian" is "uniquely Chinese", and thus by virtue of the culturalist principle of dichotomic essentialism, it can't be related in any way to a "Western" concept (such as monotheism).However, such a statement is rather problematic.First, it's rather nonsensical to call monotheism "Western": Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are Oriental religions.Moreover, the tendency to attribute personal feeling and volitions to God can also be observed in the pre-Confucian notion of Tian surfacing in the Odes: "Revere the anger of 天/Tian" (Legge 1970, 503) 4 ; "天/Tian, in giving birth to the multitudes of the people / To every faculty and relationship annexed its law."(Legge 1970, 539). 5Maybe one can admit that the interpretation of Tian as meaning God is an expression of Eurocentric orientalism.However, in this case we should also admit that interpreting Tian as meaning environment is as an expression of Sinocentric self-orientalism.It seems rather more likely that what Taoists meant by tiānrénhéyī was not really to live in harmony with "nature" as we understand it today, i.e. meaning the Earth, but to follow the "law" of the "Universe", the "Dao" that allows us "to ride the clouds and mist, straddle moon and sun" (something rather extra-terrestrial).Such anachronistic interpretations create an erroneous feeling of continuity contradicting classic texts' meaning in their original contexts.Eric Nelson in Daoism and Environmental Philosophy is right in "acknowledging the perils of conflating ancient teachings of Dao and modern environmentalism" (Nelson 2020, 16).It is possible to have an environmentalist reading of Taoist sources without postulating that they always had an ecological meaning.Avoiding this hermeneutical fallacy is essential if we don't want to fall into the culturalist trap of the "postmodern" narrative of an inherently Chinese Ecological Civilization.

Historical Deconstruction of Ecological Civilization
Second, even if it were true that classical Chinese texts could have an environmentalist meaning, the reverse assumption, that such texts cannot be found in the Western tradition, is erroneous.To demonstrate that the claim that the holist conception of man/nature interactions is uniquely Asian is not true, it will be enough here to quote the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (X, § 6): "let this first be established, that I am a part of the whole which is governed by nature." The idea of an anti-ecological nature of Western thinking mostly comes from Lynn White's 1967 "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis", contending that our current ecological crisis is due to the influence of Christianity on European modes of living: "modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an Occidental, voluntarist realization of the Christian dogma of man's transcendence of, and rightful mastery over, nature" (White 1967).The notions that God is above nature, that nature is not divine, that God has created the world and its animals for the sole purpose of human use are, according to White, the cultural roots of the European's will to exploit "nature" in an unsustainable fashion.Needless to say, this thesis has been widely discussed (LeVasseur and Peterson 2017) and often harshly criticized, notably by James Nash, who notes that such a claim tends "to reduce the explanation of the complex ecological crisis to a single cause, […] to minimize the fact that non-Christian cultures also have been environmental despoilers, [and] to overlook the number of dissenting opinions in Christian history" (Nash 1991).The weakest point of White's argument lies in the historical fact that the development of the Industrial Revolution coincided with the gradual secularization of Europe.It can thus also be argued that it is not the influence of Christian ideas but their gradual disappearance that made unsustainable industrial capitalism possible.
Indeed, as Marx and Engels pointed out, by inducing the decomposition of all social ties except selfish greed, industrial capitalism led to a mass process of "deculturation", paving the way to the unsustainable exploitation of nature: The bourgeoisie has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations […] and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest […] The bourgeoisie has created more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.Subjection of Nature's forces to man, […] clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground.(Marx and Engels 1975, 48283) Thus, it's not the "Western quality" of economic development that makes it unsustainable, but the fact that capitalist modernity induced a global process of deculturalization affecting the West itself.
Finally, even if it were true that classic Chinese texts anticipated contemporary environmentalism, even if it were true that such an awareness of the importance of man/nature interactions were absent from the European tradition and that's the reason why unsustainable development occurred, the notion that Chinese civilization is (or has always been) ecological does not fit with historical records.China has always placed the colonial development of the empire and the intensive exploitation of conquered lands above any other "ecological consideration": "According to historical records, vegetation destruction occurred nationwide and frequently in preindustrial China" (Fang and Xie 1995); "From 1650 to 1949 the area of cropland generally increased, while the forest cover decreased.Over the long history, approximately half of cropland expansion came from deforestation in China" (Miao et al. 2016).Not only was massive deforestation caused by extensive rice cultivation already a concern in Imperial China (Elvin 2004) but, during the Maoist period, the Great Leap Forward also promoted man's conquest of nature (人定勝天 -réndìngshèngtiān) and engaged in deforestation to plant grain (开荒种粮食 -kāihuāng zhòng liángshi) (Shapiro 2001, 910).
It should also be noted that, until recently, Asian leaders considered environmental regulations as a means used by "Western powers" to limit their development: "to many Asian leaders, Western concern for areas such as human rights and the environment is often seen as unwarranted interference at best and as revealing ulterior motives at worst" (Han 2003).

Sociopolitical Deconstruction of Ecological Civilization: Eco-Panopticon with Chinese Characteristics
Third, as Zhang Wei noted, the Chinese concept of ecological civilization can be traced back to the works of American ecologists, from Aldo Leopold to Roy Morrison (Zhang, Li and An 2011).
This is an interesting departure from the official genealogy of the concept (Gare 2012;Rodenbiker 2020).According to the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment ( 2012), the concept was developed by economists from the USSR in 1984.The first academic publication in Chinese was authored by Zhang Jie in 1985 (Zhang 1985), and then the concept was developed by the Chinese economists Ye Qianji and Liu Sihua (Huan 2016).
The term "ecological civilization" in English was coined by Roy Morrison in a book entitled Ecological Democracy, in which he states: "an ecological civilization is built on three independent pillars: democracy, balance and harmony" (Morrison, 1995, 12).Differing from Ophuls, who contended in 1977 that "the only solution is a sufficient measure of coercion" (Ophuls 1977, 150), Morrison stressed the fact that "democracy" is an essential component of any sound and fair "ecological civilization", since it requires the free participation of citizens and their ability to voice their concerns against developmentalism.
If "balance" and "harmony" can be easily linked to the PRC's "harmonious society", the term "democracy" reveals that the political dimension of ecological civilization has been largely overlooked by the official interpretation of the concept, emphasizing only its culturalist and neo-Orientalist aspects.
In this sense, the Chinese ecological civilization should be understood through T. W. Luke's theoretical framework of "Green Governmentality" (Luke 1995).According to Luke, there are two problems with the conventional notion of the environment.First, the environment is not outside human society, but it is human society which is inside the environment.Second the trouble with "environment" is that it is not only a noun but a verb, not only a fact but an action: "In its original sense, […] an environment is an action resulting from, or the state of being produced by a verb: 'to environ.'And environing as a verb is, in fact, a type of strategic action.To environ is to encircle, encompass, envelop, or enclose" (ibid.).In this sense, the environment is the product of environmentality defined as the series of statements, predictions, and policies through which human beings are trying to regulate and discipline their own actions with regard to nature in order to preserve their abilities to continue to exploit it in the future.Environmental policies are more an attempt to discipline the capitalistic exploitation of "nature" than an attempt to protect "nature" for its own sake.
To understand Luke's concept of geopower, it is necessary to go back to Foucault's concept of biopower.For Foucault, biopower is the new form of political control that emerged in the age of biology, medicine and statistics: By [biopower] I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.(Foucault 2007, 16) Biopower means that what the state started to control is the population (aggregate of people) as defined in bio-medical terms: birth-rate, longevity, health status.Luke's concept of geopower extends Foucault's biopower: The individual human subject of today, and all of his or her unsustainable practices, would be reshaped through this environmentality, redirected by practices, discourses, and ensembles of administration that more efficiently synchronize the bio-powers of populations with the geo-powers of environments.(Luke 1995) Geopower refers to a new kind of control whose target is not human demography but natural resources, and whose aim is not to avoid epidemic diseases but the scarcity of material goods.Human life and social labour are becoming less important than the Earth's resources and energy production: a new kind of paradoxical individual behaviour ("consuming responsibly") is imposed on human beings in a society framed by growth-compatible environmental exigencies.
The Chinese notion of shentai wenming, by focusing on the technical and administrative aspects of environmental policies, by excluding civil society's direct engagement with ecological issues, could be read as an Eco-Panopticon with Chinese characteristics.Such statements should not be understood has being merely critical-on the contrary, they intend to be descriptive.Anne-Christine Trémon, in her paper about the development of Shenzen, demonstrated clearly how Chinese Ecological Civilization has become a way to enforce urban policies which further deplete the rural environment while silencing local protests: The particularity of Shenzhen is that it was created in a rural territory transformed overnight into a special economic zone.
[…] by urbanizing all these villages in 2004, the Shenzhen authorities prepared the ground for a takeover of these villages, stigmatized because of their rural past.Urbanization now had to be green, that is to say based on an intensified use of space.Cooperative urban renewal projects become residential tower construction programs in the name of ecological civilization.(Trémon 2022; our translation)

Archaeology of Western Intellectuals' Need to Believe-Beyond Postcolonial Heideggerianism
Usually, the history of Western representations of China is divided into two periods: the "Sinophilia" period during the 17th and 18th centuries and the "Sinophobia" period during the 19th and 20th centuries, with a shift occurring at the end of the 18th century.Many scholars have noted this change: "The turning point is sudden and decisive [...] In the aftermath of the French Revolution, it would not occur to anyone to refer to China to think about the future of institutions" (Crépon 1993, 13;our translation); "As is well known, disenchantment with things Chinese began to take over in the second half of the eighteenth century" (Luca 2016, 180).This turn is particularly noticeable in Germany, moving from Leibniz's and Wolf's representations of China to those of Kant, Hegel and Herder: "Leibniz was still guided by the idea of mutually beneficial cooperation between two coequal scientific worlds.By the end of the eighteenth century, however, a one-sidedly imperial outlook had come to prevail" (Osterhammel 2018, 208); "Leibniz places Chinese culture on a higher or at least an equal level to Europe […] Herder portrays China as the biggest failure in the course of the history of humanity" (Zhang 2008).
Different explanations of this turn have been provided.One framework of explanation that seems to be readily usable is the post-colonial narrative provided by Edward Said's Orientalism.In this new framework, the question of "Chinese sources" (and their universalist re-evaluation) gave way to the issue of "European constructs" (and their relativist deconstruction): in the 1980s [postcolonial studies] became the mainstream tendency for Sinologists and historians concerned with Enlightenment thinkers to interpret their preoccupation with China as a construction of an 'other' represented by an 'image,' rather than understanding the Chinese sources as a full-fledged part of European intellectual history.(Gaarsmand Jacobsen 2013) The main idea of Said's Orientalism is that Western accumulation of knowledge about the Orient did not aim at knowing but rather dominating it: "modern Orientalism has been an aspect of both imperialism and colonialism" (Said 1977, 123).Many scholars thus adopted the concept of Orientalism to analyse Westerners' representations of China.For example, Daniel Vukovich in his China and Orientalism contended that: "Sinology itself must be seen as part of the long history of imperialism, colonialism, and trade.Thus, this knowledge formation must be understood as a part of historical colonialism and its mission civilisatrice" (Vukovich 2013, 5).However, there are important limitations to the use of "Orientalism" in Said's sense of the term to define modern Western's representations of China as a whole.
First, if the reference to Said's Orientalism to frame Western views of Asia and China is misleading, it's because, as "critics have pointed out […], Said's 'Orient' is focused on the Arab world and excludes most of what Westerners mean by the word" (App 2010, viii).However, there is an essential difference between the Western perception of the Chinese world and the Western perception of the Arab world: because the European perception of the Arabic Orient has been over-determined by the conflict between Christianity and Islam during the Middle Ages, it started with a rather negative background.Conversely, the Western perception of China has been for a long time largely positive, starting from Marco Polo's narrative of the marvels of Kublai Khan's court before reaching its climax in 18th century Chinoiseries: "In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, very many Westerners saw China as at least the equal of Western civilization in important respects" (Gregory 2002, 2).
Second "we call him an Asian, an Oriental, and that eliminates the need to know more; a precious faculty, a decisive advantage, which generic words provide to those who do not hold to correct ideas, and who, in order to judge, care little to go into depth" (Abel-Rémusat 1843, 225; our translation).
In this regard, we need a new framework of analysis.Instead of dividing the European reception of Chinese sources into two periods (Sinophile and Sinophobe), we will divide this history into three phases: Similarity, Subalternity, and Alterity (plus another one which is slowly emerging).
From medieval times to 17th and 18th centuries, Chinese realities were framed in terms of Similarity: "Medieval European travelers admired the Yuan Mongols and Han Chinese and their civilizations, perceiving more similarity than difference between themselves and the peoples of Yuan China" (Phillips 2014, 186), and "Among eighteenth-century travelers, freedom from prejudice is equated with fairness toward foreign manners and an impartial detachment from one's own" (Osterhammel 2018, 176).
deeply influenced post-1980 Sinology."Onto-culturalist Sinology" thus became the dominant form of scholarly discourse about China.In short, Alterity as an academic framework for the analysis of Chinese sources goes with the a priori assumption that nothing which can be said about "the West" (Being, Logos, Polemos) can stand for China, and nothing which can be said of China (Becoming, Mythos, Datong) can also be true for "the West".
Recently, attempts have been made to escape this Heideggerian/Occidentalist trap.These allow us to understand retrospectively that, by denouncing the Orientalism of classical Sinology, post-colonial critics have been covering up the very Occidentalism of contemporary Sinology (Ames 2016).As Slingerland's Mind and Body in Early China rightly pointed it out (2019, 1): The resulting potent cocktail of French theory and cultural essentialism currently holds a surprisingly large swath of Asian and comparative cultural studies in its grip […] while the negative side of such cultural essentialism has been singled out and rejected as pernicious Orientalism, its normatively positive manifestation [i.e.Occidentalism] has continued to flourish […] from Granet straight down to … Roger Ames, Henry Rosemony Jr., and François Jullien in the West, as well as Zhang Xuezhi or Tang Yijie in Chinese-language scholarship.
Thus, the critic of Chinese Ecological Civilization is not only the critic of a concept but also a critic of its rather uncritical reception by some scholars moved by the religious craving for non-religious alternatives that have partly framed the reception of Chinese sources since Voltaire.There is indeed no huge difference between Voltaire's idealization of Chinese culture (which he claimed ignored irrational myths and superstition) (Voltaire, 1766, 9014 , 5715 ; Voltaire 1779, 56 16 ) in his attempt to demolish the Catholic Church and contemporary scholars' enthusiastic reception of Chinese Ecological Civilization in their mission to atone for the sins of "Western colonial modernity".Both are manifestations of "critical" intellectuals' need to believe.

Conclusion: Addressing the Death Drive of the Mis-Anthropocene
Maybe Western intellectuals have never been totally able to cope with the loss of faith, and thus have always been looking for alternatives to the Christian transcendent salvation.For us, this is the main reason behind what Mark Lilla called the "philotyranny" of 20th century intellectuals from Heidegger to Derrida (Lilla 2001).Not much has changed since the 18th century intellectuals the most critical against the Church (Diderot, La Mettrie) embraced "enlightened despotism" and rushed to the court of Frederick the Great (Prussia) or Catherine the Great (Russia).Intellectuals' faith in culturalist narratives, feeding existential voids with exotic gods, appears to be very conducive to both philotyranny and green-red-washing (according to Doyle (2021): "These advocates of Daoism are not just tertiary political players, however, but include President Xi Jinping himself").
This is why we are still pious.Sartre famously said in his Existentialism is a Humanism: If God does not exist, we will encounter no values or orders that can legitimize our conduct.Thus, we have neither behind us, nor before us, in the luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse.We are left alone and without excuse.
[…] What man needs is to rediscover himself and to comprehend that nothing can save him from himself.(Sartre 1948, 29) The fact that Heidegger suggested at the end of his life that "only a God can save us" (Heidegger 1993b) is very telling-it's the same need for faith which led him toward National Socialism.Sartre himself would prove unable to keep to his own words, as testified by his feverish embrace of first Stalinism, and then Maoism.Rimbaud was more accurate when in a late poem, biding "farewell" after a "season in hell", he wrote: "One must be absolutely modern.Never mind hymns of thanksgiving: hold on to a step once taken.A hard night!Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!" Nothing left of "nature" but a little tree scarcely hiding our collective guilt -for which the religious search for cultural scapegoats ("Western dualism") or cultural savours ("Chinese wisdom") is nothing but a self-delusional way to avoid the contemplation of the abyss of human nature.
Wanting to save humanity from the trap it is setting for itself by degrading its own conditions of life seems rather illusory.If the world as it is pushes humanity to its loss, it is because there is not much in it (in its current form) to be saved.If the business-as-usual economic model led to the irreversible degradation of soil and pollution of water, it is because the survival of "humanity" in the sense of the perpetuation of an aberrant state of affairs may not be the goal, but rather the satisfaction of unlimited needs with finite resources is emptying the Earth without filling the soul.There is no need to save a humanity that wants to be lost, there is to "save" humanity from its desire to be lost-to quote Jean-Luc Nancy: Nothing is more common than the death drive-and the point is not whether the state technological policies that enabled Auschwitz and Hiroshima unleashed such drives, but rather whether humanity too heavy with its millions of years has not chosen for several centuries the path of its annihilation.(Nancy 2008, 55;our translation) As Spinoza said, the only way to thwart a desire is to produce a stronger one.The only thing that can surpass the desire to lose oneself (Thanatos) is the desire to find oneself in the other (Eros).The only way out from our current Thanatocene fuelled by the competition between superpowers pretending to have a monopoly on the course of history is to arouse a "life drive" whose impulse and strength is exceeding the death drive in order to foster an Erocene of links and contacts among "Earthbound people" (Latour 2017, 255).
Ultimately the issue with the Anthropocene is not about "the relation of human to nature" but about the relation of humanity to himself.The Anthropocene refers to the moment where humans recognized that their domination over "nature" is also the instrument of their own demise.One could have hoped that man acknowledgement his influence on the planet as a whole (Steffen at al. 2011) could have given way to a shared feeling of terrestrial belonging.However, that the Anthropocene means that humanity in general is responsible for climate change has been criticized by social-scientists: it's not humanity in general but a small portion of it that is responsible for global ecological disruption.But the least we can say is that there is no agreement about naming this "evil portion" of humanity that needs to be "overcome": the Male (Androcene), the Rich (Capitalocene), the White (Racialocene), British and American Empires (Anglocene), the West (Colonialocene) the non-Aboriginal (Sedantarocene)?
To settle this highly polemical issue we need to de-culturalize and re-historicize the Anthropocene: according to most scientists today, the Anthropocene arose with the post-1950 "Great Acceleration" (Steffen et al. 2015).This refers to the era of US hegemony, Western decolonization, market globalization and the rise of Asia (Japan, China, India).In other words, the Anthropocene started when the colonization of the Earth ceased to be the privilege of one region of the world, the "West", and started to be available to the Global East and South.The Anthropocene is the name of our era in which every country is developing to its utmost in a race towards global or regional supremacy.It is linked to global geopolitical antagonisms: the Cold War between the US and the USSR marked the first Great Acceleration; the current Cold War between the US and the PRC is marking the second Great Acceleration, leaving us no chance to get out of it without deep civilizational harm.The fact that Western countries are responsible for most of past CO2 emissions is today largely counterbalanced by the fact that Asian countries are responsible for most of the current and predicted such emissions.
Furthermore, the post-colonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty rightly stressed that a more equal distribution of emissions among all nations would have changed nothing about our current environmental crisis, except making things even worse: Only a few nations (some twelve or fourteen, including China and India in the last decade or so) and a fragment of humanity (about one-fifth) are historically responsible for most of the emissions of greenhouse gases so far.
[…] Historically speaking, it is, of course, true that the richer nations are responsible for most of the emissions of greenhouse gases as they pursued models of development that produced an unequal world.But imagine the counterfactual reality of a more evenly prosperous and just world made up of the same number of people as today and based on exploitation of cheap energy sourced from fossil fuel.Such a world would undoubtedly be more egalitarian and just -at least in terms of distribution of income and wealth -but the climate crisis could be worse![…] Humanity's current predicament renews for the humanist the question of the human condition.(Chakrabarty 2021, 57) This is why reading the Anthropocene through the lens of an "East and West onto-cultural divide" and along the lines of Green Orientalism and Brown Occidentalism narratives is so misleading.This is also why a transcultural approach to the Anthropocene is necessary.What is needed is to stress not the cultural specificities of a place but the universality of our terrestrial belonging: "In a context of rapidly increasing connections around the globe, what is crucial for ecological awareness and environmental ethics is arguably not so much a sense of place as a sense of planet" (Heise 2008, 55).This is the main problem with the culturalist interpretation of environmental threats: it contradicts the eco-cosmopolitan requirements of environmental ethics today and could become an obstacle to the international resolution of environmental issues, as "environmental dangers pose supranational problems; these need solutions to which national governments are not well suited" (Yearley 1991, 45).Only a transcultural environmental ethics can cope with the global nature of risks we all face in the age of the Anthropocene (Mayer 2016).
By transcultural we mean neither intercultural nor cross-cultural: neither the rational dialogue between cultures nor their empirical hybridization and capitalistic mixing up, but the unpredictable meeting of what in each culture is transcending its own "cultural specificity" and linguistic boundaries.Transcultural environmentalism is not about going back to "past wisdom about nature", but is the creative result of cultures accepting that their national identity is challenged by the universality of our ecological predicament.There is no way out without reinventing a transcultural notion of the universal.
dedicated to Ecological Civilization was created inside the central SLG initiated in 2013 for the "deepening of social-political reforms".As a Vice-Minister for the Environment, Pan Yue (2006a) introduced the concept for the first time in 2006 to express the need to cope with the environmental degradation caused by economic development: in Western society is dominant[…]  Western society adopted strong anthropocentrism.The decisive socio-historical influences put forward are: Ancient Greek philosophy; the Judeo-Christian tradition; the mechanistic thought of the Renaissance/ Reformation; … […] A dominant anthropocentric worldview is a barrier to … humanity as a whole reaching an ecologically sustainable future.(Washington et al. 2021) Ewing 2019 1 ; Reynolds et al. 2018 2 ), this 1"As its massive domestic coal sector is squeezed by a saturation of existing plants, economic transitions away from heavy industry and a 'war on pollution,' China's powerful state-owned companies look abroad.The Shanghai Electric Group will build coal plants in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran with a combined capacity of 6,285 megawatts; that is nearly tenfold its planned constructions in China."(Ewing 2019) 2 "Coal-fired plants constitute half of announced CPEC [China Pakistan Economic Corridor] energy generation projects and 69% of capacity." (Reynolds et al. 2018) In his 2013 paper "Chinese Influences or Images?",Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen divided the Western study of China into two major periods.The first moment is an answer to 19th century "Sinophobia": countering discourses about European supremacy and Chinese backwardness from Hegel to Weber, reception studies demonstrated the impact of Chinese learning on European modernity.Key writings in this context are Adolf Reichwein's 1925 China and Europe; Virgile Pinot's 1932 La Chine et la formation de l'esprit philosophique en France (1640-1740); Joseph Needham's 1956 Science and Civilisation in China; Basil Guy's 1963 The French Image of China before and after Voltaire; and Donald E. Lach's 1965 Asia in the Making of Europe.The second moment of 20th century Chinese studies is opened by Said's Orientalism in 1977, whose immediate impact was to replace the study of the influence of Chinese learning on Europe by the discourse of the European imperialist framing of Asian realities.
(Zhang 2008)concept of Orientalism cannot really explain the shift in Western perceptions of China, it is because Sinophobic views started to prevail even before the 19th century, and thus cannot be attributed to colonialism:During the second half of the eighteenth century, the dominant course of Sinophilia shifted toward Sinophobia […] [However] European imperial encroachment on China did not start until the 1840s with the first Opium War.In particular, Germany […] did not […] have imperial ambitions.In the 18th century, European trade with China was almost exclusively conducted on China's terms.(Zhang2008)Finally, the idea that Sinophobic Orientalism determined all European representations of Chinese culture and framed academic Sinology can be further proven wrong by the fact that two leading scholars of Chinese studies in France expressed very critical views about the colonial enterprise and the development of the British Empire in Asia.Chrétien-Louis-Joseph de Guignes' 1808 Voyages à Peking criticized British colonial practices in China (Abbattista 2017), while Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat directly opposed Eurocentric Orientalism in his 1828 Nouveau Journal Asiatique paper republished in his 1843 posthumous works: