China's environmental state is constantly at war. Officials wage battles for blue skies, launch offensives against pollution, and mobilize campaigns to defend ecological civilization. These military metaphors are often taken as evidence of state strength and determination. This talk argues the opposite. Based on years of fieldwork with environmental officials, the present analysis shows how endless environmental warfare can undermine the very capacities it seeks to strengthen. As campaigns multiply and paperwork proliferates, bureaucrats find themselves increasingly detached from their expertise, reduced to managing symbols of action rather than environmental problems themselves. The result is a "warring state" that struggles to translate political mobilization into durable ecological governance. This talk is based on a chapter in the speaker's current book manuscript titled Environmentalism Of, By, and For the State.

About the Speaker

Yifei Li is a Global Network Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Studies at New York University. He is an ethnographer, researching and writing on the theory and practice of environmental authoritarianism, with a primary empirical emphasis on China. He is the lead author (with Judith Shapiro) of China Goes Green: Coercive Environmentalism for a Troubled Planet (Polity, 2020) and co-editor (with Chris Coggins) of the Handbook on China and the Environment (Sage, 2026). His scholarly work has been featured on NPR, in The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Le Monde, and other media.

The ANU China Seminar Series is supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World at ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.

Photo credit: Adil Edin on Unsplash.

Contact the host of The Warring State: How China's Environmental Officials Become Cannon Fodder