Description
Book SynopsisExamines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to reconfigure Hangzhou’s urban space, alter the natural environment in West Lake (Xihu), and refashion the city’s culture in post-1949 China.
Trade ReviewWith the focus on political ecology,
The People’s West Lake addresses the policy, remapping, and engineering of the environment in the Mao era. The author explores the fraught notion and practice of "nature" in biosphere, landscapes, and human nature in production. An excellent historian, He Qiliang has drawn from historical archives and assembled rich empirical evidence in picturing the schemes of political ecology and the discontents. This book offers a refreshing perspective on China’s urbanization and modernization under socialism." —Ban Wang, Stanford University
"Too often in the humanities and social sciences, "nature" is conceived as the inert or passive object of human action, or a platform upon which human events unfold. This has particularly been the case in the interdisciplinary field of China area studies. He’s book is long overdue and welcome.
The People’s West Lake develops a framework of what Jane Bennett has called the "distributive agency" of the non-human. He uses this to explore the history of the Mao-era party-state’s contradictory and fitful efforts to transform Hangzhou’s West Lake through a series of propaganda-campaign projects." —Tim Oakes, University of Colorado, Boulder
