Before and After the Nanshan Conference: A Speech at the Symposium on "Ecological Civilization and New Quality Productive Forces"

Han Shaogong

In 1999, the Hainan Writers’ Association in China and Tianya magazine hosted an international symposium in Hainan on the theme of “Ecology and Literature.” More than 20 years later, Han Shaogong, one of the conference attendees, reflects on its theme and significance and shares his thoughts on the ethics of environmental development in China and beyond. The following is the English translation of Han Shaogong’s reflection. Please see here for the Chinese version of this piece. 

The 1999 symposium produced an influential Nanshan Summary, which was published in 2000. Its Chinese version can be found in the link provided above. For the English translation of the Summary, please visit: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/168420

For many in China, the issues of environment and climate remained relatively unfamiliar until the 1990s. During a cross-strait writers’ meeting held in Shandong province, a popular Mainland novelist made a striking remark: “You guys should not be too morally condescending. There can be no development without pollution. Right now, people in Northwestern China are worrying about no pollution or too little pollution, and they are looking forward to the pacier advent of industrial pollution in greater amount!” While this comment was not entirely tongue-in-cheek, it greatly shocked the Taiwanese writers in their astounded reflection: “Are mainland intellectuals all really this outdated and uncouth in their views?” 

Later, as works like The Limits to Growth gained more influence in China, more people became enthusiastic about protecting the environment, but their tones remained ambivalent. In 2010, a renowned CCTV journalist advocated for the rather unfair global emission reduction plan pushed forward by Western countries, regarding the objection voiced by the interviewed scientist on this unequal plan as a “political interpretation” and a deviation from the “universal values” of humanity. Even if China were to pay an exorbitant price to purchase carbon emission credits from the West in the future, this would, in the journalist’s viewpoint, be entirely reasonable: China must suffer the consequences of its belated entry into the global developmentalist schemes. This kind of stance by the CCTV journalist was deemed just and enlightened in the arena of public opinion – a must-take step for China to be “on the same track with the rest of the international community.”

It is not hard to see that, despite their differences, the two aforementioned arguments simultaneously acquiesce to an irreconcilable conflict between development and environmental protection. The situation seems to be as such: for those late-developing countries, you either give up development or give up environmental protection; either you are a loser in terms of economic interests or a loser in moral standing; even if you don’t end up losing on both fronts, you are at least forced to compromise one side of the seesaw to prioritize the other. Just resign yourself to fate. According to reports from some Western institutions, which calculate carbon emissions by national sums instead of per capita, and emphasize current emissions instead of the accumulated amount through history, China is definitely the world’s largest carbon-emitting country. If we consider environmental accountability by this type of calculation, China would stand as the foremost culprit in the world, deserving to be placed in a “courtroom of climate justice” and subjected to censure and condemnation in the dock by the global community. 

What is of grave concern is that these accusations are not entirely baseless; people in China have also been voicing deep discontent over environmental degradation: The Yellow River has seen frequent interruptions in its flow, the Yangtze River has experienced abnormal flooding, and waters in the Huai River and the Pearl River have turned black. The level of residual pesticide in food and medicinal products has been astonishingly high, desertification in the “Three-North” region (the Northwestern, the Huabei, and the northeastern areas) has expanded at an accelerated speed, and the Huabei region has witnessed a sharp increase in smog and sandstorms. Pernicious acid rains have even panicked the neighboring countries, and in many urban areas, the lead content in the blood of teenagers has exceeded the normal range. Meanwhile, imported waste from developed countries continues to enter our nation in a nonstop flux… All these happened during the early stage of China’s economic growth acceleration, while most of our countrymen had just achieved the life standard of possessing basic subsistence and food security. According to the preliminary statistics conducted by relevant national departments, the economic damages caused by environmental pollution once accounted for 6.75% of China’s GDP, which has offset most of the country’s economic growth. 

What should we do? This is such a burning conundrum that even Marx’s guidance would be of no avail.  This is not surprising, as thoughts are often the products of the material conditions of a given society. Marx, facing capitalism in its early stage, experienced an industrial scale that was not comprehensive enough to deteriorate the global environment. It is only expected that issues now being heatedly debated, such as global warming, did not fall into his purview of analysis. This stands true for both his sympathizers and opposers. 

In December 1999, the Writers Association of Hainan Province, where I worked, in collaboration with Tianya magazine, organized a large symposium themed “Ecology and Literature” in Hainan Province. The goal of the conference was to address pressing concerns and facilitate understanding of the issues surrounding this topic. Participants included renowned writers such as Zhang Wei, Chi Zijian, Ge Fei, Su Tong, Ye Zhaoyan, Li Rui, Fang Fang, Wu Re Er Tu, Jiang Yun, Jiang Zidan, Kong Jian, and Li Shaojun, as well as scholars like Huang Ping, Li Tuo, Dai Jinhua, Wang Xiaoming, Chen Sihe, Nan Fan, Chen Yangu, Wang Hongsheng, Geng Zhanchun, and Shan Zhengping. Colleagues from France, the United States, South Korea, Australia, and Hong Kong also attended, totaling about 50 people. The conference agenda spanned five full days. However, this was not enough for us, leading to the emergence of sub-seminars from the main seminar and smaller meetings arising from larger gatherings. Brainstorming sessions stretched from day to night, as participants were unable to resist extending their various debates. A lecture by the American scholar Arif Dirlik, with Huang Ping as the volunteer interpreter, had to be arranged to be delivered on the beach at night, where the audience sat on the sand, some in bathrobes or in bare shoulders. A document titled “A Summary of the Nanshan Conference - Why We Need to Talk about Environmental Ecology” was also produced spontaneously as the result of late-night work and discussions. This document, negotiated by scholars in China and audited by some international scholars, aimed to reflect the consensus of the conference participants. 

This summary, over 10000 characters, was published in the first issue of the Tianya magazine in 2000 and had a significant impact on intellectual circles. It was translated into more than ten foreign languages and circulated internationally.  

Its main content can be summarized as “two critiques and one prospect.”

The First Critique: Developmentalism

The Summary argues that there are deep-rooted social, political, and cultural causes for ecological degradation, a dilemma that cannot readily be resolved by technologies and capital. For example, for those places that gravely lack water resources, they also see the proliferated construction of water-consuming leviathans like luxury hotels. Given this situation, what is the point of vaguely talking about the deficiency of water resources? Similarly, the relentless expansion of transnational corporations’ acquisition tentacles has led to overgrazing, depleted grasslands, and damage to biodiversity. Who bears the cost of ecological degradation, and who reaps the excess profits? Evidently, the appropriation, utilization, and distribution of natural resources always take place under social systems and ideological frames, while mere moral calling, which may very well be full of sincerity and compassion, is far from enough. As a knowledge system, the discourse of developmentalism after World War II, promoted by international institutions dominated by developed countries, consistently employs abstract terms such as “humanity,” “growth,” and “modernization” to conflate people’s legitimate needs for development with growth-centrism, GDP obsession, and the disorderly expansion of capitalism. This discourse continually conceals the cruel law of the jungle inherent in the unevenness of globalization. Just as indicated in the 1999 report by the United Nations Development Programme, the income gap between rich countries and poor countries had enlarged from the 30-1 ratio in 1960 to the 74-1 ratio in 1995, while ecological degradation is only part of this larger trend. 

The Summary also notes that regions and countries like Japan and the “Four Asian Tigers,” as rare models of developmentalism, offer lessons and references for efficient scientific technologies and management strategies. However, as the majority of developing countries lack the advantages of early industrialization, they are subject to a greater risk of descending into “marginalization” and “banlieue-ization” in the global market vortex. These nations are often forced to sell resources cheaply, accept high-resource-consuming and high-pollution “sunset industries,” and suffer from talent migration and brain drain. All these not only aggravate poverty but also inflict further damage on the already fragile local environmental and ecological systems. What is ironic is that GDP cannot warn against these risks; instead, after the water source is contaminated, people shift to purchasing bottled water; once the air is polluted, people can buy air-purifiers, filtration systems, dust masks, and plane tickets to holiday resorts - all these conversely increase the GDP data, and this is the mechanism by which the image of “good life” is re-produced. 

The Second Critique: Consumerism

Of course, literature was another important subject at the Nanshan Conference. The Summary considers the images of “successful individuals” in many contemporary works of literature and art as a new type of ideological indoctrination. The idealized lifestyle they portray, for instance, every household owning a private car, owning multiple mink coats, golfing weekly, frequenting high-end clubs, and enjoying yearly vacations at renowned resorts, is woven together by advertisements, films, television programs, news, entertainment, and bestsellers. They constitute an ideal of “the middle class” constructed by the modern cultural and media industry and exemplify a mass aesthetics shaped by transnational capital. This narrative artificially amplifies material desire, intensifies the already fraught relationship between humans and nature, and gravely distorts human values, overlooking and even eliminating needs for emotions, dignity, security, and aesthetic experiences. This constructed ideal also aggravates exclusivity in the distribution of profits and will inevitably exacerbate inequality, depriving the majority of people --- those who are “unsuccessful” or “not-that-successful” --- of resources and hopes for self-realization, to the extent of losing basic sustenance, such as the access to clean air, water, sunlight, and food security. 

The Summary respects the writers’ fascination with human nature but does not regard desire as the totality of humanity, nor does it believe there is any form of humanity that is purely natural or sacred in this world. For example, if it is humans’ biological instinct to eat sufficiently, then what counts as eating well is shaped by culture and is highly diverse: in what kind of dining space is the food consumed, what utensils are used, what attire is appropriate, what music is played, and with whom to hold a banquet --- answers to these questions are conditioned and shaped by the consumerist culture, as there are too many ideological seasonings in our dining plates. This is just a rather commonplace example. In this sense, the Summary does not advocate for a blind suppression of desire in a return-to-antiquity mindset, an antagonism to consumption, nor a repression of the self. Rather, it opposes using greed to hijack desire, defining consumption by profligacy, and inflating the self with apathy and selfishness. It also opposes the so-called “green writing” under the spell of the new tricks of consumption culture. Examples of this include individuals who insist on being vegetarians but drive a luxury car, who love penguins but detest their parents, or a bunch of cool “activists” try to prevent industrial pollution by using drones and rockets. These types of green daydreams, while being “politically correct,” aren’t they equally dubious in their self-gratification? Aren’t they equally concealing fractures and chaos in their value systems?  

One Prospect: A New Method of Quantifying Values

The Summary is deeply aware of the significance of intellectual innovation, especially in anticipating the reformulation of the GDP concept. While GDP is the standard measure for gauging economic growth, it inherently assumes that all production is purposed for sale, that everything must have a price, and that activities and products outside the domain of exchange and circulation are valueless. In addition, products for exchange and their values are typically converted to the U.S. dollar exchange rate as the common denominator.  This is, at best, a limited and narrow metric. Meanwhile, the significant costs of ecology and health are always excluded as irrelevant in the calculation. Moreover, activities that are hard to be monetized, such as housework labor, volunteering, mutual aid among relatives and friends, and self-sufficient agricultural labor, are often barred from being counted as part of GDP. Furthermore, non-materializable values such as ethics, familial love, freedom, and happiness --- values that cultural anthropologists cherish as integral to human life, or the so-called “incalculable values” --- are a significant blind spot in GDP calculations. 

If we are to prioritize the humans instead of prioritizing the capital, overcome and transcend the developmentalist knowledge system, while restoring the multi-dimensionality inherent in the truth of human existence, can we find a better metric other than GDP? Can we find a more reasonable method of calculation that is comprehensive, inclusive, or even all-encompassing?  If not so, how should we establish and describe new value systems? 

Twenty years have passed since the Nanshan Conference. What is exhilarating is that through enduring hardships in trailblazing enterprises, China has unexpectedly extricated itself from ecological predicaments, as various environmental indices are heading in a good direction. Especially in the recent two decades, the idea of sustainable development has been deeply integrated into people’s consciousness and strongly promoted by national strategies, legal frameworks, and industrial policies, and has gained widespread support across the country. Vast momentum of constructing ecological civilization has gathered forces from all directions and sectors. China’s green industry is now leading the world. Representatives of these green industries are the “three pillars,” which are EV cars, lithium batteries, and photovoltaic energy. 

These achievements are simultaneously environmentally beneficial and propelling growth, blending soft power and hard power. With “one rock two birds,” these technologies achieve a win-win result ethically and economically, breaking from the longstanding binary opposition between economic growth and environmental protection. Moreover, with the aid of industrial automation and AI industries, these advances could incentivize a new cycle of industrial revolution, devaluing the dual dominance of resource-rich and manufacturing-empowered countries and consequently reconstituting the global economic structure and civilizational paradigms. To be honest, this transformation and rearrangement in modes of production and lifestyles have caught people unprepared. In this light, is the skepticism and criticism expressed at the Nanshan Conference of petroleum depletion and auto consumption boom overly pessimistic? Is it the case that The Limits of Growth, a credo much revered among the environmentalists, needs re-evaluation by later generations? 

Of course, besides exhilaration, there are also regrets. In 2006, the State Environmental Protection Administration of China and the National Bureau of Statistics released the “Green GDP” calculation research report, indicating that 10 provinces were inclined to adopt this “Green Calculation.” The research and callings by experts like Hu Angang, Niu Wenyuan, and Pan Yue before and after this release made noteworthy contributions to this issue. The new type of measurement tool envisioned at the Nanshan Conference --- the cornerstone for an alternative economics, and a new method of value quantification --- seemed to be able to materialize. But unfortunately, the challenges for this innovation are immense: to precisely represent and calculate the values of the full spectrum of human activities, especially those that are difficult to materialize or monetize, are extremely difficult, a “defiant-against-heaven project” that is unlikely to be accomplished at one stroke; and whether it is realizable is much in the unknown. Perhaps, in a rather long time from now, we can’t circumvent the stagnation, hesitation, setbacks, and underdevelopments in the process of exploring knowledge. The authoritative status of the GDP concept, despite its increasingly apparent shortcomings, will remain unshaken for some time and continue to dominate the news, financial reports, classrooms, and everyday conversations. In this situation, we have to have patience and the tenacity to move forward with great strength.