China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing desertification. State environmentalism—in the form of grazing bans, enclosure, and resettlement—has transformed the lives of many ethnic minority herders in China’s western borderlands.

This book shows how such policies have been contested and negotiated on the ground, in the context of the state’s intensifying nation-building project. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Alasha, in the far west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Thomas White describes how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism.

In exploring how the greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nationstate, this study is both a political biography of the Bactrian camel and an innovative work of political ecology addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

Join us for a conversation between Thomas White, King’s College London and Christian Sorace, University of Cambridge about the politics of state environmentalism and nation-building in the arid west of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to celebrate the launch of ‘China’s Camel Country’.

This is an in-person event. Registration is required.

Speakers

Christian Sorace is a lecturer of Global China at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Shaken Authority: China’s Communist Party and the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake (Cornell University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi (ANU Press and Verso Books, 2019) and Proletarian China: One Century of Chinese Labour (Verso Books, 2022). He also serves on the editorial board of the Made in China Journal.

Thomas White is lecturer in China and Sustainable Development at the Lau China Institute, King's College London. He was previously a Research Associate at the Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. After completing his PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, he worked as a Lecturer at this university, and then as a Senior Researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He holds a BA from the University of Oxford, and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. Thomas studied Mandarin at SOAS, and has lived and worked for several years in China, where he also learned Mongolian.