CASAS’ member Daren Shi-Chi Leung has published this review of the book Circular ecologies: environmentalism and waste politics in Urban China by Amy Zhang in the Journal of Peasant Studies.
Abstract: With intellectual rigor and ethnographic richness, Amy Zhang offers her much -anticipated monograph, Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China. In this book, she provides a comprehensive ethnography of Guangzhou’s ambitious attempt to engineer a ‘circular economy.’ Zhang’s central argument is that this grand techno-scientific project – designed to eliminate waste by transforming it into a resource – is far from a seamless, top-down success. Instead, she vividly illustrates how its implementation generates a cascade of social frictions, spatial displacements, and political contestations. Following the journey of waste itself, Zhang reveals how it acts as a ‘systemic irritant’ that forges new ‘circulations’ of value and harm, and gives rise to unexpected political ‘collectives’ that challenge, negotiate, and reimagine the state’s vision of a green future. Circular Ecologies is a timely and essential intervention into critical debates on political ecology, discard studies, and environmental governance.
Read the full review here: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2026.2644490
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CASAS
The Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the Global South (CASAS) is a community of Scholar-Activists working in critical agrarian studies.