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“China Goes Green brilliantly redefines our understanding of modern Chinese governance, dismantling a simplified portrait and illuminating the force, and the flaws, of the centralized approach that some officials call the “era of coercion.” These insights are vital to understanding not only China’s environmental policy but also its handling of public-health emergencies and other issues of urgent global interest.”
— Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
“A clearly written, comprehensive and timely volume, China Goes Green will help students, researchers, and the general public understand how to think about China’s ’authoritarian environmentalism’ — or more accurately, as Li and Shapiro argue — ‘environmental authoritarianism’ under Xi Jinping. A concise guide to a very important issue.”
— Emily T. Yeh, University of Colorado Boulder, author of Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development

Li and Shapiro trenchantly explore environmentalism as an element of China’s deepening and globalizing authoritarianism, while also showing that citizen involvement, or “supervision by the masses,” is required for such projects to succeed. Through nuanced case studies from urban air quality to reforestation, China Goes Green inspires us to focus on the relationship between sustainability and freedom – an endangered species in our increasingly illiberal world.

— Jesse Ribot, American University