"From 'Closing Down the Deep-Bore Wells' to The Wandering Earth: A Re-Examination of Environmental Governance Legitimacy in China"
KuoRay Mao
What the paper says
The article critically examines the role of environmental law in China’s state-capitalist system from a structural Marxist perspective. The author argues that the Chinese environmental regulatory regime, often perceived as arbitrary and chaotic, is not a mere byproduct of a developing legal system but a deliberate strategy to legitimize state authority and control. Through case studies on integrated water resources management and the prevention of husbandry waste pollution, the article illustrates how environmental laws serve as both Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA) and Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), enforcing social control and shaping public consciousness. The state’s top-down enforcement methods, reliance on technocratic solutions, and manipulation of legal and moral ideologies are shown to maintain and obscure the relations of production, reinforcing the state capitalist model of accumulation. The article also explores how China’s cultural products like the film, The Wandering Earth, normalize authoritarian state authority in global environmental governance. The analysis concludes that to fully understand China’s environmental governance, one must view it through the lens of state-capitalist accumulation, recognizing the role of environmental law in maintaining authoritarian state-society relations and shaping the broader political-economic landscape.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.00 × 0.4 = 0.00 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.