China's Camel Country: Livestock and Nation-Building at a Pastoral Frontier

China's state-led environmentalism has targeted pastoralists and their animals, leading to contested and negotiated policies on the ground. Thomas White's book explores how ethnic Mongols in Alasha, Inner Mongolia, have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel to defend pastoralism, addressing critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 264 pages
Publication date: 20 August 2024
Publisher: University of Washington Press

China today presents itself as a model of state-led environmentalism, with grassland conservation policies targeting pastoralists and their animals, blaming them for 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. However, 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 nation-state, 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.

Weight: 406g
Dimension: 228 x 151 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780295752433