Development and Sustainable Ethics in Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve, China

In March 2013, several thousand delegates at China’s National People’s Congress voted to approve the environmentally sensitive and authoritarian Xi Jinping as president. This portended dramatic changes in environmental policies, not least of which was an offsetting of top-down development-at-all-costs dogma with a new official orthodoxy focused on a sustainable and circular economy, with inclusive and more rounded growth. This article is part of a long-term project (2008–2018) in Fanjingshan National Nature Reserve in Guizhou Province that took place as the political scene in Beijing shifted. The larger project is about human–environment dynamics and complexities focusing on the preservation of snub-nosed golden monkey habitat and the implementation of top-down grain-to-green and national forest conservation programs. This article is about the contexts of two development projects, one in the reserve and one just outside of it, with very different outcomes. Drawing on the work of Arturo Escobar, Rosi Braidotti, and Xiaobo Su, we argue for development in a time and place of rapid change as if marginalized farmers and their families mattered and the possibility of sustainable ethics with a locatable politics. The article elaborates the potency of this kind of sustainability through the stories of families living on Fanjingshan Reserve in the midst of (1) authoritarian environmental policy proclamations from Beijing and (2) boisterous local development. Key Words: China, development, sustainability.