Greening Chinese cities? Denaturalizing the ‘good’ of environmental discourses in China’s urban planning system

The past three decades have witnessed a growing body of research that draws on post-structuralist theory to interrogate environmental discourses in planning. Grounded in the interpretative tradition, this approach rejects essentialist ontology to assume environmental discourses being socially constructed and linked to different policy arenas at multiple geographical scales. Widely applied in environmental politics and planning studies in advanced capitalism, the scaled discourse analysis has barely been deployed in China’s context. This chapter uses this approach to interpret the political and scalar construction of the environmental discourses in China’s urban planning system. It has made two primary arguments. First, there exist multiple narratives of ‘environment’ instead of a single narrative. The environmental discourses in planning depend on how political regimes makes sense of environmental phenomenon rather than simply the urgency of that phenomenon. The second argument builds upon the first to contend that the formation and legitimization of environmental discourses in planning is a power-laden process through which multiple narratives are contested at interlocking scales. These arguments are elaborated upon through a discussion of the changing environmental discourses in five post-1978 master/spatial plans of Guangzhou, the capital city of Guangdong Province in South China.