China’s Green Public Culture: Network Pragmatics and the Environment

Abstract

The rates of environmental degradation and climate change accelerate and challenge taken-for-granted practices of living across the planet. China’s recent “smogpocalypse” illustrates how disruptive ecoevents necessitate complex, urgent alternatives and exchange. In this essay, we propose and analyze China’s Green Public Culture in terms of its players, networks, media, action, strategy, discourses, and cultural norm. The divergent communication activities of 21st-century green public culture in China are assembled as network pragmatics that cultivate experience, connect practices, tie alliances, express differences, and circulate controversy. Thus, we identify distinctive, emerging networks of cooperation and contestation, the vectors of dissensus that bid to generate and shape resources requisite for living in the Anthropocene.