Abstract

China today positions itself as a model of state-led environmentalism. On the country’s arid rangelands, grassland conservation policies have targeted pastoralists and their animals, blamed for causing 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. In this talk I show 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, I describe how ethnic Mongols have foregrounded the local breed of Bactrian camel, mobilizing ideas of heritage and resource conservation to defend pastoralism. Demonstrating how the much-vaunted greening of the Chinese state affects the entangled lives of humans and animals at the margins of the nation-state, this talk addresses critical questions of rural livelihoods, conservation, and state power.