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In global environmental governance, efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions often involve turning pollution rights into commodities, essentially privatizing the air. Policies like carbon pricing and market approaches are considered effective solutions, especially within capitalist systems, and continue to rely on logics of the tragedy of the (atmospheric) commons. In China, the Communist Party proposed environmental policies aligning with capitalist development principles under the concept of 'ecological civilization'. However, the perspectives on the ground differ from the government's plans. Citizens, including sci-fi enthusiasts and eco-utopian thinkers in both rural and urban areas, have their own visions for a shared future that go beyond the narrow focus on economic growth, markets and pricing. Contrary to official narratives, interviews, social media discussions and popular artworks reveal that many envision the future 'ecological civilization' with clean air as commons for the more-than-human world. I argue that anthropological perspectives must attend to such creative spaces in which political subjects become enfolded in the commons, without eclipsing their potential to reinforce class divisions and social inequalities in environmental aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China, the exchange of carbon credits prevalent in global environmental governance has expanded beyond emissions exchanges focused on polluting industrial installations and peripheral green lungs. Instead, an innovative field of individual carbon accounting schemes rescaled the responsibility for carbon emissions, savings, and offsets to the consumer-citizen through digital apps. This repurposing of carbon cannot be traced to simple top-down command-and-control measures conventionally associated with authoritarian regimes, nor to pure market-driven interests ascribed to neoliberal governance. In individual carbon accounting the auditing, consultancy and accountability strategies preaching resilience in the face of the global risks and capitalist crises meet with the Marxist-Leninist commitments to the "mass line." The Chinese Communist Party and related actors thereby foster GDP growth while performing environmental redress. Chinese social management measures, including individual carbon accounting, belong to a cybernetic, autonomous, and aspirational promise of a more harmonious melding of ecology and economy, often distilled in visions of Ecological Civilization, yet placing hope in the possibility of green capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Banned in China between 1998 and 2005, the reemergence of network marketing allows rural young women to distribute a wide range of consumer products across uneven rural–urban landscapes. The rhizomic distribution channels of network marketing long confounded Chinese legal and regulatory governance based on workplaces embedded in particular locations, a problem compounded by the rise of e‐commerce in the last decade. As network marketers and their potential clients maneuvered spatial inequalities, gender hierarchies, and financial exclusion, they confronted the subversion of long‐term mutuality and sociality to short‐term transactional exchanges, a process partially inverted by the move from physical to virtual retail and its digital rating systems. As the Chinese state sought to establish, monitor, and guarantee trust in economic activities by delimiting predatory schemes, its initial targeting of network marketing companies has given way to regulating the sellers themselves. In contrast to contexts where network marketing forges enterprising subjectivities of neoliberalism, however, Chinese salespersons prioritized meeting aspirations of an imagined pastoral state and idealized social relations over business transactions. By championing that earning trust forms the ultimate measure of success, the discourse of network salespersons and their potential customers rings with the ways that e‐commerce platforms and digital bureaucracy attempt to measure, evaluate, and regulate the trustworthiness of Chinese citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the rise of children's birthday celebrations in rural China, this article asks what is at stake in these festivities. As kin, friends, and neighbours rally around offspring, birthday parties focus on what children are and will become. Through ritual acts relatives express ties to scarce offspring as kin, often in competition with one another and the values they seek children to attain. Rural citizens thereby negotiate and contest new forms of social exclusion linked to population policies and economic transformation in the Chinese countryside. By imbuing birthday parties with ritual forms, these celebrations challenge theoretical assumptions about the secularisation of kinship under capitalism and the nuclearisation of the family through state bureaucracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In China’s Shanxi Province, responses to an earthquake rumour translated mundane concerns over safe, adequate, and affordable housing into mass action during a perceived emergency. Ongoing housing rumours challenged the wider political-economic sphere that promised order and harmony through regulations, yet frequently led to inequality and even chaos in practice. In order to understand the morality underlying the circulation of these rumours, the article explores the Chinese realm of minjian as a domain of mutual solidarity safeguarding kin, acquaintances, and even strangers. It compares this realm of minjian to E.P. Thompson’s notion of ‘the crowd’, as sites of mass action due to diminishing access to a means of livelihood under conditions of marketization. The article thereby reflects on the transformation of Chinese homes from domestic spaces of safety and security to vehicles for capital accumulation subjected to risky speculation and dangerous corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]