This article discusses how a sequence of 120 bamboo branch lyrics, Ōtō shiji zasshi (Miscellaneous Poems on the Four Seasons East of the Kamogawa, ca. 1826), represent the interface of Kyoto's bustling entertainment quarter with the waters of Kamogawa River that sustained it. Adapting elements of the French philosopher and Sinologist François Jullien's (b. 1951) analytical schema identifying and characterizing what he calls the “folds” or patterns of Chinese and Western thought, the article addresses how poems embed urban livelihoods and entertainment in the seasonal rhythms of their physical settings, and how fluidity, “communicability,” and “discretion” pervade the urban ambiance or urbanity conveyed therein. Pondering such features of this poetry in tandem with Jullien's thought might lead to fruitful discussions of the cultural and physical “folds” that have hardened into present-day urban landscapes. Exploring how fluidity and receptivity to transitivity, both literal and figurative—to currents of air, water, and life itself—might facilitate growth of an urbane sensibility that is less obtrusive and, ergo, less environmentally corrosive in cities of the future.

Slow violence, or the gradual ecological devastation that goes unnoticed, is not always discernible to our perceptions. It is the indifference toward environmental degradation and the suffering experienced by marginalized communities that contributes to the phenomenon of slow violence becoming “out of sight.” In its refusal to take responsibility, this type of indifference fails to acknowledge or realize the unequal social structures and systems that have become accepted as “natural” or commonplace. Drawing on the perspective of the Frankfurt school, this article argues that Chen Qiufan's 陳楸帆 (1981–) Huangchao 荒潮 (Waste Tide) serves as an exceptional ecological narrative within Chinese science fiction, shedding light on how indifference leads to the invisibility of environmental degradation and the struggles of marginalized groups. Moreover, it reveals that the perceived “natural” and unequal systems are the root causes behind such irresponsible behavior, serving as a symptom of alienation. Through an analysis of Waste Tide, this article examines the relationship between environmental injustice and indifference, demonstrating that waste, as evidence of environmental injustice, is a social problem inherent in capitalism. Furthermore, this article adopts a global perspective by exploring the manifestations of indifference serving as alienation presented in the novel. By delving into the fictional exploration of ecological and sociological relationships found in Chinese science fiction, this research contributes to the broad discourse surrounding the global ecological and social crisis.

Touting the technological fix for environmental crises overlooks the role of society, history, culture, production, and geography. Anthropocene, presuming all civilizations as ecologically destructive, ignores the historical, social, and cultural differences in human-nature relations. The contributors of this issue mount a humanistic critique of structural inequalities, alienating social relations, and environmental injustice in environmental crises while articulating cultural and religious legacies in human-nature relations.

Toward the end of the 1950s, China and the Soviet Union were heading down two different paths, ultimately leading to the disastrous Sino-Soviet split. The Sino-Soviet film coproduction Wind from the East (Feng cong dongfang lai 風從東方來, 1959), a film to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, inadvertently captures such a historical transition. Situating the film in the context of transnational ecocinemas, this article looks into the relationship between natural disasters and Sino-Soviet brotherhood in 1959. The author argues that the film captures a somewhat ambiguous Sino-Soviet bond under threat, oscillating between a nostalgic communist internationalism, on the one hand, and, on the other, a rising and subtle Chinese nationalism. The ecological crises, flooding in particular, serve as an unpronounced and unspecified threat to the Sino-Soviet brotherhood, which could be annihilated by the Sino-Soviet bond. The film captures a moment of natural and political, propagandistic and aesthetic “climate change,” pointing to a future of Sino-Soviet cooperation without sacrificing the Chinese national interests.

This article primarily considers the possibility of translating between Indigenous and settler modes of ecological thought and praxis. The former often manifest analogously to quantum field theory, where, as Indigene Linda Yarrowin states, “it's all connected,” while the latter depend on the Newtonian logic of the void to create simplified universal models. The author first provides green governance examples of these differences from Australia's Northern Territories and Xinjiang Uyghur Region, adopting Karen Barad's agential realism to distinguish among modes of thought. Next is an analysis of Taiwanese novelist Wu Ming-yi's attempt to engage these cosmologies in his acclaimed “ecocosmopolitan” novel The Man with the Compound Eyes (2011), assessing the viability of “patchy Anthropocene” as a means of translating, or making visible, ecologies occluded by Newtonian void logic. The author argues that Wu's novel succeeds in this endeavor by depicting local and global processes of settler-colonial decolonization and indicting epistemologies of “radioactive racism” that view Pacific islands as “empty” of life, logics that rationalized US Cold War nuclear tests and radiation experiments on Marshall Island Indigenes.

Crossing the binary of utopia and dystopia, this article reads Hao Jingfang's (1984–) novel Vagabonds as a critical ecotopia. I explore configurations of social worlds and eschew the politics of purity by highlighting the complexities of building a utopia while navigating entangled complicity and ambiguity between utopia and dystopia. The Mars Republic in the novel represents an ecotopia built through advanced technologies, where Martians adapt to the arid environment in contrast with the environmentally degraded earth. The novel portrays encounters, shocks, and mutual critiques between two planets. In general, the novel articulates the multicultural and multiracialism on Mars and the coming-of-age narrative of young Martians. Their self-realization rests on the assumption that humans must engage with and appropriate from nature while changing their inner nature.

The article considers what role “meaning” plays in shaping the unintended suffering caused by human aspirations. The thing we call meaning in “the secular age” has replaced the transcendent to become the new religion we espouse. We fight for abstract ideas, principles, or ideology, predicated on the meanings we construct, and we are even willing to be martyred for them. Humans’ meaning production has catalyzed not only the massive extinction of nonhuman species but also our own civilizational demise. This article begins with the conviction that humanity has not become more nihilistic contrary to what Nietzsche predicted and most modern scholars of nihilism profess. To the contrary, it has become more antinihilistic and nihilphobic. From an ecological standpoint, nihilism is not and should not be a curse word. In fact, learning how to die requires nihility and nihilism. Only by going deeper into nothingness/nihility and nihilism can we deconstruct human-centered views and meaning construction. Only then can we come to terms with other ecolives and with our impermanence, which has been excluded from our meaning production. In this sense, the gong'an or kōan practice of Zen Buddhism is the therapeutic technology we need in the Anthropocene eschatology.

This article reads Liu Cixin's award-winning Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem (2007, in English 2014) as a work of climate fiction. By analyzing the novel's portrayal of ecological crisis, dystopian outlook, and inexplicable dream sequences, this article identifies an overarching environmental theme complexly entangled in politics and idealism. While signaling a definite shift away from anthropocentrism, the narrative nonetheless reasserts humanist and anthropocentric assumptions. As such, the novel speaks to the inseverable connections between humans and nonhumans while simultaneously contemplating the reality of human extinction events. Riddled with such contradictions, The Three-Body Problem thus represents the experience of hope and cynicism in the face of radically transforming human/nonhuman relationships—a sentiment likely shared by many readers in our age of eco-crisis.

By engaging with and bringing together Chinese environmental humanities and science fiction studies, this article argues that the narratives of weather and climate revealed in late Qing science fiction serve as a metonymic vehicle and a medium for addressing China's social and political crises. The author analyzes three late Qing science fiction works—Bingshan xuehai 冰山雪海 (Iceberg and Snow Ocean), Dianshijie 電世界 (Electrical World), and Xinshitouji 新石頭記 (New Story of the Stone)—and delves into the intellectual history of modern Chinese environmental ideas. In exploring literary representations and environmental ideas surrounding topics on the air, this article makes three contributions. First, it compels us to reconsider the promises and pitfalls of evading the narrative of nature's decline. The imagination of the air in late Qing science fiction is characterized by its global scale, inclusive of the surface, but imperial in nature. Second, it illustrates that Chinese domestication of modern environmental ideas is not a one-way street when Chinese intellectuals appropriated Western notions for their own discursive maneuvering. Third, it suggests that the defamiliarization of the air serves as a barometer of understanding the repressed modernity in Chinese literature from an environmental perspective.

As a critical term, greenwashing refers derogatorily to the “perfect” images of green and lush scenery presented by corporate-led publicity campaigns to promote their environment-friendly postures while they continue their toxic and harmful business operations. This critique of greenwashing compares the terms greening and greenwashing, followed by a critique of “simulated green” and Yi-fu Tuan's 段義孚 (1930–2022) approach to simulated habitats. It explores the ambiguous role of technological determinism in China's modernization drive and seeks to dissect the nature of the “telescopic hegemony” of sight and vision in the Western model of technoscience and its questionable impact on China's effort to modernize by virtue of technological triumphalism. In examining the cultural ethos and modalities toward the color green to promote ecological awareness, the author focuses mainly on the human cognitive affect for conceiving green as a vital venue to rebuild corporeal ties with our biophysical settings, to guard against the misuse of green to “fix” landscapes by turning them into habitats desirable only to some humans. To that end, the article revisits Yi-fu Tuan's key notions of synesthesia, belongingness, and lived reciprocity and attempts to implement them in critiquing the uprooted and displaced nature of simulated landscapes (including simulated green).