Greening the Chinese City: Young people, environmental activism and ChinaNet

This chapter focuses on the role of ChinaNet in the growing number of environmental protests in Chinese cities, and the way in which green issues are increasingly becoming part of everyday urban life and contemporary youth culture. It explores the ways in which protests in a specific city have provoked copycat activities elsewhere, creating environmental movements and uniting disparate cities and young people in a sense of belonging to what could be called a new progressive urban sensibility across China. Academic engagement with Chinese cities has often been concerned with the rapid processes of industrialisation and urbanisation at play, including mass migration and the wealth divide between those in urban and rural areas. Ecological awareness has a long history in Chinese culture, being embedded in Daoist and Confucian thinking, for example, with the concept of the cyclical economy.