Xiaofeng Liu 刘晓凤

selected publications

1. Going out and going green: NGOs in the environmental governance of Global China

   Liu, Xiaofeng, and Bennett, Mia M.

   Eurasian Geography and Economics online

   Abs HTML

   While the roles of actors such as the state and state-owned enterprises within “Global China” elicit significant scholarly attention, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are relatively less critiqued. These members of Chinese civil society are playing an increasingly important role in the environmental governance of the country’s overseas activities. By analyzing firsthand observations and interviews and secondhand materials produced by NGOs and the Chinese government, this article traces how and why Chinese NGOs seek to “green” China’s engagement beyond its borders. First, we identify four types of Chinese NGOs with a variety of state- and non-state founders. Then, we examine how NGOs’ objectives and state policies jointly shape the way they “go out.” As both knowledge and political actors, Chinese NGOs accumulate, produce, and disseminate knowledge related to Global China’s environmental issues, across domestic and international spaces. Though the specific strategies pursued by NGOs depend on their type, overall, their alignment with Chinese state policies and interests constitutes a crucial condition for their success. This research offers new insights into Chinese non-state actors’ expanding participation in international activities. As the country’s civil organizations endeavor to exert influence both within and beyond China’s borders, the effects of their interventions on global governance may grow.

2. Governing the Extraterritorial: Global Environmentalities of China’s Green Belt and Road Initiative

   Liu, Xiaofeng, and Bennett, Mia M.

   Annals of the American Association of Geographers 2024

   Abs HTML

   This article proposes a global environmentality framework to critique efforts to “green” the Belt and Road Initiative (or Green BRI) by examining the Chinese state’s environmental governance of extraterritorial spaces. The article transcends a focus within governmentality studies on domestic processes to reveal the relations between governance techniques and environmental subjects, including state and nonstate actors, beyond sovereign borders. Drawing on interviews, observations, and analysis of policies and reports, we identify three ways in which global environmentalities operate and are negotiated through the Green BRI. First, the Chinese state is embracing international sustainable development criteria to gain global legitimacy while seeking to export its domestic environmental governance model, making the Green BRI a dialectic policy. Second, the state is targeting and disciplining BRI participants, including Chinese financial institutions, construction companies, the renewable industry, and foreign state actors in BRI countries. Third, Chinese and BRI partner country participants’ variegated subjectivities arise out of the negotiation of their own interests, Chinese state interests, and BRI host country concerns. Our analysis contributes to understanding of how China, as a rising power, engages in global environmental governance and produces extraterritorial environmental subjects. 本文提出了全球环境主义框架, 在此框架下研究中国政府对域外空间的环境治理, 评判了“绿化”“一带一路”倡议(绿色“一带一路”倡议)。本文超越国内治理术研究, 涵盖了主权国界之外的国家和非国家行为者, 揭示了治理技术与环境主体之间的关系。通过采访、观察、政策和报告分析, 本文确定了全球环境主义的运作、基于绿色“一带一路”倡议进行协商的三种方式。首先, 中国政府正在接受可持续发展国际标准, 以获得全球合法性, 并寻求输出国内环境治理模式, 使绿色“一带一路”倡议成为一项辩证的政策。第二, 中国正在针对并约束“一带一路”倡议的参与者, 包括中国金融机构、建筑公司、可再生能源企业、“一带一路”倡议国家的外国行为者。第三, 中国和“一带一路”倡议伙伴国的各种主观性, 源自于自身利益、中国利益和“一带一路”倡议东道国考量的谈判。我们的分析有助于理解中国作为一个新兴大国, 如何参与全球环境治理并带来域外环境问题。

3. The biopolitics of Chinese tourism governance in the Arctic

   Iaquinto, Benjamin Lucca, Bennett, Mia M., and Liu, Xiaofeng

   Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 2023

   Abs HTML

   Scholarly attention to China’s domestic experimentation and control measures applied to its population (e.g. the Family Planning Policy and Zero-Covid) has expanded. So, too, has the popularity of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, which refers to political strategies of governing based on a population’s biological features. However, China’s biopolitical rationales for its growing participation in global governance (全球治理 quanqiu zhili) beyond its borders have received less attention. This research focuses on the Arctic, a region where China does not claim territorial sovereignty but has significant involvement, to examine the Chinese state’s exertion of biopolitical control over its outbound tourist population. Drawing on a review of policy texts and media reports, complemented by observations at an Arctic conference held in China and three field visits to the Arctic in 2018–2019, we show how China’s interventions in Arctic tourism seek to transform Chinese tourists into a productive, self-disciplining population who practice and promote state logics of social and environmental responsibility. The paper contributes to the understanding of tourism governance in frontier regions with geopolitical significance, as well as the modern state’s exterritorial power over its own citizens even when they are beyond its sovereign territory.

4. China’s Water Governmentality and the Shaping of Hydrosocial Territories: A Case of the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Mechanism

   Wang, Yu Raymond,  Liu, Xiaofeng, and Zhang, Wenya

   The China Quarterly 2022

   Abs HTML PDF

   This paper examines China’s water governmentality in advancing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC). It attends to how discourses, used as a political instrument, are framed, justified and contested in the reshaping of international hydrosocial territories. China’s official and popular discourses present the LMC as promoting multilateral politics, economic benefits and social integration, while they obscure polarizing politics, external interventions and regional conflicts. Using strategies of positive publicity first, top-down communication and mutual empathy creation, these discourses aim to deflect attention away from controversies and geopolitics in the region to construct governable hydrosocial territories. However, in a transnational context where the Chinese state cannot unilaterally control geographical imaginaries, alternative discourses depict China as a “hydro-hegemon” that poses threats to downstream countries. The discursive dichotomy reflects multiple ontologies of water and power struggles in international river governance, bringing regional stability and sustainable development into question.

5. The geopolitics of knowledge communities: Situating Chinese and foreign studies of the Green Belt and Road Initiative

   Liu, Xiaofeng, and Bennett, Mia

   Geoforum 2022

   Abs HTML

   Geographers are paying increasing attention to the geopolitics of knowledge production. China has attracted particular interest given the state’s professed goal of becoming a scientific power. Little research, however, has attended to the politics of scientific research relating to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Instead, a focus on the discourses and environmental impacts of infrastructure projects is paramount. Understanding the situated nature of research on the BRI, particularly within the environmental sciences, is crucial considering the Chinese state’s ambitions to become a global scientific power and a leader in green energy and climate change. We carry out a systematic review of 537 publications in Chinese and English on the Green BRI, an ostensibly more environmentally-friendly version of the initiative. We find four main research themes across the entire corpus: 1) environmental impact assessments; 2) empirical analysis of non-state actors involved in Green BRI governance; 3) identification of overseas commercial opportunities for China’s green industries; and 4) detection of policy alignment of the Chinese initiative with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. For each theme, we articulate the main cleavages separating the Chinese and foreign corpuses and critique the geopolitics and subjectivities embedded in environmental studies of the BRI. The two corpuses agree on: 1) the need for a greener BRI; 2) the need for more diversified governance that engages actors beyond the state; and 3) the ability for host country context and capacity to influence the BRI’s implementation. The corpuses disagree regarding: 1) the severity of the initiative’s potential impacts; 2) investors’ and non-profit organizations’ intentions and appropriate roles; and 3) whether China should export its norms and standards or instead adopt international ones. We attribute these cleavages to divergent implicit geopolitics embedded within the Chinese and foreign knowledge communities, which reflects broader interstate power competition. This research underscores how knowledge production is geopolitically situated even within environmental studies, which are often viewed as objective. At a time of heightening international tension, this article urges consideration of how emerging geopolitical ideas and narratives affect the practices and policies of science in rising powers.

6. Viral borders: COVID-19’s effects on securitization, surveillance, and identity in Mainland China and Hong Kong

   Liu, Xiaofeng, and Bennett, Mia M

   Dialogues in Human Geography 2020

   Abs HTML

   As COVID-19 spreads, new processes, forms, and scales of bordering practices are transcending national territorial limits. This commentary critiques how ‘viral borders’ are securitizing the global supply chains of medical products, disciplining citizens, and reterritorializing communities and contemplates the consequences of these practices for the post-pandemic era.