Humanities and Social Sciences Colloquium - Andrea Riemenschnitter

China's present head of state Xi Jinping inaugurated his leadership with the promise to improve the environmental condition in his country. Moreover, he disseminated his reigning slogan of the China Dream nationwide in conspicuous propaganda campaigns. Carefully crafted poster series featured iconic landscapes in conjunction with Confucian values, thus issueing an ethical imperative for citizens to protect their environment. Critical cultural producers, on the other hand, noticed the idealism and contradictions within this campaign. Putting a big question mark behind the state's investment in pedagogic and technological solutions, they bring to the fore the worries and hopes of concerned intellectuals, citizens, and cultural producers. This lecture will address some key issues  in contemporary China's environmental discourse by contextualising the currently emerging return to ancient shanshui paradigms with historical entanglements of the nation's landscape aesthetics, and study how landscape representations both challenge and supplement the state's project of environmental modernization.