| In China, a deepening environmental crisis threatens health, livelihoods, economic development, and the future of the Chinese state. Water has grown toxic, crops fail, and the air is dangerous to breathe. Motivated by increasing social unrest and economic costs, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to reform and improve its environmental protection regime. Despite such efforts, conditions continue to worsen, particularly for those living in poorer rural communities who depend on the failing resources for basic subsistence, cannot escape pollution's effects, and have few to no options for remedy.;This dissertation is about how these villagers choose to act when faced with severe and immediate pollution, what shape that action takes, and what their choices reveal about the politics, policies, and institutions of environmental protection in China. Villagers who choose action risk significant political and economic consequences without much hope for success, and even if they win a lawsuit, participate in a protest, get the story into the media, or make their petitions heard, they may still face negative consequences. To understand the process through which such choices are made, I examine not only the choice to take visible action, but also the choices to act in less visible ways and not to act at all. I explore the boundary between action and inaction, and between different paths chosen. This boundary is significant to the CCP, which pays close attention to potential triggers of protest. It has implications for managing China's environmental damage, because environmental accountability is increasingly central to successful policies. Finally, understanding that boundary in China sheds light on how the most politically and economically marginalized can affect a durable authoritarian regime. By seeking to understand the choice process, I also find subtler dimensions of action that have significant implications for public participation and how we understand environmental awareness more broadly. Before villagers are willing to even acknowledge pollution---no matter how obvious it may seem---each individual considers a variety of social and political factors to calculate the value of that acknowledgement. As such, the open acknowledgement of pollution can itself be an act of political contention.;I also examine how villagers' choices illustrate the state of institutional development in China, particularly the legal system. The legal system has been transformed and expanded to support economic growth, and now the CCP leadership increasingly seems to identify law as a tool to support environmental protection efforts. I explore the how the state's reforms affect individual perspectives, and what role they play in the choice to act. I find that connecting environmental protection policies to the legal system, whether through providing a channel for citizen suits, or through laws implemented to govern and enforce environmental policies, can have a dampening effect on levels of institutional and political trust, which has further implications for how social unrest might manifest. |
