Environmental Crisis and Survival Politics: a Case study from Inner Mongolia

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Inner Mongolia has experienced fast economic growth and rapid industrialization. However, environmental pollution as a result has posed a serious threat to everyday life of the herdsmen. In some regions, high polluting industries permanently destroy the grassland and directly threaten the herdsmen’s health and their livestock. In order to protect the grassland, a range of collective activities have been taken by grassroots groups made up of herdsmen and local village cadres as well as intellectuals, students, educated youth, and lawyers country wide. Linking up with the existing scholarly frameworks of ‘self-relief’ and ‘rightful resistance’; this article aims to describe and analyse environmental resistance movements in Inner Mongolia. I argue that environmental protest movements in Inner Mongolia show high similarities to other cases which reported from Taiwan, Japan and Mainland-China. Thus, we should consider the nature of environmental protest movements in Inner Mongolia as an issue of environmental struggle; rather than an issue of ethnic conflicts.