A Spark in the Smokestacks: Environmental Organizing in Beijing Middle-Class Communities

Winner, 2024 Robert E. Park Book Award, Section on Community and Urban Sociology, American Sociological Association Environmental organizing in Beijing emerged in an unlikely place in the 2000s: new gated residential communities. After rapid population growth and housing construction led to a ballooning trash problem and overflowing landfills, many first-time homeowners found their new neighborhoods facing an unappetizing prospect—waste incinerator projects slated for their backyards. Delving into the online and offline conversations of communities affected by the proposed incinerators, A Spark in the Smokestacks demonstrates how a rising middle class acquires the capacity for organizing in an authoritarian context. Jean Yen-chun Lin examines how urban residents create civic life through everyday associational activities—learning to defend property rights, fostering participation, and mobilizing to address housing-related grievances. She shows that homeowners cultivated petitioning skills, informational networks, and community leadership, which they would later deploy against incinerator projects. To interact with government agencies, they developed citizen science–based tactics, a middle-class alternative to disruptive protests. Homeowners drew on their professional connections, expertise, and fundraising capabilities to produce reports that boosted their legitimacy in city-level dialogue. Although only one of the three incinerator projects Lin follows was ultimately canceled, some communities established durable organizations that went on to tackle other environmental problems. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and ethnography, A Spark in the Smokestacks casts urban Chinese communities as “schools of democracy,” in which residents learn civic skills and build capacity for collective organizing. Through compelling case studies of local activism, this book sheds new light on the formation of civil society and social movements more broadly.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction 1. A Stench on Success: Urban Middle-Class Homeowners and Rising Environmental Challenges 2. Gated Communities as Schools of Democracy 3. Making Sense of External Threats: Individual, Collective, and Representative Responses 4. Mobilizing and Organizing for Environmental Collective Action 5. Trajectories of Citizen Science 6. Consequences of Community Environmental Organizing Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Jean Yen-chun Lin is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University, East Bay.

Review :
By offering a textured account of the way space enables civic life to flourish in China, this beautiful book urgently reminds us that even in nondemocratic contexts, people can do great things when they join together to put their hands on the levers of change. Transcending conventional depictions of environmental justice politics, A Spark in the Smokestacks provides a rich and compelling portrait of how three communities in Beijing were able to mobilize their civic capacity to fight environmental harms. Lin’s impressive study deserves broad attention in sociology, political science, environmental studies, and beyond. By systematically examining the intersection of environmental activism and the development of middle-class communities in China, A Spark in the Smokestacks offers fresh evidence and original insights on a very important topic. Lin’s extensive and systematic comparative analysis and prolonged fieldwork have produced rich empirical evidence and in-depth analysis. This book will be a welcome and valuable addition to the fields of China studies and contentious politics. A Spark in the Smokestacks is an important book that will be necessary reading for political sociology in general and contentious politics in particular. It can also serve as a useful reference for students studying environmental politics in China. Brings timely and valuable insights into how citizens make sense of air pollution, as well as how everyday residential life can foster civic participation skills. With its rich data, this book is a welcome addition to the burgeoning field of civil society, environmental activism and contentious politics. An important starting point for socially engaged and reflexive research on environmental and spatial justice. A terrific book that makes a compelling case that residential communities are incubators of social change and therefore generative sites of study for future work.