This book sheds light on the social imagination of nature and environment in contemporary China. It demonstrates how the urgent debate on how to create an ecologically sustainable future for the world’s most populous country is shaped by its complex engagement with religious traditions, competing visions of modernity and globalization, and by engagement with minority nationalities who live in areas of outstanding natural beauty on China’s physical and social margins. The book develops a comprehensive understanding of contemporary China that goes beyond the tradition/ modernity dichotomy, and illuminates the diversity of narratives and worldviews that inform contemporary Chinese understandings of and engagements with nature and environment.

James Miller is Professor of Chinese Studies and Religious Studies at Queen’s University, Canada.

Dan Smyer Yu is the Research Group Leader at the Department of Religious Diversity at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.

Peter van der Veer is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.