Fantasy Islands ─ Chinese Dreams and Ecological Fears in an Age of Climate Crisis

The rise of China and its status as a leading global factory?combined with an increasing worldwide desire for inexpensive toys, clothes, and food?are altering the way people live and consume. At the same time, the world appears wary of the real costs of this desire: toys drenched in lead paint, dangerous medicines, and tainted pet food.

Examining sites in China, including the plan for a new eco-city called Dongtan on the island of Chongming, suburbanization projects, and the Shanghai World Expo, Julie Sze interrogates Chinese, European, and American ?eco-desire” and the eco-technological fantasies that underlie contemporary development of global cities and mega-suburbs. In doing so, she challenges readers to rethink how cities must undergo alterations to become true ?eco-cities.”

Sze frames her analysis of these case studies in the context of the problems of global economic change and climate crisis, and she explores the flows, fears, and fantasies of Pacific Rim politics that shaped plans for Dongtan. She looks at the flow of pollution from Asia to the United States (ten billion pounds of airborne pollutants annually). Simultaneously, she considers the flow of financial and political capital for eco-city and ecological development between elite power structures in the UK and China, and charts how climate change discussions align with US fears of China’s ascendancy and the related demise of the American Century.

Ultimately, Fantasy Islands examines how fears and fantasies about China and historical and political power change the American imagination.

Julie Sze is Associate Professor of American Studies at UC Davis and founding director of the Environmental Justice Project for UC Davis' John Muir Institute for the Environment. Her first book, Noxious New York (MIT) won the 2008 John Hope Franklin Award for the best book published in American Studies.