Tea Stewardship in Jingmai Mountain: A Practice‐Based and Cross‐Scalar Illustration of Ecological Citizenship in the Making

ABSTRACT The old tea forests of Jingmai Mountain in Yunnan, China, have been cultivated and maintained for centuries by indigenous Bulang and Dai communities through a unique ‘forest‐tea symbiosis’. We take this case as an entry point to examine a broader enquiry: how do a community's everyday ecological practices and their preservation simultaneously constitute issues of governance and social order? Using ecological citizenship as an analytical lens—a framework that comprises rights, obligations and the scale of citizen communities—this paper addresses a gap in the existing literature, which has focused largely on normative ideals and global universality while overlooking how ecological citizenship is produced through situated, historical practices of community‐making across scales. Viewed through this lens, the Jingmai case reveals a dynamic, three‐stage trajectory: (1) nascent features of ecological citizenship in low‐level disruption to nature under indigenous ecological ethics (tenth century–1960s); (2) threatened tea stewardship during state‐led agricultural modernisation (1960s–2000s); and (3) re‐articulated sustainable tea community under the ethos of human–nature harmony endorsed by nation‐state and global frameworks (2000s–present). We argue that what we see through the ecological citizenship lens in Jingmai Mountain is neither a pre‐formed ideal nor a static identity, but the performative, place‐based and cross‐scalar unfolding of community‐making, continuously constructed and contested through the complex interplays of situated community practices, governance interventions and environmental materialities. This study moves the conversation on ecological citizenship beyond ‘what it ought to be’ towards ‘how it is historically made in situ’, while acknowledging its relationality across different scales.