Governmentality, Identity, and Air Pollution Control: Listening to Laid-Off and Land-Lost Peasants in China

The social costs of pollution control and their distribution are often overlooked by policymakers and scholars. This is generally the case in China which, faced with high levels of pollution, has responded by large-scale closures of polluting industries. Ethnographic research conducted in Hebei reveals that closing private rather than state-run cement factories resulted in indirect discrimination against peasants who had lost land due to advancing urbanization. Land-lost peasants, distant from power, socially insecure, being neither rural peasants nor urban citizens, took responsibility for their work being polluting and passively accepted job losses believing that it was their duty, as laobaixing (the common people). These findings are interpreted through the lenses of governmentality and symbolic violence that may prove valuable in other contexts.