sustainable china

James Miller attending the Laozi Conference in the Great Hall of the People

I’m at the First Summit on Laozi and Daoist Culture, which is taking place this week in Beijing. The Summit is the work of Prof. Hu Fuchen, one of the leading scholars of Daoism, and a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. This morning, we had the opening ceremony, which was held in the Great Hall of the People. It was my first time in this magnificent building.

The purpose of the conference is basically to promote Daoism throughout China and the World. It is being funded by a wealthy donor, and has received backing at a high level from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Read the rest of this entry »

A collapsed building in Dujiangyan, close to the epicentre of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

China’s massive system of hydroelectric dams and water distribution has come under fire once again. Right after the devastating Sichuan earthquake of May 12, 2008, in which over 70,000 people lost their lives, officials rushed to deny that the massive Three Gorges Dam complex hundreds of kilometres downstream could have played any role in triggering the natural disaster.

Now officials are working hard to  play down a call by Fan Xiao, Chief Engineer of the Regional Geology Investigation Team of the Sichuan Geology and Mineral Bureau, for scientists to investigate whether the Zipingpu dam project, located upstream of the quake area, may have triggered the earthquake.

Fan’s call comes in the wake of a paper by Christian Klose at Columbia University which theorized how abnormal surface stresses caused by the Zipingpu dam system may have triggered the massive earthquake. Klose’s hypothesis also matches work conducted by Lei Xinglin a geologist with the China Earthquake Administration in Beijing.

Read the rest of this entry »

By James Miller

I recently had the pleasure of participating in the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Forum on Religion and Ecology, now housed at Yale University. While I was there I managed to see for the first time the Chinese translation of the book Daoism and Ecology that I co-edited some ten years ago when I was a graduate student at Boston University. 

The book arose out of one of a series of conferences on world religions and ecology, organized by the founders of FORE, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, at the Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions.

The translation of the book was accomplished several years ago by my friend Chen Xia at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, but the publication, by Jiangsu Education Press, had been held up for bureaucratic reasons. In China all books that are published have to go through an approval process, and books on the topic of religion also need a second level of approval from the State Administration for Religious Affairs. 

What speeded the approval process up was that Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Chen Xia and I had the good fortune of arranging a meeting with Pan Yue, the vice-minister of the State Administration for Environmental Protection, in Beijing this summer. At that meeting, Minister Pan expressed a keen interest in the volumes published as a result of these conferences and wanted them all to be translated into Chinese. Fortunately we had already got the wheels in process to publish the volumes on Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, and all that was lacking was the necessary approvals. I don’t know if Minister Pan personally intervened in our favour, but soon after we left China this summer, we learned that the books would be published in the fall. You can read about the Daoism and Ecology book on the Amazon.cn website.

By James Miller

After the terrible Sichuan earthquake on May 12, 2008, I recorded several television interviews with CTV, a Canadian broadcaster. In this clip, from Canada AM, their morning show, I discuss the Sichuan earthquake from the perspective of China’s cultural views of nature, and how those have changed during the modern period.