Abstract
This thesis addresses when and where the modern concept of environment arose in human history, as well as the shifts in people’s perception of the environment and environmental change in modern China, by applying conceptual history to Chinese discourse. Thus, I use conceptual history as a methodology for studying the history of forming, using and developing the concept of environment in Euro-America and its integration and interaction with traditional Chinese ideas and the Chinese responses to the concept and environmental change in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Before the term environment became a modern concept (i.e. before the 19th century in Euro-America and the 20th century in China), its use first as the state of being surrounded and then life circumstances was similar in Euro-American and Chinese discourses. The shifts in the use of the term (i.e. English environment, German Umgebung and Umwelt, and Chinese huanjing 环境) started from the formation of the biological concept of interaction between living creatures and the environment via the English term environment in the mid-nineteenth century. The significance of such conceptual change is that the development of a modern biological idea changed the way that people look at the surrounding world. Before the formulation of modern biology, people viewed the surrounding world as nature, while after it, people see the surrounding world as the environment. More importantly, in the development of scientific knowledge, starting from modern biology, the concept of environment has become more and more abstract and complex – as it includes the thinking of philosophy, sociology, biology, ecology, economy, etc. In Chinese discourse, before the modern environmental concept (i.e. biological sense of the environment) was introduced from the West to China, the use of the ancient term huanjing (environment) was the same as it was in the ancient western world (i.e. the surroundings). After the introduction, the Chinese perception of the environment basically followed the same path of development as the western region had experienced. The reception of the new concept of environment coming from Euro-America was a complex combination of western environmental concepts, Japanese kankyō (環境, environment), western knowledge of hygiene and the Japanese hygiene administration system, as well as the global and China’s own domestic environmental movements. The conceptualization process for environment in Chinese discourse was also closely associated with the conceptualization of the two Chinese ancient terms weisheng (hygiene) and wuran (pollution). Moreover, the concept of environment is still changing. It started in the 1910s, but the greater shifts appeared in the 1920s, 1970s and 2000s. People’s perception of the surroundings, the natural environment, life circumstances, public hygiene and health, pollution, as well as the virtual environment (such as information environment), reflects a process of human recognition of the environment, in which the human self-centered tendency becomes more and more exposed. Ideas of the human-environment relationships (e.g. ecological development and sustainable development) reflect the political ideology at both local and global levels. The concept of environment is of course connected with the term environment, but it is far more than a term. Not only has it become more and more abstract and keeps expanding, but it abides in people’s ideologies and serves as a weapon in social and political movements toward achieving a particular goal in human history.