China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future

It is highly recommended to watch the recording of James Miller’s book outline, which he delivered in 2014 at the USC U.S.-China Institute, before reading Ernest J. Yanarella’s book review, which we reprinted with his permission. It was originally published by MARY ANN LIEBERT, INC. in Sustainability: The Journal of Record, Vol. 11, No. 5, October 2018 (DOI: 10.1089/sus.2018.29140.ejy).

Several recently published books by religious studies researchers and like-minded students of East Asian cultural and philosophical traditions (references 1-4) have weighed the possibility of a productive interpenetration of Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian ideas and values and ecological goals and aspirations that might counter the authoritarian and Enlightenment impulses informing the Chinese party-state’s current grip on national programs and policies related to economic development and eco-modernization strategy.

Among these writers, James Miller has emerged as a leading scholar in Eastern religions and perhaps one of the strongest voices for the relevance of these religions— particularly Daoism—for affecting a Chinese grassroots campaign to recuperate these ancient resources and refunction them in the present and near future to advance an ecological agenda in China and elsewhere. As he has succinctly put it:

The monumental task that China faces in the 21st century is to create a way of development that does not destroy the ecological foundations for the life and livelihood of its 1.4 billion citizens. This requires a creative leap beyond the Enlightenment mentality and the Western model of industrialization. (5)

From a Western perspective, this ambitious research program and formidable political and cultural undertaking might seem to be mere folly, given the powerful trends toward further centralization of power and prerogative by the Xi Jinping regime. The state continues on a path of tight control over recognized religions and condemnation and periodic repression of those folk and popular religions labeled superstitions. Yet, even in this atmosphere of close monitoring and occasional suppression of religious streams by an officially atheistic regime whose ideology regards religion as an illusion, Chinese religions continue to vie for the allegiance of the Chinese people’s souls. (6)

James Miller’s book, China’s Green Religion: Daoism and the Quest for a Sustainable Future (2017) is nothing less than a masterful reconstruction of Daoist philosophy and religion. As such, it offers a 21st-century guidepost for overcoming the alienated binaries (humans/nature, self/other, earth/cosmos, reason/faith, local/global) still inhabiting Enlightenment thinking shaping our perceptions, orientations, and programs for living in the world.

Part of the task Miller sets before himself in this book is to illuminate how Daoism has evolved from its early philosophical beginnings, and how these binary categories have relevance for rethinking humans in the world and the world in humans. For Daoism, the body, earth, and the cosmos or the heavens are not radically separated from one another. Indeed, these three domains mutually interpenetrate and pervade each other so that the liquid ecology, porous body, and re-enchanted cosmos are rewoven into a holistic, dialogically transcendent framework through Dao as the Way and through the qi (energy) coursing through channels connecting the body with nature, landscapes, the universe, and the constellations. For Miller, this process leads to an “inner alchemy” taking the expression of body cultivation practices paralleling an “outer alchemy” through which the refinement of minerals and other natural substances Daoists work to produce an elixir of immortality (p. 62).

Even more, the body of humans and the body of nature and landscapes, far from being disenchanted as in the modern world view, are analogically linked by a transformative power that points to the inner connections of both bodies through their respective organs (the human heart, kidneys, etc. with nature’s sacred mountains, grotto chambers, and caves) in a spatial sense that breeds an emphasis on the primacy of the local and a locative imagination. Faithful to its holism, this spatiality in the body and in the earth in Daoism, according to Miller, extends to the cosmos through the concept of wu (nonbeing or emptiness), which characterizes the heavens as well as the earth and the body. In Daoist cosmology, then, the dimensions of body, mountain, and sky are understood as “locations in which things take place, most notably the encounter with perfected beings who ‘take up residence’ in the sky, mountain, and body” and thus are spaces for inhabitation (p. 96).

These and other themes and tropes opened up and interpreted through classic Daoist ideas, concepts, values, and perspectives produce not merely a trenchant critique of developmentalism, instrumentalism, and the Enlightenment’s shadow (the impulse to dominate), but a decisive shift from environmentalism to ecological holism— especially in regard to nature. Attacking mainstream environmentalism’s perception of nature or environment as that which is out there and separated from urban life and key aspects of Western humanism, Miller shows how Daoism goes beyond environmentalist, preservationist, and conservationist notions of nature that take the form of national parks, virgin forests, wetland conservation and preservation by rejecting instrumentalist and rational bureaucratic orientations and thus restoring
ontological linkages underpinning body, earth, and the heavens.

So subtle and radically penetrating is his critique of enlightened modernist thought informed by Daoism that Miller makes the seemingly outrageous claim that China does not have an environmental problem requiring solution through Western techniques and their supportive cultural intellectual (Enlightenment) paradigm and religious (monotheistic Christian, largely Protestant) moorings. Rather, its supersession is to be found in the recovery of the eco-knowledge and wisdom of an ever-unfolding Daoist holism and its refunctioning toward the future.

Asking why Sinologists often fail when they try to define Daoism, Miller notes how even close students of Chinese religion, including Daoist thought, tend to read Daoism through Western cultural categories derived from their understandings of religion as it emerged in Occidental culture. Thus, even the most noted scholars of Chinese religion like Joseph Needham fail to excavate the assumptions and supposedly universally applicable character of these intellectually and culturally hidebound and therefore parochial Western notions underpinning the questions raised and phenomena they seek to analyze. The preponderant literature from this tradition wastes time and intellectual energy trying to determine whether Daoism is a philosophy or a religion and often contents itself with dividing Daoism into two (or more) phases. The first phase supposedly had the features of a philosophy, and then later on took on the trappings of a kind of religion (pp. 133–135). As a result, much of Western scholarship essentializes supposed markers of religion based upon the Western experience.

While nowhere cited in this book, Miller is familiar with the Ernst Bloch philosophy of hope. As revealed in some of his other writings and the overriding thrust in his concluding chapters, he is clearly tacitly inspired by Blochian themes like the modality of hope and the virtues of non-contemporaneous contradictions and the notion of critical inheritance. Here, Miller treats Daoism neither as a philosophy or a religion in Western senses, but as a body of holistic thought and practice that dovetails with sustainability and an ecological worldview and operates as an alternative modernity.

How then can Daoism and the blended popular religions practiced by urban and rural inhabitants alike in their quotidian lives come to promote sustainability and serve as the basis for an alternative modernity? Ernst Bloch’s three-volume The Principle of Hope (1986) lights the way. (7) There, Bloch recognized that pre-modern and even anti-modern elements of earlier times act as non-contemporaneous contradictions in present-day politics, which are often expressed in conservative and even reactionary articulations. Humankind’s task, the observed, was to shoulder the responsibilities of active inheritance as a form of hegemonic articulation of the cultural surplus of these ideas. For Bloch, their political-cultural potential as a member of a forward coalition of forces promoting fundamental change is to “pay the debts of the past in order to receive the present” (8, pp. 66–67) by re-articulating and refunctioning every value and ideal expressed in the existing remnants of past and evolving articulations which could only be truly realized from this cultural surplus in society, culture, and economy in a future yet to be made. (9)

As Miller demonstrates, Daoism and strong sustainability do not present religion as a problem to be solved (p. 142). Others have reached the same conclusion. (10) Miller explains that Daoism “does not ‘produce’ religion in the same way that modernity, as a cultural paradigm, does. Rather, the paradigm of sustainability asks what worldviews, values, and social networks can produce a continuity of the human species together with the ecological systems of the planetary biosphere” (p. 142).

On this view, Daoism as eco-theory embedded in a holistic and interpenetrating vision of body, earth, and heaven(s) derived from its cultural surplus in the past can be reconstructed and refunctioned as a source and force for assisting other premodern, anti-modern, and postmodern groups to retheorize and re-enact a way toward a sustainable future for China. With this retheorization and re-enactment, he argues, an “alternative, practical reading of human engagement with nature [derived from the Daoist imagination] can emerge from this, one that need not be limited to Daoism or Chinese approaches to sustainability but one that can inform the environmental humanities more broadly” (p. 146).

Finally, venturing forth from the aesthetics and ethics of flourishing, Miller grapples with its politics. There, he argues that the cultivating of human flourishing requires a transfigured politics—one that while embracing the Chinese state’s call for an ecological civilization, states forcefully that it must overcome its contradictions with the kind of eco-modernization strategy that has its foundations in Enlightenment modernity; it cannot be attained “at the expense of rural spaces, marginalized people, or through prejudice against ethnic minorities. Such a politics will also follow Daoism too in its focus on the local—including local governance, and local political issues” (p. 162).

In keeping with the importance attached to balance in Daoist thought, Miller points to the need to rethink China’s frenetic race toward urbanization and reorder its priorities between urban and rural habitats. Here he hints at, but does not fully articulate, the need for sustainable city - regions, a new ecological relationship between city and countryside, and the need to rehabilitate and lay the groundwork for democratic politics to forestall hopeful ecological developments from surrendering to the bureaucratic pathos of the Chinese state (p. 163).

Students of Daoism and scholar-activists will find in this enormously learned book an avenue for gaining renewed interest in the Daoist way and its profound relevance to the most formidable ecological challenges of the 21st century.

References

1. Girardot NJ, Miller J, Liu X. Daoism and Ecology: Ways Within a Cosmic Landscape. Harvard University Press for the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA, 2001.
2. Miller J, Yu DS, van der Veer P (eds.). Religion and Ecological Sustainability in China, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, London, 2014.
3. Stikker A. Sacred Mountains: How the Revival of Daoism Is Turning China’s Ecological Crisis Around, Bene Factum Publishing, London, 2014.
4. Tucker ME, and Bethrong J. (eds.). Confucianism and Ecology: The Interrelation of Heaven, Earth, and Humans. Center for the Study of World Religions and Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1998.
5. Miller J. Lecture on China’s Green Religion. https://china.usc.edu/video-james-miller-chinas-green-religion (last accessed 3/28/2026).
6. Johnson, I. The Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao. Pantheon Books, New York, 2017. 
Book review: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341264762_The_Souls_of_China_-_How_Xi_Jinping_tries_to_fix_mental_health_and_governance_problems_with_a_resurgence_of_religion
7. Bloch E. The Principle of Hope (vols. 1–3). Plaice N, Plaice S, and Knight P (trans.). MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1986.
8. Howard D. The Marxian Legacy. Urizen Books, New York, 1977.
9. Bloch E. Nonsynchronism and the obligation to its dialectics. New Ger Crit 1977; 11(Spring):22–38.
10. Smith, J. Imagining Religion: Religion from Babylon to Jonestown. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1982.