Book Review : Circular ecologies: environmentalism and waste politics in Urban China : by Amy Zhang, Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 2024, 224 pp., $30.00 (paperback), ISBN: 9781503639294

The rise of the circular economy has exacerbated a central problem in waste politics: how to resist the technocratic impulse to treat waste as an abstract "resource" and, in doing so, preserve a community's agency in shaping its 'shared' environment. Critically engaging this neat discourse requires following waste's diverse materials forms - a bundle of scrap, a plume of toxic smoke, a fermenting pile or organic matter. It is by tracing these materials that we can connect the state's grand visions with the messy realities of labor, displacement, and resistance that circular projects actually produce, thereby making the community stakes visible (see Hawkins et al. 2019; Leung 2025a).