Biography
My name is Brian Spivey and I am a historian of modern China. I completed my PhD in History
at the University of California, Irvine in 2023. I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at UC Irvine from
2023-2024. In 2025, I will begin a multiyear research postdoc at the Centre on China in the
World at The Australian National University. I am an environmental historian of modern China.
Broadly, I study the environmental and social changes brought about by China’s dramatic and
uneven industrialization in the twentieth century. Beyond environmental history, my research and
teaching spans topics related to ethnicity, borderlands, tourism, social movements, oral history
and memory, and urban history—though I avoid setting too firm boundaries around my interests.
I also have a long-standing interest in the Uyghur people and their homeland, especially in the
events and possibilities of the reform decade of the 1980s.
My book project, “Pollution Revolution: Maoism, Environmentalism, and the Consequences
of Industrialization in Modern China” is a history of the origins and character of
environmental concerns in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I show that the early seeds of
environmental awareness and concerns about sustainability in China can be found in industrial
hygiene and resource recycling philosophies of the 1950s and early 1960s. During the late 1960s
and early 1970s, Chinese leaders, scientists, and citizens combined those ideas with the Maoist
agenda of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and new globally-circulating discourses about the
environmental consequences of industrialization. They theorized an ambitious, revolutionary
environmentalism based on endless circular waste flows, politically-engaged science, centralized
planning, and grassroots technological innovation. Proponents argued that this Maoist approach
to environmental problems meant that Chinese socialism offered a way to achieve industrial
growth without externalities like pollution, presenting it as a global alternative to the unfolding
environmental crises found in capitalist societies. Ultimately, “Pollution Revolution” shows that
while the post-Mao 1980s saw Chinese leaders adopt a more technocratic and globally-legible
environmentalist framework, it was from the utopian reimaginings of human society amidst the
tumultuous Cultural Revolution that the Chinese Party-state began to see environmental concerns
as integral to its pursuit of socialist modernity.
Here you can watch me present portions of this research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese
Studies at Harvard University.
Since 2009, I have lived and studied in China and Taiwan for nearly 5 years. I have also studied
Uyghur in Ürümchi and through Wisconsin-Madison’s Central Eurasian Studies Summer
Institute (CESSI).
Outside the academy, I work with Jeffrey Wasserstrom as co-editor for China-related content at
the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Advisors: Dr. Emily Baum; Dr. Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Fields: East Asian Environmental History, World History, Modern China
Dissertation: Pollution Revolution: Maoist Environmentalism in the Late Cultural Revolution, 1970-1974
Awards/Grants
Fulbright Taiwan Student Research Fellow
Univ. of Cal. Humanities Research Institute Multicampus Working Group on China’s Reform Era
China U.S. Scholars Program (CUSP) (awarded, declined)
Association of Asian Studies CIAC Research Travel Grant Award (awarded, declined)
UC Irvine Career Development for Historians Internship
Luce/ACLS Predissertation China Summer Travel Grant
UCI Department of History Winter Research Grant
UCI Department of History Summer Research Grant
Charles & Ann Quilter Graduate Students Award in History
Long Institute Graduate Student Project Grant
Georgetown Asian Studies Scholarship
Title VIII Scholarship - Central Eurasian Studies Summer Institute (Uyghur)
Taiwan Ministry of Education 12-month Huayu Scholarship
Scholarly Publications
Spivey, Brian. “The Anthropocene and a Small Place in China.” Journal of Urban History, 50:3
(November 2023), 563-582. https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231209307
Spivey, Brian. “The December 12th Student Movement: Uyghur Student Protest in Reform-Era
China.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 81: 4 (November 2022):
727–746. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0021911822001206