Leigh Martindale: I am a visiting PhD student from Lancaster University of UK. My PhD seeks to examine China’s recent project of ‘Ecological Civilisation’ and its relationship with small-scale green movements, specifically ‘Alternative Food Networks’ (AFNs). Ecological Civilization can be seen as an explicit recognition on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party that a version of ‘green development’ is becoming necessary due to the rising tension between essential economic growth and the increasing levels of environmental degradation. This tension is especially pertinent with the issue of food security which, as the basis of legitimacy for Chinese governance for the past 2000 years, has been on providing the people’s right to subsistence above anything else. The emergence of the new and diverse forms of food procurement that are occurring in China, as a response to fears of food safety, can perhaps offer new insights regarding the thorny question of how AFNs are able to scale-up.